MANUFACTURING: Catherine Evans1 Bedspreads

One drowsy day in 1895 Catherine Evans, a farm girl from Dalton, Ga., journeyed back into the hills to visit a cousin. There she saw a pair of family-heirloom “candlewick” bedspreads, the handsomest bedspreads she had seen in all her born days. Back she went to Dalton. learned to make them herself. Soon hardly a wedding anywhere around was complete unless the bride got one of Catherine Evans’ bedspreads.

A few years later a Dalton dentist’s wife, Mrs. H. L. Jarvis, who had been to college and knew more about big cities than blue-eyed Catherine Evans, proposed to market the bedspreads for Catherine in department stores. John Wanamaker bought half-a-dozen, then contracted for the entire production for five years. Though she could make two bedspreads a day, Catherine’s two hands could not keep up with the demand. She began to trace her designs on cloth, carry the marked cloth and a hank of yarn around to neighboring farm wives who would do the “tufting” for so much per spread. Every few days she would set out in a mule cart to run the circuit of her tufters.

At first she unraveled cotton yarn herself, wound it on corncobs; later a nearby thread mill made it for her. Her backyard was full of bedspreads bleaching in the sun. On each one she made about $1.75 less the cost of materials.

Soon Catherine had competitors. Mrs. Jarvis started a firm of her own. In 1921 Mrs. C. B. Wood, known around Dalton as Sister Kate, made some fancy, fringed spreads for Wanamaker’s, by 1929 was producing as many as 600 a day, often had 1,500 at once out in the homes of her tufters. To swank B. Altman in Manhat tan Sister Kate sold $60,000 worth of spreads a year.

But this, thought local men, was too much money for women to handle. After 1921 they began to take over the industry. One of the first was a young Georgian named Burl (“Chickenhawk”) Judson Bandy, now a 52-year-old, bullet-headed bedspread tycoon who flies his own cabin plane. When Real Silk bought out a Dalton hosiery mill, the displaced executives scraped together $13,000, started a spread house called Cabin Crafts Co. which now does the industry’s largest single business — about $1,000,000 a year. These men brought professional designers into the industry, and even installed a few tufting machines — locally made out of wagon wheels. But the newcomers generally stuck to the system of sending spreads out to mountain families for tufting. Around Dalton, some 15,000 backwoods people took part. Children, expectant mothers, even hillbillies in their voluminous spare time, would do a little tufting. Families sometimes made $30 a week, smart money for a mountaineer.

Then came the Wage-&-Hour law, and the Georgia tufters, whose working hours no time clock had ever measured, were out of luck. Rather than pay their tufters the law’s wages, the bedspread makers bought tufting machines and moved production into factories. Most of the new factories sprang up around Dalton. The industry, now mechanized, grew faster than ever.

The country around Dalton is still Bedspread Land. The roads are hung on both sides with thousands of bedspreads for sale. In city department stores this year some $12,000,000 worth of bedspreads, 75% of them from Dalton, will sell at an average retail price of $5. Last week 1,000 girls (many of them from ex-tufting mountain families) flocked into the 50-odd Dalton spread factories, signing on in preparation for the fall production rush. By mid-September there will be 7,000 of them hard at work at the machines.

Still unmechanized is Catherine Evans (now Mrs. W. L. Whitener). Grey-haired and 60, she still produces for any friend who wants a handmade spread.