Carpet bags used to be made of Oriental rugs. Carpet was the chosen material because it was a popular domestic accent piece and the "remainder" pieces were easily bought. In a sense, the carpet bag was a sustainable invention because it used remnants of materials which otherwise would have gone unused.
The carpetbaggers of the Reconstruction Era following the American Civil War—Northerners who moved to the South for economic or political opportunity—were given their name from this type of luggage which they carried
Carpet bags sometimes also served as a "railway rug", a common item in the 19th century for warmth in drafty, unheated rail-cars. The rug could either be opened as a blanket, or latched up on the sides as a traveling bag. From Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879): "... my railway-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, made me a double castle for cold nights."
There are many companies still producing carpet bags today keeping this very quirky trend alive!
