Carpet Capital of the World

Tufting party circa 1935

In my hometown of Dalton, GA, a cottage industry in chenille bedspreads sprang up. The picture above features my great grandmother Barbara Baggett Dillard and some of my other kin working on tufting bedspreads out in the yard. This was mainly women's work, but men were sometimes involved. My grandfather, for example, created some original designs. One of his designs, a horse, covered my bed when I was a child, and I would give my right one to have that bedspread now. I would frame it as a work of art.

Entrepreneurs would provide the spreads and materials, and women would tuft them in their "spare" time when they were not working in the house or on the farm. This provided a source of cash to cash-poor farm families and helped them survive the Depression. Tufting was done by hand until about the 1940s when a local man invented a tufting machine. This technology is the foundation on which the multibillion dollar tufted textile industry was built. This is why Dalton is the "Carpet Capital of the Known Universe".

The entrepreneurs would put machines in homes where women would tuft even more spreads than before. Up until the opening of I-75 in the late 1960s, a lot of these spreads were sold in roadside souvenir stands along Highway 41. The signature peacock design was quite popular with Yankee tourists in transit to and from Florida.

In the late 1940s, "spread houses" sprang up where workers, again mainly women, came together to tuft spreads under one roof. This gave women a source of steady income if they wanted it. Many women worked sporadically when they could consistent with their other obligations at home and on the farm.

By the 1960s, carpet production and ancillary industries (dye houses, backers, tufters, foamers, etc.) had outpaced spread houses in importance. Men had begun to work in factories in larger numbers and outnumbered women in carpet factories. Farming became less profitable for small holders, and many men opted to enter the wage labor market in lieu of farming full time. By the 1970s, farming was virtually a thing of the past in Whitfield County. Much of the production was handled in stages by different small companies. One company would dye the material, another would tuft the yarn into backing, another would finish the product, another would sell it, and another would truck it. Entry into the market was easy, and entrepreneurship was common. My first job at age 13 was with a man who took scrap carpet, cut it into stair treads and sold them in packages. With little investment, he became quite rich.

More recently, there has been some consolidation in the industry with Shaw Industries, a Berkshire Hathaway holding, and other companies handling almost the full scope of production and much of distribution in-house. The trend over time has been for centralization, more vertical hierarchies and control, and less stake for the workers in the process. The tradition of local ownership and investment has given way to outside ownership. Just when workers were in a position to make some demands for higher wages and benefits, thousands of immigrants from Mexico were recruited to live and work in Dalton. The next step will probably be to move the whole industry to a third world country.

The industrialization of Dalton brought considerable prosperity to the town, but the trajectory toward centralization and top down control has made Dalton more vulnerable to a bust. More horizontal organization meant that no single company or combine of companies could pull up stakes or dictate terms to the community. Workers could make the various companies compete for their labor, whereas now fewer large employers call the shots. Daltonians used to be independent spirited and creative; now they seem like any other population of wage slaving schmendricks.

This consolidation process seems to happen often in industry, and it sometimes has an air of inevitability about it. Is there some inherent advantage to a centralized structure that drives out decentralized alternatives? I am genuinely confused by this phenomenon since I have found in some other industries that outsourcing and more horizontal structures can give companies a competitive edge.