Thanks, Rebecca! I have enjoyed browsing around that site. I was in Paducah recently and got to look at all the quilts in the museum. There was one from about 1885 that particularly surprised me because it had a huge number of different prints in it (little appliqued baskets), and most of them looked as bright and detailed as fabric you can buy today. They also had another very similar basket quilt from the 1930's, and you'd have to know fabrics quite well to realize that 50 years had elapsed between the two quilts. Seeing them has stimulated my interest in the history of fabrics as well as quilting.
On that site there is this article
http://www.antiquequiltdating.com/cocheco.html about the Cocheco Mill in Dover, NH. I was amazed at some of the numbers: by the 1870's they were printing 25 million yards of fabric a year, and a decade later the number of yards had doubled! They were exporting fabric all over the world. Since there are no color photographs of those earlier times and people so often wore their best dark woolens and crisp whites for their formal portraits, it's easy to forget just how colorful the world of fabric was back then.
I need to add however, that on the left side of that page the link for "How to date antique quilts" is blocked. I assume you have to register with the site to see that, but I got so involved with reading things that weren't blocked that I didn't even check to see yet.