Langhorne Carpet Company, in Penndel, Pa., used to share its building with a hosier, but that business closed long ago. The building, from 1907, is a technological innovation: among the first mills to have a free-standing roof, leaving floor space without the obstruction of supporting beams. The building now houses 10 broad looms and eight narrow ones. On the day I visited, a young man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans was making a five-color runner on one of the narrow looms, while an older man in a denim smock was restringing a broad one; 5,040 spools of yarn needed to be knotted on. “We’ve stayed in business because we’ll take a 20-yard order, that’s our niche,” said Langhorne’s president, Bill Morrow, whose grandfather and great-grandfather founded the company in 1930. “Henry Ford had some looms he wanted to get rid of, and my great-grandfather went and bought them, and that’s how we got started. Ford had wanted to make all the parts of a car, even the textiles for the interior, but I guess he gave up on making the textiles.” Langhorne has made reproductions of historic carpets for the Frederick Douglass house in Washington; the Congress Hall of Philadelphia; and the Rutherford B. Hayes home in Fremont, Ohio. It also makes carpets for individual homes: “We recently did a family crest. That’s an example of the kind of thing we like about being a small-batch mill.”