American carpet weaving: Sprague's knotted carpets (1791), then ingrain mills at Tariffville (1825) and Thompsonville (1828)

Cite this source

Research notes

Correction to a common assumption: the NPS describes William Peter Sprague's Philadelphia Carpet Manufactory (1791) as the first full-fledged commercial carpet factory in America, but it used the Axminster hand-knotting technique (he may have trained under Thomas Whitty), not ingrain. Connecticut Historical Society material calls him William R. Sprague. Flat-woven ingrain arrives at mill scale later: the Tariff Manufacturing Company, Simsbury, incorporated 1825, was Connecticut's first carpet factory and made ingrain (the Winterthur dye notebooks in record wint-lib-tariff-brussels show it later dyed Brussels yarn). Orrin Thompson founded the Thompsonville works in 1828 (mill finished early 1829), making 'inexpensive flat-woven ingrain carpeting'; this became Bigelow-Hartford. A LeRoy Historical Society article reports ingrain was still over 50 percent of US production in 1899 (single source). Sources: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/inde/anderson/chap1.htm · https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/senate-carpet.htm · https://connecticuthistory.org/first-connecticut-carpet-mills-emerge-in-simsbury-and-enfield · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow-Hartford_Carpet_Mills · https://enfieldhistoricalsociety.org/old-town-hall/the-carpet-industry/ · https://leroyhistoricalsociety.org/Articles/2009/011809%20-%20A%20Red%20Carpet%20Affair.pdf Research note (Oct 2026): from search results; pages not opened.