Dalton: How a Teenager's Bedspread Changed America

In eighteen ninety-five, a teenage girl named Catherine Evans stitched a hand-tufted chenille bedspread as a wedding gift near Dalton, Georgia. Neighbors wanted their own. She sold them for two dollars and fifty cents each, hired women from surrounding farms to help keep up, and by the nineteen thirties an entire cottage industry stretched along Highway Forty-One, so thick with chenille goods strung from roadside stands that locals called it Peacock Alley.

When machinery arrived in the thirties, the hand craft became an industrial engine. Today most of the carpet made in the world comes from within about sixty-five miles of Dalton. The Carpet Capital of the World grew from one teenager's needle and thread.