When was carpet created

Spread mill owners employed a largely female work force to operate the sewing machines that now created the raised patterns. By the end of the s, a number of these firms had begun to experiment with multi-needle machines that could tuft wider swaths of backing material more quickly.

Some firms, such as the cleverly named Cabin Crafts to conjure the image of a cottage industry that already had ceased to exist had begun making small rugs by covering the entire surface of a piece of backing material with tufts. Hosiery mill mechanics like Albert and Joe Cobble founded firms in the southern industrial dynamo of Chattanooga, Tennessee less than 30 miles from Dalton to build special machines for the tufted bedspread and small rug industry.

From these technological roots, area entrepreneurs began experimenting with making large rugs and wall-to-wall carpeting with this tufting process. About , the Cobble Brothers firm and an innovative Dalton spread making company, Cabin Crafts, introduced tufting machinery wide enough to produce carpeting in a single pass. Carpet makers could buy cheap pre-woven backing materials. Manufacturers tried cotton with mostly poor results.

Eventually Indian jute became the primary backing material for tufted carpets through the s. In the s, manufacturers developed suitable synthetic substitutes for jute. The traditional woven carpet industry primarily used wool. The new southern tufting mills used cotton yarn at first. Cotton did not compare with wool as a floor covering material — it crushed easily and wore more quickly. Yet already by , southern carpet mills were selling more carpets than northern mills, in spite of the clearly inferior nature of the product.

The key was price: the wholesale price of tufted carpet was about half that of woven products. Consumer surveys in the s demonstrated that few carpet buyers could name the manufacturer of the carpets they had purchased. The same consumers were almost without exception unable to distinguish between a tufted and a woven construction with a visual inspection.

The tufted carpet industry experienced a meteoric rise in the s, but many skeptics saw it as a fad that would fade. The obvious inferiority of cotton made the argument plausible. Surely consumers, many in the old woven industry argued, would eventually tire of placing glorified bedspreads on their floors. Tufted manufacturers experimented with rayon disastrously and staple chopped, spun nylon with some success in the s. The most significant breakthrough in terms of raw materials came in the mids from the DuPont Corporation.

DuPont helped insure that the bust never came by developing bulked continuous filament BCF nylon in the mids. DuPont even helped the new industry along by launching its own ad campaign for carpets made with its trademark nylon in the late s and early s.

BCF nylon helped insure the long-term future of the tufted carpet industry. Tufted carpets used, and still use, a variety of fibers. Staple nylon could be used in constructions and styles that were not possible with a continuous filament yarn — plush, lustrous constructions.

And in recent years, the industry has made increasing use polypropylene and other continuous filament yarns. By the end of the s, the new tufted carpet industry had raced past the old woven industry. While the total volume of carpet sales skyrocketed, woven sales actually fell.

Tufted products accounted for all the growth in the industry through the s. Tufted carpet sales increased from about 6 million square yards in to nearly million yards in Carpet finally became a staple of middle and working class home furnishings — indeed, it became the default floor covering over much of the nation for decades.

The logjam had been broken by product substitution. Per household sales increased for the first time since the turn of the century. By , Americans consumed over 12 square yards of carpet per family per year, up from 1. Woven sales drifted downward in the same period from 67 million yards to just over 40 million. Woven products did not disappear. High-end consumers still sought the assumed quality of woven goods, and woven products continued to dominate specialty commercial markets — hotel lobbies, casinos, etc.

But tufted carpet achieved total dominance of not just the residential carpet market, but the residential flooring market in general. The brief narrative sketched above outlines the emergence of an industrial district. By the s, the district had developed several distinct features.

The carpet complex was characterized by the rapid emergence of new firms. The industry had developed from the deep roots of textile manufacture and, specifically, bedspread making. Carpet manufacture was also a decentralized affair.

A few large firms, such as Cabin Crafts and E. Barwick Mills, spun some of their own yarn and finished some of their own carpets in-house by the s, but most of the hundreds of small firms relied on independent yarn spinning or production mills and independent commission finishing firms. Carpet finishing provided the industry with significant flexibility. Mills produced some carpets with pre-dyed yarns, but tufted significant yardage with undyed yarn. Commission finishing companies provided these services.

Initially post-production dyeing was handled in dye becks, or large drums. That is, finishers dyed carpets by the piece albeit large pieces, feet or more in length. Dye becks were produced locally and regionally. Clearly this industry originated in northwest Georgia because of the peculiar skill set developed among managers, mechanics, and workers.

With so many firms and workers in close proximity, improvements in technology, management practices, marketing, and other arenas were rapidly transmitted throughout the industry. Though different in many ways, Paul Krugman has observed, the relatively low-tech carpet industry of the Appalachian foothills was quite similar to the high-tech Silicon Valley in these respects. In the s, European firms introduced continuous dyeing equipment to the U.

Continuous dyeing equipment held out the potential for more effective use of mass production techniques — an endless stream of white carpet moving through a dye range capable of rapidly shifting colors. Through the late s, Dalton, Georgia, struggled with cotton mills and steel manufacturing works to forge a small town in the north Georgia hills. Northwest Georgia, with its hard-packed clay, poor farmland, and rolling hills was among the last areas of Georgia settled. Rich in a heritage of Cherokee Indians and Civil War battles, that northern corner of the state was rugged and spawned people who were independent and self-sufficient.

Those were the people who brought forth and nurtured the tufted textile industry. The industry began in a simple way, around the turn of the century. A young, Dalton woman, Catherine Evans Whitener, recreated a bedspread in a hand-crafted pattern she had seen, for a wedding gift.

Copying a quilt pattern, she sewed thick cotton yarns with a running stitch into unbleached muslin, clipped the ends of the yarn so they would fluff out, and finally, washed the spread in hot water to hold the yarns in by shrinking the fabric.

Often, entire families worked to hand tuft the spreads for 10 to 25 cents per spread. Bedspread income was instrumental in helping many area families survive the depression. As an example of the spirit of these early entrepreneurial women, Mrs. Buyer competition, which tended to lower the prices, the change in the minimum wage laws, and development of machine-produced spreads soon made the hand-crafted spreads too expensive. Gradually the industry began to pull the workers from surrounding hillsides and small towns into mills in Dalton, beginning the rapid growth of the mechanized tufting industry.

In the s, as a result of the demand for more bedspreads, the first mechanized tufting machine, attributed to Glen Looper Foundry of Dalton, was developed. Looper modified the single needle commercial Singer so that it would tuft the thick yarn into unbleached muslin without tearing the fabric and an attached knife would cut the loop.

Mats and rugs were created with the same process, using cotton yarns and fabric. Volume increased rapidly after World War II, because people were hungry for color and beauty. To show the extent of growth, 30, bales of cotton were consumed in by the industry. By , approximately , bales were used, and the industry was the third largest consumer of cotton grown in Georgia in Highway 41 between Dalton and Cartersville. This stretch of the major north-south highway got its nickname because of the bedspreads the tufters hung on clotheslines to dry in the breeze and sun.

As the number of tufted products produced annually went into the millions, the job of supplying the industry became equally important. Yarn, sheeting, duck mills, and agents were established in the area, with their entire output going to the industry; and larger mills elsewhere vied for the growing business.

Machine shops were established to manufacture the thousands of single and multi-needle machines needed, as well as to design improvements aimed at making even more beautiful and better spreads, bathroom sets, robes, beach wear, and rugs. Dye plants for yarn were built. Laundries were erected for finishing the spreads.

Printing shops were established to supply the millions of tags and labels needed. A jingle, really. Hardwood flooring too, maybe windows as well, but mostly carpet. You might know the tune. I blame you, Lynn Hauldren. The percentage of the U. The carpet industry, while significantly more popular than any kind of flooring, saw declines in , falling in comparison to hardwood flooring The Pazyryk Carpet, which was excavated from a burial mound in , was an incredible find at the time, as it was a nearly-2,year-old carpet that was largely intact, due to its being frozen in a block of ice.

And there are said to have been examples that date back even further. Clearly, carpet has come a long way from that early, fairly pristine example.

As you hopefully learned from history class, parts of the world like China, Iran, North Africa, and Afghanistan each have distinctive styles of carpet that tell significant stories about the ancient cultures in each of those regions. Of course, the industrial revolution played an important role in the uptake of carpet globally. Perhaps the most important innovation in the world of carpet came out of Dalton, Georgia, once known as the bedsheet capital of the world.

A key invention that came out the bedsheet industry, says the Dalton-based Carpet and Rug Institute, was the invention of the mechanized tufting machine in the s. It was a byproduct of minimum wage laws that were getting too high to make hand-built tufted bedsheets tenable.

It also had the side effect of making carpets made of tufted fabric into a natural next step for the industry. Playing at Doctors, a Frederick Daniel Hardy painting featuring a drugget. Another major innovation in carpet that can be mostly credited to the industrial era is the wall-to-wall, or fitted, carpet. But the carpet style had some precedent in Europe, where it had seen uptake in the 18th century. Reflecting that point, Louis XVI gave George Washington a fitted carpet for his home at Mount Vernon as a welcome-to-the-global-neighborhood gift of sorts.

With the U. As he was not allowed to receive present from foreign powers, the carpet was sold to my-great grandfather, Judge Jasper Yates, and remained in the old family mansion at Lancaster until about thirty years ago, when it came into my possession. As I consider Mt. Vernon the proper place for such a relic, if the ladies of the Association will do me the honor of accepting it I will send it at once to your care to the address you may designate.

In giving this carpet to the association, I request that it be places it will not be used continuously and that a card of explanation be placed upon it.

Imagine what it must have been like for this family, having to constantly explain where they got this weird carpet from. Fitted carpet has since gone in and out of style in competition with hardwood, with those tufted carpet innovations helping it along. The modern form, which is nailed into the ground, came around in the s , and generally, contractors are involved. It also helped that we actually figured out a way to clean our carpets while they were still on the floor.