II. Almy, Bigelow & Washburn; Carpet Shopping

Posted on 10/3/25

Carpet History
Carpet was a big business in the late 19th century. Often misstated by tour guides as a luxury only for the very wealthy, carpeting had become accessible to much of the middle class thanks to cheaper mass production. All types of carpeting—from throw rugs to installed wall-to-wall—were available. Showrooms were popping up in many cities with mass-produced carpets ready for your needs in a wide variety of colors and styles. Carpets from the Middle East and Asia were also being imported at a rapid pace into the United States.

Main weaves for wall-to-wall carpeting you’ll see in the period:

Tapestry Brussels — loop pile; pattern formed with printed yarns; economical, very common for wall-to-wall.
Body Brussels — loop pile; yarn-dyed; considered better than tapestry.
Wilton — cut-pile “velvet” cousin to Brussels; richer hand; same loom family.
Ingrain/Kidderminster — flat woven, reversible; budget option; sometimes used wall-to-wall.
Axminster — knotted/woven pile; premium room-size carpets existed, but for fitted work Brussels/Wilton dominated.

For Throw Rugs & Room-Size Rugs:
Beyond fitted carpets, households in the late 19th century layered floors with portable rugs for comfort, color, and seasonal flexibility. These were sold ready-made in standardized sizes through department stores and carpet dealers, and imported examples were widely available alongside domestic makes.

Let’s Go Shopping for Carpets!
Entering through the front door of Almy’s in the late 19th century could be as thrilling as any modern shopping trip. The goods on offer were notably elaborate, and the attention to the smallest details was often superior to what we see today. With that in mind, let’s make our way to the first department called…

The Rug Room was filled with freestanding rugs in a range of sizes. Some were manufactured in the United States, while others were imported from abroad. The exact proportion of imports to domestic goods is unclear, but it was likely a mix.

Imported Carpets: Continuity & Tradition
Imported carpets then—and now—draw from long-standing regional traditions, so the visual language stays remarkably consistent. Floral Herati fields, central medallion layouts, allover gul motifs, and teardrop boteh (the precursor to “paisley”) appear across 19th-century and modern examples alike. Workshops in Tabriz, Kashan, Kerman (Persia), Oushak/Hereke (Ottoman Turkey), Bokhara and Caucasian districts, and Indian centers like Agra/Amritsar kept to established loom widths, knotting methods, and border formulas—elements passed down through apprenticeships—so patterns and proportions remained stable.

While late-19th-century dyestuffs shifted from strictly vegetable sources (e.g., madder, indigo, weld) to include early aniline dyes, the palettes stayed grounded in familiar crimsons, indigos, soft golds, and bottle greens. As a result, a new rug from these regions today can look strikingly similar to an 1880s piece: same border hierarchies (guard stripes flanking a main border), familiar field repeats, and comparable knot densities for the type. Even finishing details—overcast edges and fringed warps—persist.

In short, continuity of technique + workshop tradition + market preference explains why imported designs feel “timeless,” with only subtle shifts in hue intensity or weave fineness across the decades.

Small Rugs & Placement
Here is a small rug that can be placed in a doorway, beside a nightstand, or along the side of a bed. Historic photos show rugs of many sizes positioned throughout rooms—adding warmth, protecting traffic paths, and framing furniture groupings.

At the foot or side of beds
In front of dressers and wardrobes
Before fireplaces and parlor stoves
By washstands or sinks
Inside doorways and at room transitions

Behind the small rugs appear to be some type of simple matting.

The floor rug is possibly an Anatolian/Ottoman prayer-design “saph” (a multi-mihrab prayer rug). The attribution is tentative given the angle and monochrome image, but several cues point that way: Alternates to keep in mind: some Caucasian (Shirvan/Kuba) pieces and late-19th-century Smyrna/Izmir workshop rugs echo this multi-niche look; without color and closer detail on the knotting, those remain plausible second choices.

Carpets were everywhere and in all sizes—on the walls, on the floors, stacked high. You can imagine a carpet salesman pulling rugs from the stack and laying them out on the floor to display a range of colors and sizes.

Stacks of floor underlay mats and folded carpets in varying sizes—if only we could leaf through them all.

“Tapestry” carpeting refers to warp-printed machine carpets whose pile yarns are dyed with the pattern before weaving. This innovation—originating in Britain in the 1830s and widely adopted by mid-century—made multicolor designs more affordable than “body” Brussels or Wilton. Both loop-pile (tapestry Brussels) and cut-pile (tapestry velvet/Wilton) were produced this way and used for full-room installations throughout the late 19th century.

Tapestry Carpet Pricing (1880s)
Tapestry Brussels typically sold for 55¢–$1.00 per 27″ linear yard (better grades up to ~$1.25). Because 27″ equals ~0.75 sq yd, that’s about $0.73–$1.33 per sq yd in 1880s dollars—roughly $24–$44 per square yard today. In other words, a basic tapestry grade landing near $25 (modern equivalent) is a sensible mid-market estimate.

A View into the Rug Room
Looking in from this side, rugs are everywhere—stacked, rolled, and hung. Metal drapery chains hold back the portières, likely another item offered in the drapery department. On both the left and right are carpet footstools, perhaps sold as accessories within this tapestry section.

Portières & Room Division
Portières help divide the two rooms, softening drafts and framing the passage. It’s also possible the curtains were sold upstairs in the drapery department. We’ll be visiting that next time.

Behind the open gas-jet lamp, you can see a cut fragment roll placed on top—perhaps discounted remnants for sale. It’s striking that even a simple lamp form could be richly ornamented.

Like previously stated, before modern broadloom, tapestry carpet was woven in narrow strips (commonly about 27″ wide). Installers hand-sewed these strips together (“made up” the carpet), added separate borders, mitered the corners, and tacked the finished piece to the floor—creating true wall-to-wall coverage that could be lifted, repaired, or re-made as needed.

Strips at ~27″ widths; seams repeating across the field at regular intervals.
Borders cut in, corners mitered for a framed effect.
Fittings around hearths, door casings, and built-ins carefully scribed.
Perimeter tacked allowing later lifting and re-use.

Brussels Carpeting (Wall-to-Wall, 19th Century)
“Brussels” is a loop-pile carpet: the pile yarns form small, uncut loops on the surface, creating a durable, slightly pebbled texture. Two commercial types were common in the 1800s: body Brussels (colors carried as full warps through the backing) and tapestry Brussels (warp-printed yarns for lower cost). Both appeared widely in Victorian interiors.

We now enter this low-ceilinged storage room to look around. Notice the long pipe on the ceiling? Could this be used for feeding the carpet through and cutting? Displaying? Put your thoughts in the comments section below.

In this picture, you can see carpet borders for those who preferred a framed edge around the perimeter of the room—a style largely defunct in modern homes. Sometimes in businesses this practice of borders is still used.

Same as the last room, rolls can be unrolled to let you preview the repeat pattern and the border.

This website called Antique Homes has a helpful article on carpeting and includes images showing how borders were attached. Click here to visit.

Carpet borders for Brussels carpets were largely similar and came in a wide variety of rich colors. Like many goods of the era, carpets could be ordered by catalog. This color plate offers insight into how the borders looked and how they could be matched to the carpet’s field.

In this low-ceilinged wood room, smoke bells are mounted above the open flame to trap soot and protect the ceiling from excessive heat. They’re called smoke bells—also known as smoke shades or heat deflectors. On gasoliers and open gas jets, these glass or metal dishes were hung just below the ceiling to catch soot, shield the ceiling from heat, and sometimes reflect light. Common materials were pressed or opal glass, tin, brass, or enameled iron.

Notice the large rolling doors are fully covered by carpet rolls?

The interior carpet room isn’t specifically described, so it’s reasonable to assume it held a mix of types. One likely highlight was Axminster—a luxury cut-pile option prized for deep, velvety tufts and richly figured “Oriental” or floral designs. Early hand-knotted Axminsters inspired later 19th-century machine versions (often called chenille or spool Axminster), which delivered room-size effects with greater pattern freedom than most loom carpets. In parlors, hotels, and other formal interiors, Axminster appeared both as large rugs and as made-up wall-to-wall installations.

Alongside Axminster you’ll also see Wilton/Velvet (cut-pile cousins to Brussels, using solid-dyed or tapestry-printed yarns), Ingrain/Kidderminster (flat-woven, reversible, with geometric or sprigged patterns—economical and common for bedrooms and chambers), and Venetian (warp-faced striped flat-weaves, especially for stairs and passages). Late-century homes also used druggets (felted/woolen protective coverings), natural-fiber cocoa/sisal mattings for summer use or porches, and machine-made “Smyrna” rugs that imitated knotted Eastern carpets. In practice, households mixed these types: a formal room might get Axminster or Wilton, while secondary rooms and circulation areas used Ingrain, Venetian runners, or matting—each stitched and “made up” to fit like wall-to-wall.

This simple folding chair rests atop a large roll. You can almost smell the room and feel the filtered light on your face, sitting here with all these rolls of carpet behind you. A fantastic variety of carpet options fills the room.

The burlap roll in the foreground is likely burlap sacking, commonly used to wrap and protect carpets in storage and during delivery. Dealers typically sent rugs rolled, tied with twine, and wrapped in burlap or heavy paper to guard the pile and edges; padding or underlay came as separate rolls, and shorter remnants were bundled for discount sale, perhaps like what we saw earlier in.

More options of carpets rolled out for the customer. The variety is fantastic.

Color plates give us a peek into the color in this black and white world. The carpets on this catalog range from $0.65 cents all the way up to $1.00 per yard. Which one would you pick?

The skylight and arch windows provided light. It also appears to have a roller shade on the skylight to filter the light coming in, perhaps to keep the sun off the carpets as well. The arched windows also appear to have a covering over them. Like we’ve seen in other areas of the store, two different types of lighting and fixtures are mixed in. Does anyone want to take a guess at what the differences are between these two fixtures?

Carpet Cleaning in the Late 19th Century
Before electric vacuums, households cleaned fitted carpets by lifting the made-up strips, hauling them outdoors to beat, and using brooms, damp tea-leaf sweeps, and druggets to control dust between major “spring-cleanings.”

The big shift was the mechanical carpet sweeper: in 1876, Melville R. Bissell of Grand Rapids patented a compact box with brush rollers and dust pans that picked up grit without lifting the carpet—perfect for wall-to-wall interiors which would become known as The Bissell Carpet Sweeper. He and his wife Anna Bissell built a business around it; after Melville’s death in 1889, Anna became the company’s chief executive and expanded BISSELL internationally.

The idea spread quickly: BISSELL sweepers were selling commercially by the 1880s, and British maker Ewbank introduced its own sweeper in 1889.

Late-Victorian homes relied on sweepers and beating until powered suction arrived in the early 20th century—famously with Hubert Cecil Booth’s large, horse-drawn vacuum in 1901, and later domestic uprights.

Next time we need to buy draperies or portieres and will visit the Upholstery and Drapery Departments!

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