D. Cosley, Weaver
Dennis Cosley was born June 20, 1816 near Martinsburg, Virginia. In 1831, he went to Fort Louden, Franklin County, Pennsylvania, where he learned spinning, dyeing and weaving. He remained in Pennsylvania for fifteen years. In 1837, he operated a mill in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, which subsequently burned. To get the necessary funds to purchase his own mill, he conducted a school for four years and in 1844, bought one at Fayetteville, Pennsylvania. Cosley also bought a loom for weaving coverlets, which he fortunately kept in his home, for in 1845 this mill burned as well. In 1846, Dennis and his brother George, moved to Xenia, Ohio, where they built a log loom house at the rear of Dennis Cosley’s residence, and where he produced a great number of coverlets without a center seam. Cosley did his own dyeing and, at the outbreak of the Civil War, dyed blankets for the Union Soldiers. He left Xenia, Ohio in 1864 and never wove another coverlet thereafter. Instead he ran a woolen mill in Miami County, Ohio, for three years and later had a store in Troy. He retired in 1890 and died in 1904.
Biographical note from Coverlets: A Handbook on the Collection of Woven Coverlets in the Art Institute of Chicago, by Mildred Davison and Christa C. Mayer-Thurman, 1973, page 171.