Pool Manufacturing Company

🏛️The era

Sherman in the early 1900s was a growing North Texas town. It sat in rich farming country and was tied to the rest of the nation by railroads. That combination of farm families, railroad workers, and laborers made for a steady market for sturdy work clothes, and overalls were the uniform of rural America.

The early twentieth century was also when American industry became obsessed with efficiency. Ideas about scientific management and industrial engineering were spreading from big Northern factories into businesses of every size, promising more output from better-organized work.

At the same time, textile science was advancing. Shrinking, fading work clothes were a constant frustration, and manufacturers competed to deliver fabric that kept its size and color. This plant grew up right in the middle of those changes.

👥People & events

The company started modestly. It was chartered on September 20, 1909, as the Sherman Overall Manufacturing Company, and its first machinery came secondhand from a glove manufacturer and was set up in the Birge-Forbes Building on East Lamar Street.

In August 1911, R. F. Pool and his son Carl bought the business, and it began to grow, soon spreading into several buildings downtown. The family put its name on the company in 1925, and in December 1928 moved operations to this site, with 60,000 square feet of manufacturing space.

Under the "Swetpruf" brand, Pool expanded from overalls into work pants, work shirts, and matched uniforms. The marker credits the company with a color-fast khaki, which it calls an important first in the industry, and with preshrinking fabric before manufacture, ahead of the Sanforized process that later became the industry standard. It also says that in the early 1930s Pool introduced the original army Cramerton cloth, a fabric still in use by the U.S. armed forces.

Carl Pool is remembered for bringing modern industrial engineering to garment making. In time the company branched into sports clothes, and by the time of the 1967 landmark designation its market reached the Pacific Coast and some foreign countries.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Pool story is a reminder that American manufacturing innovation didn't only happen in the big industrial cities of the North. A family-run plant in a North Texas town took on problems every worker knew, such as clothes that shrank and colors that faded, and by the marker's account helped set new standards for how work clothes were made.

Its link to military cloth ties Sherman to the larger story of how American soldiers were clothed in the twentieth century. It also shows how private manufacturers supplied the armed forces as the country moved toward World War II.

Carl Pool's use of industrial engineering on the garment floor reflects a national transformation, as the scientific approach to efficiency spread from steel mills and auto plants into every corner of American production.

🧭If you visit

Come to see the scale of the 1928 plant, with its 60,000 square feet of manufacturing space, which was a major investment for a regional garment maker. Picture rows of sewing machines turning out overalls and khaki uniforms for workers across the Southwest.

Take time to explore downtown Sherman as well. The company began in a building on East Lamar Street and spread through several downtown buildings before moving here, so the town center is part of the same story.

This makes a good stop on a North Texas road trip focused on the region's working history. It's a chance to think about the everyday clothes that dressed farmers, factory hands, and soldiers, and the Texans who worked out how to make them last.