The History of Hickory Stripe Work Shirts
THE HISTORY OF · CHAPTER NINE
A tough name, an 1845 shop advert, a Civil War portrait and a shipwreck with a surprise. The striped work shirt has a story well beyond the railway yard.
A blue-and-white striped work shirt has a habit of bringing a whole scene with it. There is usually a steam engine, a pair of overalls and a cap involved. You can almost hear somebody checking a pocket watch.
It is a good association. It is also only part of the history. Long before hickory stripe became shorthand for railway workwear, shops were selling hickory shirts, people were wearing them to haul goods, and a dictionary was explaining why they had such a tough-sounding name.
The OKONKWO Hickory Stripe Cotton Work Shirt in the store belongs to that wider family: straightforward cotton shirting, visible stripes and useful pockets. To understand how it got here, it helps to look past the locomotive for a moment.
What is hickory stripe?
Hickory is a traditional sturdy cotton shirting, usually recognised today by alternating light and dark lengthwise stripes. Blue and white is the familiar combination, though old descriptions also include brown. The classic cloth is a twill: its threads form a small diagonal pattern beneath the much more obvious stripes.
Those are two different things. The stripes are the colour arrangement. The weave is how the threads cross each other. Look at the shirt from across a room and you see the stripes; look closely at the cloth and you can inspect the weave. You do not need to bring a loom to breakfast.
“Hickory stripe” is therefore useful, but it is not a complete specification. A modern shirt still needs its own fibre description, measurements and care instructions. The name does not give you an exact weight, guarantee an indigo dye or tell you how generously it has been cut.
Nor is every striped cotton shirt hickory. A fine dress shirt, a puckered summer shirt and a substantial work shirt can all have blue-and-white lines while feeling quite different. That is worth keeping in mind when a product photograph is doing most of the talking.
A tough name, already in print in 1859
The pleasingly direct explanation comes from John Russell Bartlett’s 1859 Dictionary of Americanisms. His entry describes a heavy cotton twill shirt with a narrow blue stripe, commonly worn by labourers, and says it is “so called from its strength”.
That is a much better starting point than trying to match a shirt to a photograph of tree bark. Hickory was a tough name for a tough shirt, and people were putting that explanation into print in the nineteenth century.
The entry does not tell us who first wove the fabric or stitched the first shirt. It tells us something more useful than a tidy invention legend: by 1859, the term already described a recognisable working garment.
There is also a small sting beneath the definition. Bartlett quotes the humorist Doesticks contrasting people dressed in silk with poorly paid hickory-shirt makers. It is satire, not a reliable wage survey, but it reminds us that humble workwear had makers as well as wearers. Somebody had to sew all those supposedly simple shirts.
Shops, wagons and a much earlier shirt
A Houston shop advert in the Telegraph and Texas Register of 18 June 1845 lists hickory-striped shirts among ready-made clothing. The term was already useful enough to sell a garment without a paragraph explaining it.
Then there is the rather less glamorous business of hauling flour. In his 1915 memoir, Recollections of a Long Life, Isaac Stephenson remembered changing into overalls and a hickory shirt for an October 1847 journey with five yoke of oxen. His load was twenty-five barrels of flour. He described the outfit as a common sight on the road.
It is a recollection written much later, but it puts the garment into a very ordinary job: moving heavy things from one place to another. No railway company, matching cap or coordinated uniform was required.
The railway became one of workwear’s most recognisable settings, but a sturdy striped shirt was useful outside it. Starting the story in a train yard cuts out people who were already getting dressed for work elsewhere.
It also makes the shirt feel less like a costume today. You are not borrowing one narrowly defined uniform. You are wearing a practical kind of shirt that passed through different jobs, places and wardrobes.
The shirt in the Civil War photograph
The young man below is a more useful guide than a modern illustration of a generic old-time worker. His shirt has bold vertical stripes, a collar and a short front opening. The chest pocket makes the lines change direction around it. These are details you can actually see.
The photograph appears in the 1911 Photographic History of the Civil War, where the caption explicitly calls it a “hickory” shirt and places the volunteer alongside men of the Fourth Michigan Infantry.
The caption connects the visible stripes to the name. This was part of the clothing world people brought with them into wartime, rather than evidence of one standard shirt worn by every soldier.
Its shape is also worth a second look. A short opening meant pulling the shirt over the head, rather than opening a full row of buttons down the front. Our present-day work shirts may look familiar beside it, but they need not copy every part of its construction. A family resemblance is more interesting than pretending nothing has changed.
Buying one through the post
By 1875, a customer could order hickory shirts from Montgomery Ward’s spring and summer catalogue. Two entries appear at 65 and 90 cents. Cotton checked, cheviot-striped and calico shirts sit beside them.
The same catalogue also sells hickory stripe shirting by the yard, with an ordinary version and a “best” version. You could buy the finished shirt or the material to make one. Workwear was not travelling along a single path from factory to shop to wearer.
The catalogue distinguishes hickory stripe shirting from blue and brown denims, too. Modern sellers sometimes use “denim” as a roomy umbrella for anything that looks remotely like workwear. A nineteenth-century shopping list can be more particular.
There is something wonderfully familiar about the choice between two qualities, even when the entire sales pitch occupies a line. Today we expect close-up photographs, detailed measurements and a description of the buttons. The older customer had fewer clues, but still had to decide whether the dearer version was worth it.
Half a century later, the Eugene Guard of 2 April 1925 advertised hickory shirts in a department store’s Dollar Day sale. They were presented as ordinary work shirts in a bargain event, alongside overalls and socks. There was no need to sell the buyer a nostalgic lifestyle. The buyer already had a working life.
A shipwreck, and why cotton shirts disappear
One of the more unexpected places to look for work shirts is a river wreck. The steamship Bertrand sank on 1 April 1865 after striking a submerged log in the Missouri River. It was carrying goods from St Louis towards Montana’s goldfields. Its cargo later became the remarkable museum collection at DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge.
Clothing survived among the tools, food and household goods, but the river had been selective. The excavation report says wool and silk appeared to survive best. Some other textiles fell apart at the slightest touch; material thought to be cotton and burlap around tools was badly decomposed. A museum collection can reflect what survived as much as what people originally packed.
But here the name needs a little care. A 1976 study of rural dress describes shirts from the wreck as “hickory”. The earlier National Park Service excavation report labels the checked garment pictured below a woollen shirt.
The wool shirt is shown here as a comparison. It brings the working wardrobe of 1865 into view, while the report explains why we should not expect every kind of cloth to survive beside it.
For the cotton hickory-shirt story, this is why photographs, adverts and fabric records matter alongside surviving garments. The things that were worn hardest, or survived a wreck least successfully, can leave a much thinner trail.
Blue, brown and a little bit of weaving
For a clearer fabric description, the US Department of Agriculture is unexpectedly helpful. Ruth O’Brien’s Selection of Cotton Fabrics, revised in 1931, describes hickory as a coarse, durable twill shirting with lengthwise stripes, usually blue or brown against white.
Brown stripes are a nice corrective to the idea that there has only ever been one approved version. The guide is describing a useful cloth category, not laying down a uniform for a heritage clothing club.
Twill is easier to understand than it sounds. A thread passes over a small group of crossing threads, then under another. In the next row, the repeat shifts along. Keep doing that and you get the little diagonal lines. The big coloured stripes and the small diagonal weave can exist on the same piece of cloth without competing for the job.
That still does not make all twills interchangeable. The yarn, density, finish and garment construction matter as well. Stripes are not a substitute for checking the actual shirt.
| Name | What to look for | Useful distinction |
|---|---|---|
| Hickory stripe | Contrasting lengthwise stripes; traditionally a sturdy cotton twill shirting. | The stripe name alone does not give the shirt’s weight or fit. |
| Denim | A twill with a characteristic difference between its face and reverse. | A blue work shirt does not automatically belong in this category. |
| Chambray | A plain weave, commonly combining coloured threads in one direction with white in the other. | It can look blue from a distance without being denim. |
| Seersucker | A deliberately puckered surface, often arranged in stripes. | Flat striped cotton does not become seersucker just because the colours match. |
Fabric distinctions draw on O’Brien’s guide, including its weave discussion and fabric glossary. For the longer denim story, see The History of Jeans.
What railway workers actually wore
The railway association is worth keeping, provided we leave room for actual railway workers. A photograph can show a plain shirt with striped overalls, a striped cap with a denim jacket, or a mixture of patched clothes. The stripe did not have to cover the whole person.
Jack Delano’s photographs for the US Office of War Information put names and jobs back into that familiar workwear picture. The man below is Frank Williams, photographed on the car-repair tracks of an Illinois Central yard in Chicago in November 1942.
His shirt is plain. His overalls are worn and fraying at the straps. There are goggles on his cap and a substantial tool resting on his shoulder. It is a useful counterpoint to the perfectly coordinated railway outfit that tends to appear in our imagination.
The archive records that Williams came to Chicago from Pocahontas, Mississippi, and had eight children, two serving in the US Army. Those details make the photograph more than a collection of interesting pockets. These clothes belonged to somebody with a job and a family.
For everyday wear now, the appeal lies in clothes designed to be useful, and in the variety of ways people put them together. A hickory shirt does not need striped trousers, a striped jacket and a matching cap to make sense. One set of stripes will manage quite nicely.
If the jacket is what catches your eye, our chore-coat history follows another practical piece of the working wardrobe.
Wearing a hickory stripe shirt now
The easiest approach is to let the shirt supply the pattern. Plain trousers, a T-shirt underneath if you want one, and a jacket that does not fight for attention will do the job.
With jeans, the stripes break up what might otherwise be a lot of plain blue. With olive fatigue pants, they make a useful change from another solid-colour shirt. Worn open, it can work as a light extra layer; buttoned, it is still simply a shirt.
Our OKONKWO version uses blue and ecru cotton hickory stripe, with two buttoned chest pockets, contrast stitching, buttoned cuffs and a curved hem. Those are the details to buy, rather than an imaginary promise that wearing it will improve your ability to operate a steam engine.
For fit, compare the shirt’s garment measurements with a shirt you already wear comfortably. Allow a little extra room if it will usually sit over a T-shirt. Follow the care label for washing rather than assuming every striped work shirt will shrink or fade in exactly the same way.
The shirt in the store
See the OKONKWO Hickory Stripe Cotton Work Shirt for the current photographs, available sizes and full product details.
The older records leave us with something better than a single origin tale: a shirt already being sold in the 1840s, described as strong in the 1850s, photographed on a volunteer, ordered through the post and carried into different kinds of work. The stripes are the recognisable part. The long, ordinary usefulness is what makes them worth keeping.