Manchester museum displays Pandora Sweaters exhibit
Between 1940 and 1990, a bold neon sign that read “Home of Pandora Sweaters” sat on top of the Pandora Mill building at 88 Commericial St. in Manchester. This March, some of these letters will make an appearance at the Manchester Historic Association’s Millyard Museum as part of a special exhibit, “Pandora by Design: Sweaters from the Millyard.”
The exhibit is scheduled to open on March 9 and will run through August in the museum’s Henry M. Fuller State Theatre Gallery.
The fashion-focused exhibit will take a look at the history of Pandora Industries starting when they first came to Manchester as Brookshire Knitting Mills, according to Jeff Barraclough, the Millyard Museum’s director of operations and the exhibit’s assistant curator.
“It’s a fun exhibit that really looks at the design of Pandora and the different sweaters and materials that they produced over the years,” he said.
Not to be confused with the modern-day Pandora jewelry, Pandora Industries made textile products, such as knitwear and sportswear; the company produced as many as 60,000 sweaters per week, according to the Millyard Museum website, and its specialty was women’s sweaters. Pandora relocated from New York to Manchester’s millyard in 1940 and became a great source of employment for the city, employing as many as 1,000 individuals at a time. It was also one of the last places to manufacture textiles in the millyard.
According to Barraclough, the sweater company was owned by Saul and May Sidore, who later became May Gruber. Gruber was a pioneer in Manchester’s business industry, during a time when few women held positions of power, he said. The exhibit will feature a video that talks about Gruber’s life and influence.
The centerpiece of the “Pandora by Design” exhibit will be part of the neon sign that was once atop the Pandora building. In all its glory, the sign read “Home of Pandora Sweaters.” On display will be the fully restored “Sweaters” piece of the sign. When the Manchester Historic Association announced the sign restoration project in a press release last summer, it noted that the “Pandora” piece of the sign was beyond repair, and that when the sign was removed from the building in the early 2000s some of the letters disappeared. One of those missing letters was returned last year, allowing the Historic Association to move forward with the restoration.
“It’s a really cool centerpiece of the exhibit,” Barraclough said.
The exhibit will also feature a large collection of Pandora sweaters and advertisements from the 1970s and ’80s. These pieces were donated by one of Pandora’s former designers. The sweaters will be displayed on mannequins throughout the exhibit. Additionally, photographs will be displayed showing workers in Pandora’s factories. Barraclough called it “the production piece” of the exhibit.
Barraclough said he hopes that visitors will leave the special exhibit with a sense of nostalgia, whether they’re residents of Manchester who have family members who worked in the millyard, people who worked in the mills themselves, “or even just people who remember buying and wearing Pandora sweaters,” he said.
The Millyard Museum has Covid safety precautions in place, and this exhibit will adhere to the protocols without exception. Masks and social distancing are required, and only 30 guests are allowed in the museum at one time. – By Sadie Burgess
Pandora by Design: Sweaters from the Millyard
When: March 9 through August 2021
Where: Manchester Historic Association’s Millyard Museum, 200 Bedford St., Manchester
More info: manchesterhistoric.org/events
Featured photo: Vintage Pandora ad. Photo courtesy of Jeff Barraclough.
