Roswell Brayton, who died Monday at 55, transformed the oldest wool mill in America, Woolrich, Inc., into a diversified company that sold not only traditional oversize red and black “buffalo plaid” shirts but licensed its name for outdoor products around the globe and even marketed spring water.

Brayton, the sixth generation to head the privately held company, collapsed at its headquarters in Woolrich, Pa., named for John Rich, the English immigrant who founded the company in 1830.

Woolrich was a paternalistic company that originally provided everything from food to garbage collection to electricity for its employees, who helped build company housing when work at the mill slowed. Managing in a time when textile industry jobs were becoming scarce everywhere in America, Brayton reoriented Woolrich toward a marketing firm, albeit one that continued to manufacture clothing. Repositioning Woolrich as youth- and outdoor-focused, Brayton opened boutiques in France, Italy, and Japan, where the brand adorns a line of bicycles.

Brayton was great-great-great grandson of John Rich, an English immigrant who at first made his living hawking woolen socks and blankets at Pennsylvania lumber camps from an old mule cart. He established his first mill on a creek not far from Williamsport, Pa., in 1830, at the time real wilderness territory.

Rich did what he could to make his new town — at first dubbed “Factoryville” — into a worker’s paradise, a far cry from the dark, satanic mills he left behind in Bradford, England. He and his family succeeded well enough that in 1912, a writer for the Williamsport Gazette and Bulletin drove along a new macadam road to “one of the most interesting little hamlets in the world” — Woolrich — where one could find “the most independent people on earth. All of their help live in the Rich houses, drink the Rich water, eat the Rich food, live a Rich life, are as happy and contented as any people on earth. There are no policemen, no labor troubles, no jail …” It really did work well.

Over the years, the company changed with the nation. At first, it produced garments with game pockets for trappers; then, for railwaymen, vests with watch pockets. During the Civil War, it provisioned the Union army with blankets. When sports and leisure activities became popular, it manufactured golf jodhpurs and TV jackets. It made Arctic wear for Admiral Byrd’s polar expeditions, and its hunting outfits, as immortalized by Elmer Fudd, became known as the “Pennsylvania Tuxedo.”

But some things were slower to change. At the time Brayton’s father, Roswell Sr., took over as president, in 1968, the company had only recently ceased being fully vertically integrated; i.e., it stopped raising sheep. (Roswell Sr.’s mother bore the surname Rich.)

Roswell Jr. attended Harvard, where he was a good enough pitcher to be drafted by the Red Sox. But he never made the major leagues and came home to join the family firm in 1977.

Roswell Sr. retired as president in 1985, although he remained chairman of the board until 1996, when Roswell Jr. took over as president from a non-family member.

While employment at Woolrich had peaked under Roswell Sr. at more than 3,000, it fell to 630 as Roswell Jr. reoriented it toward marketing and moved manufacturing overseas. He launched new catalog and Internet businesses. Taking advantage of a heartland craze that harked back to the company’s own beginnings, Woolrich began supporting historical re-enactments, as well as advising films set during the Civil War.

In 2005, the firm celebrated its 175th anniversary with a townwide gala featuring a keynote address by General Norman Schwartzkopf, who apparently did not make the long history of Woolrich’s blankets in the armed forces his main topic.

Speaking to Women’s Wear Daily, Brayton said Woolrich was continuing in the family tradition. “They used to come to the office for a few hours and then farm land in the afternoons. They were open-minded and their plans were thought out –not concentrated in one area,” Brayton said. “Our founding members would be pleased with the direction we have taken.”