C. F. HATHAWAY SHIRT FACTORY
10 Water Street

In 1849, C. F. Hathaway, established by Charles F. Hathaway, started making shirts in Waterville. They supplied shirts for Union soldiers in the Civil War. Their original location was on Appleton Street.

Ellerton Jette and Charles McCarthy purchased the company in 1932. They hired David Ogilvy's Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1951 to come up with a new advertising campaign. He ran through 18 copy ideas for Hathaway's inaugural campaign before striking on Baron Wrangell, “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt.” This campaign with this mysterious character had “story appeal” as people wondered, “why the eye-patch?" It ran exclusively in the New Yorker and was a wild success. Hathaway's revenues tripled within a couple of years. The campaign became an advertising legend. Jette sold the company to Warnaco, Inc. in 1960 but stayed on as chairman of the board until 1965.

In 1996 Warnaco sold to a group of investors that included former Governor of Maine John McKernan. Federal and state governments loaned the city $1.5 million to buy the shirt factory and to maintain manufacturing at the facility. Hathaway returned to its beginnings with a traditional gentleman's shirt with more ample dimensions, up-to-date fabrics, single-needle construction, three-eye buttons and an “H” embroidered on the tail. McKernan's group eventually folded and Hathaway closed in 2002, leaving 235 workers unemployed. Waterville's Hathaway shirt factory was the oldest remaining shirt factory in the USA.

Rhode Island developer and Colby graduate, Paul Boghossian, in partnership with Niemann Capital, purchased the property in December of 2007 with plans for an approximately $6o million transformation of the old shirt factory into a center for commerce, housing and the arts. The building rehab is well underway, and city officials envision that the development will boost the downtown population by 1,000 on a daily basis. This project would be a key step toward the revitalization of downtown Waterville as a destination for shopping, dining, arts and culture.