After decades, end of an era for ‘wonder rug of America’
EDEN, N.C. — Sounds change with the seasons, but this spring there are notable silences in this town of 15,000 people.
The mill whistle that used to signal the start of three daily shifts at the Karastan rug factory isn’t blowing after 93 years. The mill’s workforce has dwindled to a few as one of the last of the region’s complex of textile mills prepares to close. Inside the mill, it’s quiet. When the train ran, it drove into the factory to pick up goods. The rooms and halls are so large, as James Ivie, a retired educator and preservationist said, “You can drive a Sherman tank down them.”
As of March, many of these rooms were empty.
Most of the machines sit silent.
Among them are the Axminster looms that from 1928 until 2019 made Karastan’s most famous creation: a worsted wool rug that so convincingly replicated the design and durability of imported, handmade rugs from the Middle East and Asia that it was called “the wonder rug of America.”
Handwoven and knotted rugs of wool or silk from countries, including Iran (aka “Persian” rugs), China, India, Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco and Egypt have long been used in Western decor, especially in Europe in the 19th century. Karastan helped take this trend into the 20th century, making a machine-made rug sold by department stores
and approved dealers across the country.
These U.S.-made rugs were marketed to a customer who seems not to have survived into the 21st century. The wonder of this rug may be that it managed to last this long.
“It’s one of the better machine-made rugs,” said Robert Gordon Shropshire of Scotty’s Carpet and Oriental Rug Service, which specializes in cleaning and repairing Karastan rugs. “When you buy a Karastan rug, you’re going to keep it forever.”
In 1917, when Marshall Field & Co. moved its underwear and bedspread manufacturing from Illinois to Leaksville, consolidated along with two other towns to Eden in the 1960s, it was to be closer to nonunionized labor and cotton. Though known today for its former retail empire, Marshall Field had an equally important wholesale business.
When it opened in 1921, the mill was a branch of Marshall Field’s Homecrest Rug division. An engineer and inventor employed by the company, Eugene Clark, began experimenting with the Axminster broadlooms. He modified the loom so that it wove through the back, simulating the look of a hand-knotted rug.
According to company history, the first rug came off one of these customized Axminsters at 2:02 p.m. April 8, 1928, and its resemblance to a handwoven Persian carpet was so remarkable that it was called a “mystery rug.”
The new rugs were given a name that played up the enigma — Karastan — an invented place that, to American ears, sounded more like the source of a Persian-style rug than Leaksville, North Carolina.
An appearance at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 transformed Karastan’s mystery rug into “the wonder rug of America.” For the event, the mill created an enlarged version of its “Tree of Life” (Kirman pattern 791) rug. Rather than hang the carpet so that visitors could admire its beauty like an art object, Karastan’s executives placed it on the ground so fairgoers could walk across.
An electric eye measured the crowd at more than 12 million people “wear testing” the rug during the six-month event. When the fair continued to the next year, Karastan returned with the rug: half cleaned, half dirty. The contrast proved the rug’s durability.