Over eighty years ago, D.C. and Eleanor Churchill did what many in the contemporary craft world are still trying to do. They started a business based on hand skills and hand production, national marketing and full time employees. Churchill Weavers may well have been American's first craft business.

D.C. Churchill was an engineer with an aviation background. He went to India early in the 20th Century to revive the handweaving industry in that nation. World War I interrupted his work but not before he had developed his unique flyshuttle loom. When the Churchills moved to Berea, Kentucky in 1920, Eleanor Churchill set up one of the looms in a third-floor room of the Boone Tavern Hotel and started designing the patterns that were to become the Churchill Weavers product line.

Inspired partly by the need for jobs in Southern Madison County, the Churchills started their new business in a shed near the current loomhouse. D.C. Churchill built the looms and supervised productions. Eleanor was the designer and marketing manager. That included watching fashion trends to keep the handwoven accessories up to date in the marketplace and selling to department stores in larger cities, and unheard of move for craft producers in the 1920's.

The "newfangled" looms were not initially made welcome in the Appalachian craft world of the early 1920's.

After D.C. Churchill's death in 1969, Eleanor Churchill ran the business alone until 1973, when she chose Lila and Richard Bellando to continue the Churchill Weavers legacy. The Bellandos have strived to maintain the company's tradition and also carry the business into the 21st century with new prodects and new materials made in time-honored ways.

Berea, KY

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