Vintage Bassett-Walker Raglan Sweatshirt Made in USA - Navy

Measured flat: chest 40 in (pit to pit 20 in). Length 22 in.

Condition: great. No holes, no stains, no heavy pilling, and the cuffs and hem still have their spring.

Twenty-two inches on a forty inch chest is short. It sits at the waistband rather than below it - the boxy, square proportion sportswear had before everything was slimmed and lengthened. You cannot get it by buying a size up, because a size up moves every measurement at once.

Raglan sleeves run in one piece from underarm to collar rather than being set into a shoulder seam. There is no seam across the top of the shoulder at all, which is why the shoulder line falls softly instead of squaring off.

Martinsville, Virginia was where America's sweatshirts came from, and two companies did most of it. William Pannill moved there in the mid-1920s and founded Pannill Knitting. He took on a young man called Samuel Walker and taught him the trade; in 1928 Walker started out on his own with Virginia Underwear Corporation, working on second-hand knitting machines, sewing machines and dye tubs bought from a firm that had just gone bankrupt. That company became Bassett-Walker, and Walker ran it from 1941 until his death in 1960, by which point it was one of the largest makers of knitted outerwear in the country.

Pannill's own fleece business took a different road. It was incorporated as Sale Knitting in 1937, renamed Tultex in 1976, and liquidated in 2000.

And here is how the two stories end. In 1999, as Tultex went down and 1,100 people in Martinsville lost their jobs, Bassett-Walker's head of human resources said the company might be able to take on a couple of hundred of them. The mentor's firm failed and the protege's firm offered to catch its people. Seventy years after a young man bought a bankrupt company's machines and started knitting.

Bassett-Walker was part of VF Corporation by the early 1990s, making fleecewear and T-shirts under the Lee and Riders labels.

It is a blank. No graphic, no school, no slogan - a navy raglan with nothing printed on it. Fifty-fifty fleece from a Virginia mill, which is a thing that effectively no longer exists: almost every blank sold today is sewn somewhere else entirely.

One of one. Sold as found.

No returns - as is.