A short history of the tarp

November 3, 2026

Few working tools are as old, or as plain, as the tarp. The word itself comes from the sea. Most dictionaries trace tarpaulin to two older English words: tar, and palling, from pall, a heavy cloth used as a covering. Merriam-Webster dates the word to 1607. The idea is simple: canvas soaked or coated in tar to make it shed water, used aboard ships to cover hatches, cargo and gear.

Etymologists add a caution. The tar-and-pall explanation is the usual one, but the earliest written uses don't prove it, and the Oxford English Dictionary treats the link to a funeral pall as conjecture. What is well recorded is that sailors themselves were associated with the cloth: "tarpaulin" was used as a nickname for a seaman, and the shorter "Jack Tar" is often traced to it.

A wharf in Nome, Alaska, with goods covered by large canvas tarps, early 1900s — Freight under tarps on a wharf in Nome, Alaska, between 1900 and 1910. Before warehouses were built, canvas was the warehouse. Photographer unknown. Via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Canvas carries the load

For most of their history, tarps were made of cotton or linen canvas. Heavy, closely woven cotton "duck" sheds water well once it is treated, and because it is a natural fiber it breathes, so moisture under it can escape. That made canvas the cover of choice for wagons, rail cars, hay ricks, ships' hatches and, eventually, trucks.

The world wars turned canvas into a strategic material. Armies needed it for tents, vehicle covers and supply dumps, and factories were turned over to cutting and sewing it. The photographs below are from that era: a Philadelphia plant making tarpaulin and canvas for the government during World War I, and a Dodge army truck plant in 1940, where, the caption notes, "tons of tarpaulin are required for covering certain types of Army trucks."

Archival photo of a canvas and tarpaulin factory floor in Philadelphia, World War I era — Manufacturing tarpaulin and canvas for the government at the Richards Manufacturing Corporation, Philadelphia, during World War I. U.S. National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A worker unpacking folded tarpaulins in a truck plant, 1940 — Army truck manufacture at Dodge, 1940. The original caption: "Tons of tarpaulin are required for covering certain types of Army trucks." Photo: Alfred T. Palmer, U.S. Office for Emergency Management. Library of Congress, public domain.

Vinyl arrives

The material that eventually displaced canvas for most heavy-duty covers came out of a lab accident. In 1926, Waldo Semon, a chemist at B.F. Goodrich, was trying to use polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to bond rubber to metal. Instead he found a way to make PVC soft and flexible. Goodrich sold it as Koroseal, and early uses included waterproofing cloth and coating electrical wire. Commercial PVC production grew through the 1940s and after the war.

Coating a woven polyester fabric with PVC gave a cloth that was fully waterproof, didn't rot or mildew the way untreated cotton could, and could be heat-welded at the seams. That is what a modern "vinyl" tarp is: polyester for strength, PVC for the waterproof skin. Flatbed lumber and steel tarps, dump truck covers and most of the heavy-duty tarps sold today are built this way.

Then poly

The light, inexpensive tarp most people picture, the blue or silver one at the hardware store, is woven polyethylene: flat tapes of plastic woven into a sheet, then laminated with a thin polyethylene coating. It is cheap, light and waterproof when new, which made it the default for quick, short-term covers. Its weakness is sunlight, which breaks polyethylene down over a season or two outdoors.

Where that leaves us

All three materials are still in use because each is good at something. Canvas still wins where a load needs to breathe, like hay or freshly cut lumber. Vinyl wins where a cover has to stay out for years, or survive highway wind. Poly wins on price for jobs that last weeks. Our guide to choosing a tarp material goes into the trade-offs.

The hatch, the wagon and the ranch

For three centuries the most important tarp on a ship covered the hatch. Cargo holds were closed with heavy wooden hatch boards laid across a frame, and the boards were covered with tarpaulins, folded down over the coaming and held with iron battens and wedges. That arrangement was still in daily use on American inland ships in the 1940s, as the photograph below shows: a crew closing the hold of a grain boat loaded with wheat for Buffalo's flour mills.

Crew on the deck of a grain boat closing cargo hatches with boards and tarpaulins, 1941 — Closing up the hold of a boat with boards and tarpaulins after loading wheat for Buffalo's flour mills, 1941. Photo: John Vachon, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, no known restrictions.

On land, the same cloth covered wagons, freight and camps. On Texas ranches the chuck wagon carried a tarpaulin that could be stretched out from the wagon as a fly, giving the cook shade and a dry place to work. Cowboys' bedrolls were wrapped in canvas tarps too. It was the most versatile piece of equipment on the place, and it hasn't changed much.

A ranch chuck wagon with a canvas tarpaulin stretched out as a shade fly, Texas, 1939 — Chuck wagon and tarpaulin on a ranch near Spur, Texas, 1939. Photo: Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, no known restrictions.

Why tar worked, and why it was replaced

Tar and pitch are mixtures of heavy hydrocarbons. Worked into cotton or linen, they fill the spaces between fibers and coat them with something water can't wet, so drops bead up and run off instead of soaking in. The trade-off was weight, stiffness in cold weather, stickiness in heat and a coating that cracked as it aged. Later oil, wax and chemical treatments did the same job with less mess, and plastic coatings eventually did it completely: a continuous PVC film has no gaps at all.

Sources

Written by the TrueTarps team. Questions about your job? Contact us or request a custom tarp.