Bedspread display stitches together history of Dalton, Ga.
BEDSPREAD DISPLAY STITCHES TOGETHER A HISTORY OF DALTON
Like most static displays, the coverlets on view at the Old Freight Depot Gallery in Dalton, Georgia, are interesting to look at, but there’s not much razzle-dazzle. They are beautiful, for sure, but a quick glance through the space would offer little insight into their importance.
Look closely, however, and you begin to notice details: The thin muslin fabric — all that was available. The intricate threadwork — done by hand. The splash of colors — a way to use up every inch of leftover thread.
As you appreciate the artistry, know that there’s more at work here than the domestic skills common to women of the early 20th century. These coverlets actually changed the economic base in Dalton from farming to manufacturing and set the stage for the city’s dominance in the carpet industry.
Yes, these humble bedspreads. Their collector, Sandra Mahs, a former Dalton resident who now lives in Edwardsville, Illinois, says she’s astounded by the stories these pieces could tell.
And not just about home life. Dalton’s early tufting industry actually changed the trajectory of history. Especially for women.
“The upshot of it is this is women’s history,” Mahs says of the collection. “It’s the story of women coming off the farm and into town and being a part of this.”
PREP WORK
The first time Mahs exhibited her bedspread collection in a gallery space, the arrival of the properly attired curator made her laugh.
“She had these white gloves on,” Mahs remembers, “and I said, ‘Oh my God, no. These are humble objects. They’ve been dragged around and passed around. … Take those off. You cannot work with these gloves on.”
And so began the process for the first public showing of Mahs’ collection of vintage tufted bedspreads at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, the idea of a friend who had ties to the university.
A campus newsletter explained that the “Hand-Tufted Coverlets” exhibition represented a “lesser-known chapter of the Great Depression” and that these items, “used as bedspreads, were a staple of the South, where the craft eventually spawned a thriving textile industry.”
“It’s a very unusual exhibit and one that involved a lot of research to bring it to the public,” then-director of the University Museum and the exhibition’s curator, Dona Bachman, said. “It shows how people used their talent to survive the Depression and feed their families.”
For her part, Mahs recalls, “I got to tell the story of chenille over and over again” on opening night.
As novel as the story would have been to her fellow Illinoisans, this slice of history is well-known in Dalton. Mahs was 4 years old when her father moved the family West seeking better opportunity (he was thinking of pursuing uranium mining in Utah, she says, but got as far as St. Louis before settling in Illinois). Mahs and her younger brother would visit their remaining family in Dalton — aunts, uncles and grandparents — every summer, so she has always felt a part of the region.
Her collection of coverlets — started on a whim in the 1980s — had mushroomed over 30 years. She enjoyed them, felt protective of them, she says, but she could do little but keep them in storage.
“I got to the point that I had 70-something pieces, most of which were bedspreads,” she says. “It’s not like having a a thimble exhibit. You can’t show people your 70 pieces of chenille.”
Then Mahs learned of Dalton State College’s Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia, whose mission is to promote and protect the history and culture of the region. She began to think the time was right to return the coverlets to their place of origin.
In 2015, she donated all but a handful of pieces to the center, which is now displaying about 25 of the total collection in the Old Freight Depot Gallery, the converted depot where these pieces would have been shipped away to customers so many decades ago.
Now, Mahs says, the collection is “home.”
A BRIEF HISTORY
Online histories record that the phenomenon of chenille bedspreads in the early 20th century evolved from the art of candlewicking, a form of embroidery common in the American colonies. In candlewicking, the cotton thread used to make the wicks in candles was also used to make designs on bedcovers.
“Generally, the candlewick thread would be left in its original white cotton state and stitched into a white cotton sheet. This type of embroidery died out by the mid-19th century,” according to VintageChenilleBedspread.com.
The chenille bedspreads that became popular in the 20th century were developed by Catherine Evans Whitener (1880-1964). In 1892, at age 12, she visited a relative who owned a vintage candlewick bedspread. When young Catherine returned home to Dalton, she set out to create an imitation using the type of yarn available in her area at the time.
At age 15, she made her first tufted bedspread — a gift for her brother’s wedding, says Brian S. Hilliard, projects director for the Bandy Heritage Center. It was highly popular among her family and friends, and she began getting orders for more. She was selling these hand-tufted spreads for $2.50 each.
The average man at the time would have been earning a dollar a day, Hilliard says, so Whitener recognized an opportunity. The materials were inexpensive, so it was all about her labor. As interest grew, she couldn’t keep up with demand. She taught the technique to other girls in the area.
“That’s how the industry began,” Hilliard says. “One little girl said, ‘I can make one of those,’ and it grew from there.”
By 1910, dozens of women were making chenille bedspreads around Dalton. In 1917, Addie Evans, the sister-in-law who received the initial spread as a wedding gift, started the first chenille bedspread manufacturing company, Evans Manufacturing. By then, Catherine and Addie had developed a stamping method by which patterns were stamped onto the sheets before tufting.
Eventually, machines were developed to take over the hand-tufting process and increase production. The mechanism that was used to tuft the yarn into muslin or cotton for bedspreads would eventually be adapted to tuft yarn into jute to make rugs and wall-to-wall carpeting.
That’s Dalton’s enduring claim to fame. But from the 1920s to the 1960s, a North Georgia stretch of Highway 41, or old Dixie Highway, was known as Peacock Alley, so named for the colorful patterns on chenille bedspreads displayed in yards and roadside stands along the route.
Hilliard says the conventional wisdom is that multi-hued peacocks were a good way to use up whatever colors of threads were left over. Considered folk art, the eye-catching peacock spreads were especially popular with tourists traveling from the Northeast and Midwest on their way to Florida, Hilliard says. The thinking, he adds with a chuckle, was that “only a Yankee would buy something that gaudy.”
The popularity of chenille products began dying out after World War II, he says.
The war had changed textile manufacturing over to military uniforms. There were new softer synthetic fabrics, like nylon and rayon. Women weren’t just housewives anymore. “They wanted something modern,” Hilliard says, “not what their mothers had.”
MAHS’ QUEST
Mahs’ says she’s not even sure why she began buying the vintage bedspreads.
“The first piece in the collection, I found at a flea market,” she recalls. “This one had a green grid pattern … obviously hand-sewn. … It was pristine, immaculate, still had the paper label from New York [attached]. I picked it up because I thought, ‘Oh, isn’t this so cool.’”
It was “fairly cheap,” she says, so she bought it. “After that, they just seemed to call to me — antique malls, flea markets, I’d see them everywhere.”
She also began noticing toys made from handsewn chenille spreads.
“People were cutting them up to make bunnies and teddy bears, and I knew what their significance was. It was almost like my mission to keep them from being turned into teddy bears. If you’re going to cut one up, use a machine-made one from Sears and Roebuck. Don’t cut this up. This was a labor of survival. An important historic piece is how I felt about them.”
Mahs knew some of the history because it was her family’s history. Her mother and grandfather were both involved in the early stages of the industry. Her mother sewed, and her grandfather was a hauler.
A hauler, Hilliard explains, was a go-between who would deliver raw materials at the beginning of the week, then pick up completed spreads at the end of the week to take to the spread house, where they would be boiled to clean the coverlets and lock in the tuft.
Mahs marvels at the extra effort these families put in.
“For the most part, they were tenant farmers and sharecroppers. They’d work all day in the field, and the women might work in the field and be taking care of children, washing and feeding hogs. Then they worked at night on these bedspreads.
“My mother remembers a lot of that,” Mahs says. “She was a child at the time. They were living in a tenant farmer’s shack. No screens on the windows. No electricity. Working by kerosene lantern or fireplace light. It would be spread on the floor. You might have kids and dogs
crawling across it or sparks fly out from the fireplace [that could soil or damage it]. You’d be docked so much for that [in pay].
“They did what they had to do to turn these things out. That kept them from starving to death [during the Depression].”
Hilliard says the pieces Mahs has donated were found in places as far away as New York, Vermont and California.
“It’s a testament to how widespread these items were across the country,” he says. “And to think they all came from little Dalton, Georgia.”
FAVORITES
Mahs, who describes herself as “cheap,” says she “never paid much for any particular one.”
She was interested exclusively in handmade items. “Machine-made were nice but not my thing.”
She wanted the piece of history that grew up from the spread houses and gave opportunity to the women of Dalton.
“The housewives tufted towels, dish towels, tablecloths — everything but their underwear, I guess,” she laughs.
She has a few pieces besides bedspreads, including crib spreads, bed jackets and robes, even intricately designed aprons that look too fancy for everyday use.
But Mahs explains that these were considered functional, everyday items at the time, so there was no thought to protecting them from wear and certainly no thought of saving them for posterity.
“Did you keep your dish towels when you first got married,” she asks.
Some of her favorite pieces are not the prettiest, including a tufted spread made from burlap feed sacks. Also “too worn to think about exhibiting” are three bedspreads pieced together from old feed sacks that were taken apart and sewn back together to make a large sheet. It’s obvious it has been bleached, Mahs says, but the inked words still show through. It’s chewed up around the edges from being caught in exposed bed springs. But someone appreciated the work that went into it.
She paid top dollar, “probably between $80 and $100,” as best she can recall, for a spread with a double peacock design. “It was especially well done,” she says. “I had to do a lot of soul-searching. That’s a lot of money. But you can’t leave that.”
The rest were “all under $40, and I got lots of them for $10 and $15. Remember, this started in the ’80s, back when stuff was cheaper.”
She doesn’t happen upon them as commonly now. “But if I saw one, I’d buy it. No question,” she says. “I wouldn’t pay a lot of money for it, but I’d definitely buy it and drag it home. I’d keep it a while and look at it a while.
“I couldn’t not buy it. I’ve got his feeling of rescuing a chunk of history.”
She has no way of knowing if her mother or grandfather might have had a hand in the pieces’ creation.
But the larger history of the pieces is what’s important, she says.
“It’s history that’s not apparent, that’s not out there anywhere, that no one knows about,” she explains. “It’s one thing to know when battles are fought and who settled what. I want to know how they lived day to day, and there’s much less documentation for that.
“And that’s what makes us us. Not the battles.”
Hilliard says Dr. Adam Ware, who was named the new director of the Bandy Heritage Center in May, has set the center’s focus on artifacts that help tell the story of Dalton.
“We want to become the main repository for the material history of the region,” Hilliard says. “It’s one thing to use photographs and text panels to tell the story, but he wants to build up the physical archives.”
Mahs has kept just a handful of pieces for her personal archive but says she’s happy with the result.
“I’ve still got enough to stall a party,” she laughs.
Contact Lisa Denton at ldenton@timesfreepress. com or 423-757-6281.