My pulse rose a little the other day walking through the handbags department on the main floor of the store that used to be Marshall Field’s, where I saw a poster from the 1933-34 Century of Progress exhibition hawking an appearance of what they called Karastan’s “World’s Fair Rug” in the newly opened Fine Rug department. I’m just a sucker for world’s fair related design objects, and I like rugs, so I felt as if I had to go take a look. There was no image of the rug in question, but based on the graphics in the poster I was imagining a repro of some Deco number introduced at the fair.
I was wrong, but what I discovered was really a more interesting story.
The “World’s Fair Rug” is actually a 12 x 15 wool rug with a traditional Persian Tree of Life design made in 1932 at Karastan’s factory in Eden, North Carolina. The company brought it to its exhibit at the fair, where, they say, some 12.9 million people [according to an electric eye that counted] walked across it over the course of the event. At the close of the Fair, the Karastan people brought it back to North Carolina, where they cleaned half of it and left the other half dirty, to show how durable and long-lasting the rugs could be. The company did something similar at the New York World’s Fair of 1939.
When Karastan vice president Steve Roan came to the company last year, he was amazed to note that the rug — in its schizoid state — remained in its offices, draped over a partition, more or less where it had been for the last 77 years. He thinks management left it there as a constant object lesson about the quality of the product, and smelled a promotional opportunity. “Why is this just sitting here?” he said. “We should take it on the road.” And so they have.
If you’re a real rug connoisseur, a machine made wool rug doesn’t push your buttons. But you’ve got to give props [as the kids like to say] to an American manufacturer that’s still in business in its 9th decade. What’s even more notable is the rug’s connection to Marshall Field’s.
Marshall Field & Company was in business before the Chicago Fire, but in the last quarter of the 19th century, the Field company was much more than the retailer some people may still remember [even though its identity has been stolen by the Only Department Store Left In America.]. Up until the 1930s, Marshall Field & Company’s primary enterprise was in wholesale distribution of goods. In 1878, in fact, Field commissioned the great Boston architect Henry H. Richardson to design one of his seminal works in his signature Romanesque style: the Marshall Field Warehouse Store on the block just east of where the Sears Willis Tower is today. It stood there until about 1930, when the Field wholesale enterprises, which had outgrown the building, commissioned the Merchandise Mart. 
The Field wholesale operation ultimately expanded into manufacturing [no pesky anti-trust legislation to worry about then], and in the 1920s, Field purchased several textile mills in North Carolina and began making its own branded merchandise, eventually establishing yet another mercantile empire. Some of the most famous of those brands survive today [although their connection to Field’s or its successors were severed long ago], including Fieldcrest Mills and Karastan, which if I recall, was a made up name combining several of the Field family members’ names in a configuration that suggested a vaguely Middle Eastern exotica even though it came from North Carolina.
Karastan [now a part of the Mohawk carpet company, which is headquartered in Georgia and seems to still do much of its manufacturing in the US] continues to makes rugs in the Tree of Life pattern, although I have to say that I like the colors in the cleaned-up part of the 1933 rug a lot better than the current ones. The 12 x 15 rug would have cost you $500 when first introduced. Roan says the “World’s Fair Rug” itself is insured for $60,000; today a similar rug would run about $5000, which is actually a pretty good price for a rug that big, even a machine made one like this.
