Katahdin sheep
sheep breed
The Katahdin is a modern American breed of sheep. It is an easy-care sheep: it grows a hair coat with little wool which moults naturally in the spring, and so does not need to be shorn. It is reared for meat only.
It was developed by a breeder named Michael Piel in Maine, and is named for Mount Katahdin in that state. From about 1957 he cross-bred a small number of African Hair Sheep from the Virgin Islands with various meat breeds, principally the Suffolk.
History
In 1957 a farmer named Michael Piel imported three African Hair Sheep – a ram and two ewes – from the island of Saint Croix in the Virgin Islands to his farm in Abbot, Maine. For almost twenty years he experimentally cross-bred them with sheep of a wide variety of breeds, among them the American Tunis, the Cheviot, the Hampshire Down, the Southdown, the Suffolk and other English Down breeds. All but the Suffolk crosses were eventually discarded, and a flock of about 120 breeding ewes was selected. In the 1970s he experimented with cross-breeding with the Wiltshire Horn, the only naturally-moulting English sheep; after his death in 1976, his widow took steps to breed out unwanted characteristics of this cross including the horns, the lower prolificacy and the reduced ease of handling.
A breed society, Katahdin Hair Sheep International, was formed in 1985, and a flock-book was started.
“Katahdin sheep” enters the record as sheep breed. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Katahdin, sheep and breed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 22, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6375006. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1976 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Katahdin sheep” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.