The Sealy Mattress

The town came first and the mattress took its name from the town, which is the reverse of what most people assume. Daniel Haynes arrived in this new railroad settlement in 1881 as a builder of cotton gins, and began making cotton filled mattresses for friends, without the buttoned tufts that were standard at the time and that tended to compress into lumps. In 1885 he invented both a process and a machine for manufacturing a felted cotton mattress at scale, and sold the result under his own name. Customers around the country began writing to ask for the mattress from Sealy, meaning the town, and over a few years the place name quietly replaced the maker's name on the product. It is one of the few household brand names in America that is really a small town's name in disguise. Haynes sold his patents in 1906 and the company that bought them formally adopted Sealy as its brand. He was not finished with the business. In 1909 he opened a new mattress factory here, on the site now marked on North Hardeman Street, and it went on running long after his death in 1913. It stayed one of the town's principal employers until 1976. A state historical marker was placed at the factory site in 1991. There is nothing else to see: a plain roadside plaque a short distance off the interstate, on a residential street, commemorating the moment a small Texas railroad town's name ended up stencilled on bedroom furniture in every state in the country.