Vintage Woven Palm Straw Western Hat, Cloth Bound Brim, c. 1935–1960

The Piece

A western hat plaited from split palm leaf, with a creased crown, a wide shaped brim, a woven cloth band at the crown base, and a matching cloth binding worked round the whole edge of the brim.

The weave is a broad twill in flat leaf splints laid in bands that shift between pale straw and a warm toasted brown, so the surface reads as a pattern rather than as a plain field. The splints are hand cut and vary in width from one to the next, which is what gives the weave its irregular life.

The crown holds a soft cattleman crease with the side dents still standing. The brim is turned up at the sides and pulled down front and back in the way a working hat is shaped by being worn, and it has kept that shape rather than relaxing flat.

Both the band and the brim binding are a fine woven cotton or rayon tape in a mid tobacco brown, machine stitched down. The binding is what finishes the hat properly. A cheap palm hat is left with a raw plaited edge, and a bound edge is a step above that.

The inside is bare. There is no sweatband, no lining and no label of any kind, just the reverse of the weave up to the crown tip. Written across it in a broad dark stroke is an owner's name.

History & Provenance

The name inside the crown reads PATTERSON. It runs across the curve of the weave in a dark ink that has bled slightly into the leaf, and the letters are legible right through.

The stroke is worth looking at, because it is dating evidence. It varies in width along its length, flares at the start of the P and on the crossbars of the two T letters, and tapers to a fine tail. That is the behaviour of a brush or a broad nib loaded with marking ink. A felt tip lays down a dead constant width and would not flare or taper that way, and a ballpoint skips badly across a woven surface and would not carry at all. Brush applied marking ink was the ordinary way to put a name on personal effects long before felt tips existed.

The hat itself is unmarked in every other respect, and that is the second piece of evidence. There is no maker's label, no size stamp, no printed tip label and no sweatband at all, which means nothing was ever removed. A hat with no sweatband was never a dress hat; it was field wear, the kind sold out of feed stores and border town shops for working in the sun. By the 1960s even the cheapest imported straws carried a printed size and origin mark, and the complete absence of one here reads earlier than that.

The leaf agrees. The splints have gone brittle and several are split lengthwise, and the discolouration runs strand by strand rather than evenly across the surface, which is genuine oxidation rather than dye. There is scattered pinholing of the kind insects leave in stored straw.

What the hat will not do is date itself from its shape. Palm leaf western hats of this construction were made continuously in Mexico and the American southwest across the whole of the last century, and the cattleman crease is no help on its own. The range below is set from the unmarked, sweatbandless construction and from the brush applied inscription, not from the block.

A correction is owed. This was first catalogued at c. 1965 to 1990, on a reading that the inscription had been made with a felt tip marker, which would have set a floor in the early 1960s. On closer examination the stroke varies in width and flares and tapers at the terminals, which a felt tip does not do, and the writing is brush work. That removes the floor entirely, and with the sweatband and label evidence pointing the same way, the date has been moved back.

What can be said without hedging is that it was worn, and worn properly. The crease is set, the brim holds its shape, the band is darkened at the front where a hand takes a hat off, and somebody cared enough about it to put a name in it.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A worn straw hat is one of the most reliable props in decorating, because it carries a person with it. Hung on a peg, a bedpost, a hat rack or a pair of antlers, it reads immediately as somebody's rather than as merchandise, and the name inside is the proof.

That name is the whole difference between this and the new straw hat in every western shop. PATTERSON put that there with a brush and a bottle of ink because the hat mattered enough to be worth marking, and it outlasted him.

The colouring does a lot of quiet work. Toasted straw against tobacco cloth sits naturally with old leather, oiled wood, denim, canvas and raw plaster, which makes it easy in a ranch house, a mudroom, a cabin or a shop window.

For a retailer it is a fixture as much as a piece of stock. Put it on a hook above a table of belts, boots, blankets or tools and it does the styling for the whole display, and it will still sell.