Middleton, City of
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern BWBKBYRWR.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 9 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=2948
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/1972 — Middleton, City of (register-of-tartans, record)
Middleton is a city near Madison in Wisconsin USA. Matt Newsome of the Tartans Museum in Franklin North Carolina, came across a reference to this tartan which was the winning design in a competition circa 1972 for an official city tartan. The contest was won by Barbara Schaffer with this (day) design plus a hunting one. Grey represents the lead mining, black & white for the railroad, brown for the peat extraction, the red line for the great Middleton fire of 1900 and then the red plus white representing Middleton High School. Barbara Schaffer gave one of the judges - who was from Scotland - both woven samples as souvenirs and they've never been seen since. It is thought that the tartan was never actually woven so it cannot be legitimately claimed that this is America's oldest city tartan. If it does get woven, then that's a different story. (Scottish Tartans Authority Jan 2005) - 1972 circa — Middleton, City of (District) (tartans-authority, record)
Middleton is a city near Madison in Wisconsin USA. Matt Newsome of the Tartans Museum in Franklin North Carolina, came across a reference to this tartan which was the winning design in a competition circa 1972 for an official city tartan. The contest was won by Barbara Schaffer with this (day) design plus a hutning one. Grey represents the lead mining, black & white for the railroad, brown for the peat extraction, the red line for the great Middleton fire of 1900 and then the red plus white representing Middleton High School. Barbara Schaffer gave one of the judges - who was from Scotland - both woven samples as souvenirs and they've never been seen since. It is thought that the tartan was never actually woven so it cannot be legitimately claimed that this is America's oldest city tartan. If it does get woven, then that's a different story. EBW Jan 2005.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Register of Tartans
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/register-of-tartans/data.csv
- data date
- 1972 (this record)
- licence
- Crown copyright
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- Scottish Register of Tartans · Crown copyright
the living register — still published by National Records of Scotland - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 2948
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 6466
Thread count
N/64 W4 N4 K4 N32 LY16 R8 W8 R/8
One full sett is 224 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
| LY | #DCBC32 #DCBC32 | oklch(80.0% 0.150 95.2) |
| N | #636363 #636363 | oklch(50.0% 0.000 89.9) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s9/n16w1n1k1n8ly4r2w2r2~x4/