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If you go› What: “Southern Tufts: Fashion from Georgia’s Bedspread Boulevard”› Where: Creative Arts Guild, 520 W. Waugh St., Dalton, Ga.› When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays, through March 31› Admission: FreeInformation: www.creativeartsguild.org
Before there was an interstate roadway system, U.S. Highway 41 – known as Old Dixie Highway – was a popular route to Florida. Its stretch between Dalton and Cartersville, Ga., became known as Bedspread Boulevard, so named for numerous lines of tufted bedspreads that cottage entrepreneurs draped on clotheslines along the road.
Bedspread Boulevard was a popular tourist attraction with Northerners headed to the beach. They’d stop to buy “off the line,” as the saying goes, and these Northern tourists showed a particular affinity for the peacock pattern, according to “Early History of the Carpet Industry in the United States.” The popular pattern lent itself to a third nickname for that stretch of Whitfield County highway: Peacock Alley.
The tufted additions to the bedspreads were made from chenille, the French word for “caterpillar” since the yarn was meant to resemble the insect’s fur.
After World War II, chenille went out of style. At the same time, innovations in loom machinery made it possible to manufacture wide lengths of tufted carpeting, resulting in a boom in the carpet industry that solidified Dalton, as the Carpet Capital.