Picture this: it's the 1850s in rural Clinton, NC, and Abigail Carter is TIRED.
She's tired of a lot of things that go with being a wife and mother of the time, but mostly she's tired of sewing. Her husband, Homer, is a railroad engineer. Homer is wearing out work pants at an alarming rate, and it falls to Abigail to do the cleaning, and sewing, and mending, and salvaging of those pants.
It's a LOT.
So Abigail gets crafty. While she sees the fabric that Homer's pants are made of will easily deteriorate, she also sees that canvas, which she finds in dry goods sacks and in various other uses around the home, will not.
She gets an ingenious idea: what if she fashions the canvas into a kind of bib design, and combines that with Homer's dungarees?
The results were good, and pretty soon they were popular. Other railroad men, miners, and workers in similar trades soon wanted a pair of the bib/dungaree combination that Abigail had made.
Out of that design, Abigail was issued a patent in 1859 for her overalls, one of the first patents received by a woman in North Carolina. Her design is so successful, she and her sons open a business, H.W. Carter & Sons, becoming the first manufacturer of overalls in the United States.
So there you have it. Bib overalls were born right here in the Carolinas, just like our business. And while we might not have any of Mrs. Carter's originals, you're sure to find something just as fashionable and even more durable when you shop with us. For example, these Carhartt Loose Fit Denim Bib Overalls
Photo credit: Steamtown National Historic Society Facebook page