Treasures in your attic: Hooked rug’s value is in sentiment
Q. This hooked rug measures 30 by 38 inches. A label on its back reads “Mountaineer’s Cabin,”” with an address of Heritage Rugs, 54 Irving Ave., Providence, R.I. The fabric is in very good condition. How old it is and does it have value?
A. Few early homeowners in either Europe or America could afford to cover their floors with rugs. Extremely wealthy homes might have Oriental carpets or perhaps carpets made in the great rug centers of France such as Aubusson or Savonnerie, or perhaps they would have an England Axminister.
But if most homes had floor coverings, they had to be the work of the enterprising and thrifty housewife. It is widely reported that hooked rugs began in Yorkshire, England, early in the 19th century when weaving mills allowed employees to collect the “thrums,” or short pieces of yarn that were approximately 9 inches long, for their own use.
These thrums were of no value to the factory, so the workers took them home and used them to make floor coverings by pulling or hooking the thrums through a fabric backing (usually burlap).
This has been disputed in recent years by those who maintain that the Vikings hooked woolen loops through a fabric backing and brought the practice to Scotland long before the thrums were available in English woolen factories.
In America, the craft of hooking rugs (bed coverings and wall hangings) began in the late 18th or early 19th century and was most often practiced in the New England states of Maine and New Hampshire plus the Maritime Provinces of Eastern Canada. There, frugal housewives would take pieces of old, worn-out clothing or blankets from their “rag bag” and cut these items into narrow strips.
These strips would be hooked through a burlap backing usually derived from old feed sacks. They used a whale bone or special metal hook with a wooden handle to pull the strips through the backing. These pulled strips formed loops to create the rug’s nap.
In the early years, the rug maker created the design and did not use a pattern. The best of these hooked rugs are considered wonderful examples of folk art and are highly desired by collectors. In the 1860s, Edward Sands Frost of Maine began making stencils of hooked-rug designs and sold them.
Frost had stencils of birds, lions, tigers, deer, cats, dogs and floral arrangements and some based on designs found in Oriental carpets. He retired in 1876, but his stencils are now in the collection of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Michigan.
In the 20th century, kits to make hooked rugs became available, and it became a popular endeavor in the 1940s and ’50s. Heirloom Rugs of Providence, R.I., was a craft company that sold hooked-rug patterns and kits, and D.S.’s very charming rug in the “Mountaineer’s Cabin” pattern was made from one of these kits.
Therefore, this rug is mid-20th century and is not as collectible as it might have been if it were earlier and from a pattern derived from the maker’s artistic imagination. Still, it is a good size, in good condition, framed and should be valued for insurance purposes at $200 to $275.
Ÿ Contact Helaine Fendelman and Joe Rosson at Treasures in Your Attic, P.O. Box 18350, Knoxville, TN 37928.