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On South Thornton Avenue in Dalton, long before she became mythologized as inspiration for the town's multi-billion dollar carpet industry, Catherine Evans Whitener was a shrewd but kindly woman who wore her long hair in a bun and would lend an honest-looking young man a few thousand dollars at favorable rates.
One such young man, V. DeForrest Parrott, lived across the street from her frame home in the 1920s and 1930s. The only child of a railroad switchman, Parrott had come home to Dalton with a degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and his bride.
To Parrott, Catherine Whitener was a congenial neighbor whom he had known since childhood. When he was growing up, she had almost stopped handsewing and selling chenille bedspreads, but not before she had made them famous. As a teenaged girl, in 1895, she had reconstructed by hand the technique, patterns and designs of the traditional antebellum tufted bedspread. Astute in business, she began selling her bedspreads about 1900, when her price per bedspread was $2.50. She was so successful that others soon followed her into what became an impressive cottage industry. Thousands of hand-tufted bedspreads were sold by order or to motorists who saw them hanging like laundry for sale on clotheslines outside the roadside stands along U.S. 41, which came to be known as "Bedspread Boulevard."
Later, one Dalton company, Cabin Crafts Inc., went into the mechanized manufacture of the chenille bedspreads. Not until after World War II, about 1947, was Whitener's revived tufting process used to revolutionize carpet making and put Dalton at the heart of big business.
Though she never made a fortune, Whitener and her husband, Will, enjoyed a good income for their time and lived comfortably. In her garage she kept a luxury car, a black aircooled 1915 Franklin.
Although Dalton was then...