At Home: Floors—History Underfoot
By • March 10, 2026 0 591
Early settlers and Native Americans covered their humble earthen floors, made of packed dirt, with rushes, straw or sand to help with cleanliness and insulation. Sometimes they covered them with blood from animals butchered for the table; the fats and proteins in the blood reacted with the dirt, creating harder, less dusty and smoother floors than those of packed dirt alone.
Up through the early 1800s, there were still abundant old-growth forests in America, leading to the widespread use of wood. At last, the new Americans could get off their earthen floors and enjoy the resilience and warmth of wooden floors. Since convenience superseded design, those first floors used simple, thick, wide planks of wood, often rough-sawn and left unfinished to develop a natural patina over time.
Early colonists built their homes with whatever wood they could easily procure and mill nearby: white pine, red oak and cypress. White pine, a popular option, was rapidly consumed by the timber industry toward the end of the 18th century, so yellow pine planks cut to five- or six-inch widths were substituted. The long boards that spanned the length of a room were the most coveted. Random-width boards, although prevalent, were considered the “mark of a floor of poor quality.”
Painted interior walls became increasingly common in the mid-1800s, leading the way to painting wooden floors. Early painted floors, which could be quite beautiful, became a popular, affordable way to hide imperfections and make floors more “foot friendly.” Alternatively, unpainted wood planks could be covered with canvas floorcloths.
Early painted floors became a popular, affordable way to hide imperfections and to make floors smoother and “foot friendly.” Courtesy Library of Congress.
Prior to the floorcloth, only the elite could afford to decorate their interior floors with patterns of marble, ceramic or parquet. Now, the floorcloth enabled middle-class households to imitate those intricate patterns at much lower cost. Coated in an oil-based varnish, a floorcloth was a stylish, easy-to-clean floor covering that repelled water and insects and protected flooring from dirt and grime.
By the time of the American Industrial Revolution, around the 1860s, steam-powered machinery allowed for a uniform appearance in wooden planks by tightly binding the boards together. Technological innovations also enabled parquet borders — typically found along walls and corners — in which different colors of hardwood form geometric patterns.
By the end of the 18th century, the focus moved away from painted floors and floorcloths to carpets. Manufacturing breakthroughs allowed more households to afford better quality carpeting and larger looms were able to weave wider, mass-produced carpets.
The Jacquard loom, an early power loom, was invented in 1804 in France. It used punch cards read by steel needles in the loom, which raised and lowered the harness, allowing different colors, patterns and complex designs to be woven into the rug. As the first programmable machine, it is considered a predecessor to modern-day computers.
According to lore, in 1855, when an Englishman forgot to seal a container of linseed oil he was using as a paint thinner, a skin of solidified oil formed on top. Five years later, he applied for the first of a series of patents for the resulting rubbery substance, which he named “Linoleum,” from the words linum (Latin for flax) and oleum (Latin for oil). Linoleum became a top choice since it came in so many patterns and colors, provided a comfortable floor and was easy to clean.
Vinyl flooring also came about as a fluke, thanks to some experiments in 1926 that sought to bond metal to rubber, resulting in PVC (polyvinyl chloride). After a few versions of the material were created, vinyl became ubiquitous; today it is the world’s second-most used plastic. After World War II, it became popular as a floor covering, surpassing linoleum.
Laminate floors, invented in the 1970s in Sweden, are made from multiple layers of synthetic products and wood composite, onto which a photographic design is applied. Although early laminate floors had a plastic look, they simulated the look of wood without the high cost or installation challenges of typical hardwood.
Laminate, vinyl and linoleum reigned well into the 1980s. The decade offered plenty of funky design trends, but styles were inching a bit more toward the traditional. Light pine dominated the flooring trends of the 1990s and wall-to-wall carpeting made a comeback.
Finally, in the back-to-basics 2000s, dark hardwoods were once again in vogue. Hand-scraped and distressed wide-plank wood floors became popular. Reclaimed wood flooring produced from real barn beams as old as 250 years has been having a moment. It’s funny how trends come and go.
Antiques dealer, painter and columnist Michelle Galler resides in both Maryland and Virginia.
