Carpet is so commonplace in American homes today that we take it for granted. But it wasn’t always that way! Here’s a list of fascinating facts about the history of carpet.

1. The oldest carpet known to historians is the Pazyryk carpet. It was discovered in a burial mound in Siberia in 1949 and had been preserved in ice for thousands of years.
2. The word “carpet” comes from the Latin root carpere, meaning “to pluck.” This is because ancient carpet makers practiced their craft by plucking unraveled fibers. The Latin phrase carpe diem originates from the same root, meaning “to sieze (or pluck) the day.”
3. “Rolling out the red carpet” is a custom rooted in ancient times. Kings, politicians, and dignitaries walked atop red carpets to mark their routes through crowded cities. The first recorded reference in history to the custom was for Agamemnon in 458 BC.
4. Cyrus the Great was said to have introduced carpets (and the art of making them) to Persia, after having been awed by the beauty of the carpets he saw when he conquered Babylon in 539 BC.
5. Early colonial settlers in America used large rugs woven from wool to cover the floors in their homes.
6. Before vacuum cleaners, no one had wall-to-wall carpets. Instead, they used large area rugs that had to be taken outside and beaten with sticks or wire carpet beaters to clean. This was typically done only once a year, during spring cleaning.
7. In 1971, the first woven carpet mill was opened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by William Sprague.
8. The kind of wall-to-wall tufted carpets we are familiar with today started out as blankets. Catherine Evans Whitener of Dalton, Georgia, began making bedspreads out of muslin cloth with tufted yarn sewn into it. These became very popular, starting a new cottage industry in the region which eventually led to mill-produced, tufted carpets based on Whitener’s original bedspread pattern.
9. The first factories producing wall-to-wall tufted carpets were started in the same town of Dalton, Georgia after World War II, and to this day, Dalton is considered the carpet capital of the world, producing 70% of the world’s carpets.
10. The Hoover company had a hard time selling its original prototype vacuum cleaners because people were offended at the idea that their carpets might be dirty!