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Folklorists typically study quilts by interviewing living makers, asking questions about the patterns and processes, the most visible aspects. But quilts exist in multiple contexts and hold numerous meanings for the makers, recipients, and viewers. Instead of asking for answers, a more useful question would be "What can you tell me about this quilt?" KEYWORDS: quilts, women, method, history, research
ABSTRACT
Folklorists typically study quilts by interviewing living makers, asking questions about the patterns and processes, the most visible aspects. But quilts exist in multiple contexts and hold numerous meanings for the makers, recipients, and viewers. Instead of asking for answers, a more useful question would be "What can you tell me about this quilt?" KEYWORDS: quilts, women, method, history, research
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Years ago, while waiting in line at an AFS meeting, I had a conversation with Jan Brunvand. He told me, "I don't let my students write their papers on quilts anymore." I didn't need to ask why, and I didn't argue. Folklorists typically conduct research on traditional crafts by interviewing and observing living practitioners. However, there is a tendency for interviews with quilters to focus on the quilt as an object, without addressing the aspects of quiltmaking that are meaningful to the maker. Typically, a student prepares for an interview with a quilter by making a list of questions: What's your favorite pattern? How long does it take to make a quilt? How much does a quilt cost? What's the oldest quilt in the world? The student asks the questions, makes notes, writes up the experi - ence, and hands in the paper. So much more is possible.
The dimension that is most often missing when folklorists look at quilts is an awareness of the contexts in which the expressive forms, processes, and behaviors of quiltmakers have changed over the centuries, influenced by political events, technological innovations, and the everchanging fashions in fabric and clothing. A folklorist studying pottery understands the need to know about historic pots, sites, materials, and processes. With a few notable exceptions, folklorists have not acknowledged nor taken advantage of the research by scholars in other fields. Since 1980, the American Quilt Study Group has published 45 annual volumes of scholarly articles on a wide range of perspectives and disciplines, including only a few by folklorists.
As Dr. Michael Owen Jones has observed:
Many objects made by hand in the past perplex us. Who created these things and why, we wonder. How and when were they constructed? For what purposes, and for whom, were they produced? What values do they embody, and what meanings were ascribed to them? The greatest puzzle of all, however, may be what methods-concepts, assumptions, and analytical approaches-can we employ to address these questions. (Jones 2005: xv-xvii)
IN SMALL THINGS FORGOTTEN
The historical archeologist James Deetz studied material objects for what they reveal about the people who used them. He describes his discovery of a list made by an appraiser recording the value of objects in a home whose owner had died. The list covered several pages: clothing, furniture, tools, etc. At the end of the listing, the appraiser made a final entry: "In small things forgotten, eight shillings six pence," acknowledging that he may have overlooked items that nevertheless had value (Deetz 1996: 3-4). He suggests that such overlooked or undervalued objects carry messages from their makers and users, and the researcher's task is to decode these messages and apply them to our understanding of human experience. His example dates from the seventeenth century, but the method remains applicable in the twenty-first. Consider the following scenario:
You walk into a room and notice a large window with an unusual curtain pulled to one side.
You move toward it and see that the curtain is made up of colorful fabrics. Even though it hangs from a curtain rod by a series of reinforced fabric straps, it appears to be a patchwork quilt rather than a curtain. You grasp the edge gently to open it out, and your hands sense a soft thickness. This is not a flimsy single layer, but a substantial "textile sandwich," consistent with a popular definition of a quilt.
Stepping back, you shift your vision to a wide-angle perspective.
The impression is of an overall design of large diamonds formed with strips of printed fabrics. A diagonal grid of white strips simultaneously separates and connects the diamonds. Looking more closely at the construction, you realize that the visual impression of large diamonds is a secondary effect.
The actual "building blocks" of the quilt are small squares, each with a white strip crossing diagonally corner to corner. The other fabric strips are cut from a wide variety of multicolored prints.
You have determined that the patchwork top 1s attached to additional layers, and you look for evidence of this process.
Instead of rows of close stitches, either by hand or machine, y ou see that the layers are "tied" with red yarn. The maker made a single stitch with red yarn at regular intervals, tied the ends in a knot, and left the yarn "tails" hanging. Dye from the red yarn has discolored the white fabric.
The square blocks, colorful fabrics, geometric design, and multiple layers are hallmarks of "quiltness." However, this piece 1s too small to be of much use on a bed. You wonder what purpose this quilt was made to serve. You suspect that the hanging straps might have been added later, but later than what?
You have noticed that there are words written on the white strips, and now you tilt your head to read some of them:
Uplifting words from Aretha Franklin and Walt Whitman are among the diverse inscriptions embedded in this fabric document.
Aha! One of the inscriptions offers a hint to the purpose of this fabric document:
"This is an affirmative action quilt!" But another inscription suggests that the action here is more personal than political:
"For Jean, with love, from Laurel." You are curious about the quilt's story-its purpose and meaning. You want to know more. However, neither the maker nor Jean live in this house.
You ask the homeowner, "What can you tell me about this quilt?" She tells you that when Jean was experiencing personal difficulties, a sister made this affirmation quilt for her. Later, after Jean had resolved her issues, she sent the quilt to the current owner, who was going through a stressful divorce. This owner, a physical therapist, decided to display the quilt in her therapy room, where her clients could see it. Instead of hanging it on a wall, she attached the fabric straps to hang it as a window curtain. When you contact the maker, she elaborates on the intended purpose: "I couldn't be with Jean to give her hugs, but I figured she could wrap herself up in this quilt to feel the love." She was pleased to know that Jean cuddled with her two small children under the quilt and read the inscribed affirmations aloud to them (MacDowell and Mieder 2010:113-172).
Quilts frequently circulate within families and communities, particularly among women, as part of an informal gift economy that exists outside the formal monetary system. Unlike barter, the gift of a quilt is perceived as having worth instead of an inherent value and, most often, the gift does not require reciprocity. The significance of a gift quilt resides not in its perceived usefulness nor monetary value, but in the emotional associations embodied in it by the parties involved (Horton 2005:157-158).
QUILTS AS GIFTS
Gift quilts circulating in families may involve a range of emotional associations, as documented within the generations of a South Carolina family. (Horton 2005). Sometime before her death in 1927, Mary Snoddy Black enlisted the assistance of her two adult daughters in recording information for sixteen quilts made by women in her family. As Mary recalled the family stories and connections, daughter Mary Kate notated names, patterns, and fabric sources on small slips of paper, and her sister Rosa attached each quilt's label with needle and thread
Mary's collection included three quilts she received in 1889, when she married Dr. H. R. Black (Horton 2005:64-71). These were made by her mother, Rosa Benson Snoddy, her maternal aunt. Narcissa Benson, and her sister Nancy Jane.
Mother carried it with her when she went to housekeeping."
She gave [to] Mrs. H. R. Black."
Mary used her sister's formal name instead of identifying her by given name or personal relationship. Years later, in 1914, sister Nannie gave quilts as Christmas gifts to her two siblings and their children. She had made them from unfinished patchwork and other fabric inherited from their mother.
The crazy quilt she gave Mary appears less visually appealing than those given to other family members (123-125). Nannie seems to have chosen her sister's quilt to satisfy the outward expression but not the spirit, of gift giving. There's more to this story. Years earlier, following their father's death, Nannie had expressed her strong dissatisfaction and disappointment over the distribution of his property. Her share of the acreage was smaller than those of her siblings, though it included the family home. She continued to harbor resentment for the rest of her life. At her death in 1928, family members were shocked to learn that she had bequeathed the four-hundred-acre family farm to Erskine College, instead of following the tradition of "keeping it in the family."
RESEARCH RESOURCES
Access to family letters, archival collections, probate records, and legal documents can reveal events and interactions that inform the interpretations of artifacts, including the trajectories of family quilts. The oral transmission of names and relationships sometimes results in attributions that are off by one or more generations. The availability of online resources offers opportunities to establish, or update, the provenance of quilts and related textiles in public and private collections.
The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, known as MESDA, has a fine textile collection that includes quilts and "counterpanes," a term which encompasses both embroidered and woven bedcovers. When MESDA acquired a particularly elegant, embroidered counterpane, it was originally attributed to Amelia Mildred Chenoweth Nash, the daughter of prominent early settlers in Jefferson County, Kentucky. Research on the historical development and adoption of the distinctive style of Dresden embroidery indicated that the counterpane would have been made later, by one of Amelia's daughters. (Staples 2003:43). As the counterpane was handed down through the descendants of Naomi Nash Porter, the eldest daughter, she was most likely the maker. (Horton 2019).
AN OBSERVATION OF TRIFLES
In "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," Sherlock Holmes admonishes Watson: "You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles" (Conan Doyle 1892). The fictional Holmes was renowned for noticing abnormalities, such as the presence-or absence-of items or behaviors, as in, famously, the dog that didn't bark. An experienced researcher can closely examine quilts and other textiles for clues about their manufacture, intended purpose, functions, and meanings. In addition to looking for anomalies in the construction or placement of a quilt, Holmes" method may sometimes be applied to a narrative, even in the absence of the quilt itself.
A single article printed in a local newspaper opens an exploration into the lives of a group of women who gathered around a quilt. On January 12, 1910, an item in The Keowee Courier, a weekly newspaper published in Walhalla, South Carolina, included the following: "On last Tuesday, Mrs. J. H. Thompson entertained her friends at an old-fashioned quilting, which proved a happy climax to the many delightful social affairs of the holidays" (Horton 2000:3).
This opening statement prefaced an unusually detailed description in the "Local Matters About Seneca" column, which regularly reported social events, especially daytime women's gatherings. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, women formed numerous clubs and societies for a variety of purposes, including religious and missionary work, literary and art study, and civic improvement. Those gatherings that have received the least attention from historians are those formed primarily for social purposes (Scott 1991).
The newspaper account of Alida Machen Alexander Thompson's quilting was one of the many items published in the community news columns, submitted by local correspondents scattered throughout the county. To the modern eye, some items seem trivial, meaningless or even comical, such as "Miss Sue Haley spent the weekend with Miss Sue Daly," or "W.H. Hughes has recovered from a severe attack of erysipelas [a skin inflammation] and his friends are delighted to see him out again." But, for a predominantly rural population connected by unpaved roads over hilly terrain, the publication of such news served a vital function.
Along with the brief accounts of visits and illnesses, by far the most extensive coverage was given to descriptions of social events, especially women's daytime gatherings, including the account of Alida Thompson's quilting. Such gatherings typically featured an hour of ornamental handwork, such as crochet, knitting, embroidery, or needlework. For example, the newspaper account of a weekly meeting of the Emery Club of Walhalla reported: For an hour or more, fancy work furnished occupation for the busy fingers, while the latest news, fashions, etc., gave play to the busy brains." (Horton 2000:4).
The inclusion of such domestic activity in a social context may have helped dispel criticism that the meetings were distracting women from their responsibilities to homes and families. "When the guests arrived, the quilt was in frame and ready for quick fingers, and quicker tongues. Good old songs were sung and the quilt was free of its frame and finished with the decorative monograms of the guests who participated in its making" (4).
Of the local newspaper items that mentioned quiltmaking activity, the majority involved church groups and clubs making quilts for charity. These gatherings generally took place in the outlying rural communities, not in the principal towns of Wal-halla and Seneca. Reports of such events typically emphasized the number of quilts completed and their intended disposition. In contrast, the report by correspondent Mattie Verner Stribling dwelt on the social nature of Alida Thompson's quilting.
According to Katherine C. Grier, the principal goal to which a hostess aspired was to provide novel entertainment within an atmosphere of refinement and gentility (Grier 1992: 53-54). The chief elements of a successful social event were elaborate decorations, sumptuous refreshment, and delightful entertainment, and the hostess who could provide these with little apparent effort received special commendations from the newspaper correspondents. As part of the novelty and entertainment of the gathering, Alida Thompson offered her guests an elaborate practical joke, providing an inversion of the anticipated sumptuous luncheon:
When dinner was announced the party repaired to the dining room, and found a long table set after the fashion of уе day when quiltings were "all the go." A nice fresh oil table cloth adorned the table, and for the centerpiece a square from a woven Marseilles spread was used. The menu was not an elaborate one, but was recommended for its "staying" qualities. Water was the strongest beverage served (3).
Traditional rules governing hospitality in Western culture require that hosts provide ample refreshment for invited guests, and that guests refrain from commenting on any deficiencies. Mrs. Thompson committed a blatant offense by not providing the expected elaborate repast for her guests. Likewise, the correspondent, herself one of the guests, could not describe the spartan nature of the offering in her narrative directly and instead, she used subtle irony. Her narrative provided clues to the bogus nature of the meal. She relied on understated humor to convey to her readers that the spread offered by the hostess was meager.
The last course was toothpicks, served from a tiny pitcher which was imported by a friend of the family and dated back a hundred years. The above mentioned centerpiece was made by a relative of the family befo" de war, and the tablecloth an heirloom of a hundred years. These interesting facts made history, which was continued through the delights of the day and were given by the hostess in her easy, charming style.
Describing toothpicks as "the last course," suggesting their use in public, would have struck the participants as uncouth, further marking this event as an anomaly. In addition to conveying the humor of the situation, however, the correspondent also reported the significance of certain material objects selected by the hostess to enhance her "old-fashioned" theme. The description of the hostess's "easy, charming style" suggests Mattie Stribling's admiration for her hostess's ability to maintain the hoax:
The guests partook heartily of the repast and were asked to resume their quilting with a promise of dessert later. In a few moments the dining room was again thrown open and a splendid course dinner was served. Those enjoying the day were: Mesdames Е.М. Cary, W.S. Hunter, J.F. Alexander, JW. Byrd, С. У. McCarey, T. S. Stribling, and Т. Е. Stribling (3).
The unseen characters in this charade were the unidentified Black servants who prepared the splendid dinner and, within "a few moments," replaced the remnants of the bogus spread with an elegant table setting. While, nationally, the twentieth century saw a decline in the employment of household service workers, correspondent Mattie Stribling noted in her column, "The service question is not the problem for Seneca housewives that it once was... . It is a fact that the supply exceeds the demand in Seneca" (11)
These women were in good position, financially and logistically, to employ household servants, laundresses, and child-care workers. Their husbands were businessmen and store owners. They lived in a neighborhood of large houses around the intersection of North First and Oak streets, the location of the home of one of the participants, Nina Dickinson Lewis Hunter and her husband, William Simpson Hunter.
Only three blocks away, then as now, is the African American neighborhood in which the Seneca Institute for Negroes was established in 1899 (Horton 2000:11). As it was the only school of its type in the area, many rural Black families moved into Seneca so that their children could attend the Institute. Graduates of the school recalled that their parents did laundry and domestic work for white families living nearby.
The week following the quilting, the Keowee Courier published the following item submitted by another correspondent:
While in Seneca at the Sunday School convention, we saw the Irish linen tablecloth, referred to by your Seneca correspondent as having been used by Mrs. J. Н. Thompson at her old-time quilting. The cloth is an heirloom, having been used by Mrs. Thompson's grandmother, Mrs. James A. Doyle, long before the Civil War, and is now well preserved , being used only on state occasions. The home double-woven piece was woven by "Dilsey," a slave, who belonged to Mrs. James Doyle. These relics have been sacredly kept by Mrs. H. F. Alexander, who possesses high appreciation of relics of antiquity. The old spoon-holder used at this quilting was purchased in 1870. A china fruit bowl also used has been in the Alexander family 75 years, and the pitcher was presented to Mrs. Alexander by Mrs. Tidemann, of Charleston, in honor of her mother, who brought it from Germany. It is perhaps one hundred years old (Horton 2000:17-18).
The writer was Ella Dendy Doyle, the regular correspondent from the nearby Bounty Land community. Her response to Mattie Stribling's comments convey an elevated sense of indignation at the lack of the proper reverential attitude toward family heirlooms. According to Katherine Grier, "In Victorian culture, ordinary people used objects to make statements to create dense webs of connections to their culture and society" (Grier 1992: 53-54). For such families as the Dendys, Doyles, and Alexanders, the "chain of association" connected to these material objects was highly symbolic. Among the earliest arrivals in what became Oconee County, these families defined their existence through their kinship networks, extensive rural land holdings, substantial homes, and inheritance, both tangible and intangible. For families who had lived throughout the tumult of the Civil War and Reconstruction, family heirlooms connected them with the perceived stability and gentility of the antebellum period.
After asserting the exalted legacy of the family heirlooms in question, Doyle caps her tirade by invoking the "holy city" of Charleston, the symbolic seat of South Carolina's antebellum heritage. The entire drama is a family affair. Mrs. H. F. Alexander 1$ Alida's mother, Rebecca Humphries Doyle, and Ella Dendy Doyle is their distant cousin.
Alida Thompson ignored the conventional "chain of association" of gentility, hospitality, and abundance of the pre-war era. Instead, she evoked a past characterized as austere, rustic, and unrefined. She inverted the meaning of the family heirlooms by using them in association with a meager repast in order to create a contrast with the social conventions of her own era-sumptuous refreshment in abundance. By reinterpreting these objects, Alida Thompson demonstrated a growing trend of the era.
"Some scholars have suggested that, during the twentieth century, objects "were seen as one medium for articulating personality, rather than formal cultural identity as was more prevalent during the Victorian era, and that, by the 1920s, cultural memory was not believed to reside in household possessions." (Grier:1992:19). From the newspaper accounts, Alida Thompson seems to have given a higher priority to enhancing her own reputation as a hostess than to honoring the values of her mother's family.
"Toward the end of the day a suggestion was made that the photographer be sent for, and a picture made of the quilting party.
This was done, and so ended the day, which goes into Seneca's social history and one of the most thoroughly enjoyable in her calendar" (Horton 3).
The hostess's choice of an "old-fashioned" theme and the initial presentation of meager refreshment also reflected, as described by Jacquelyn Hall, "the growing class divide among the white population resulting from the explosive growth of the textile industry in the Southern state in the upper South in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." Poor white families left their tenant farms and flocked to textile mill villages in search of higher, more stable income. Townspeople held ambivalent attitudes toward the mill workers. The success of commercial centers such as Seneca depended largely on the textile trade; at the same time, the mill workers were both feared for their perceived lawlessness and derided for their uncultured behavior. "As townsfolk created and refined their own standards of decorum, domesticity and accumulation, they found themselves surrounded by workers whose way of life seemed increasingly alien" (Hall:132).
During the early twentieth century, newspaper writers frequently circulated jokes presented in the stereotypic speech patterns of African Americans and Irish Americans. Mattie Stribling's report of the quilting included the hostess's description of an item made ""befo" de war," adopting a speech pattern used by Black people in her home, as well as in her neighborhood. A number of items in the Keowee Courier show how townspeople created parodies of stereotypical "poor white trash." One extreme example is an announcement for a "Harde Times Soshul" in Mattie Stribling's column in 1909:
You air axed to a doins us folks air a goin to hav at the hum of Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Simpson. ... Every woman who kums must ware a kaliker dress and apern. Or something ekaly appropriate. Men must ware there old close and saft shirts. A vote of thanks will be given to the man or woman hevin the worst lookin rig in the rume. (Horton:20)
THE COLONIAL REVIVAL
These local events played out under the influence of a larger cultural movement, the Colonial Revival. According to Historian Virginia Gunn:
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people who had enthusiastically embraced the exotic and eclectic styles of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement were ready for change .... Old-fashioned styles became the new fashion. ... The Colonial Revival style promoted in the United States was a romanticized, not a pure interpretation of the past. The Colonial Revival period in the late-nineteenth century encouraged Americans to look to the past, believing that early historical figures and pioneer values needed to be esteemed by all who lived in the United States. Authors often note that the Colonial Revival emerged in an era of nationalism and patriotism as a reaction to changes wrought by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. The world as they had known it was changing rapidly. "Mainstream Americans sought refuge in the past and used both fact and myth (Gunn:2009:229).
"Quilting myths are realities of quilt history. Romantic myths have been combined with historical facts as people interpreted America's quilting past.... Early scholars, lacking access to the primary materials we have uncovered today, often guessed about what happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-ries (Gunn 1992:195).
Marie Webster traced her understanding of the history of quilts in her pioneering book (Webster:1915). Like most people of the era with an interest in colonial-revival styles, Webster expected to find evidence of quilts in the earliest European settlements in the new world. However, based on "the lack of knowledge concerning the house furnishings of the early colonists," she surmised that "Quilts were in such general use that the early writers about family life in the colonies neglected to mention them" (Webster 1915:60). A half-century later, the "lack of knowledge" persisted, and subsequent authors had added details to the myth, such as this interpretation by Dolores Hinton:
When the quilts and blankets which the colonists brought with them began to wear out, they must have been patched until the cloth would no longer hold thread. They were then probably replaced by quilts closely resembling our crazy-quilts-made from pieces of material of miscellaneous sizes, shapes and colors. Of course, none of these quilts have survived the more than three centuries that have passed since they were made. Also no one took the trouble to describe these early quilts in the journals, letters, and wills which mention them. It can only be surmised from what 1$ known of the conditions existing at that time, how the quilts made by the earliest colonists must have looked. These quilts could not have been very pretty because they were contrived from the strong pieces cut out of otherwise unusable clothing. Therefore, the quilts were more a result of accident than of design (Hinton.1966: 21).
In the 1970s, students in graduate programs in Folklore at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Indiana University, and the University of Texas, Austin cited sources reiterating such myths in their theses, dissertations, books and articles (Horton 1979; Milspaw 1997; Stahl 1980; Weidlich 1995).
In 1980, Sally Garoutte published an article examining two popular stories related to "Colonial" quilts: "One is that the first American quilts were made from economic need, the need for warm bedding being so great that colonial women pieced together all their fabric scraps to make quilts. Another story is that quilts were common and ordinary bed furnishings in all colonial households (Garoutte 1980: 18-27)." In the interest of providing factual data, Garoutte sampled household inventories from the 17th and 18th centuries to enumerate bedding textiles and their values. She determined that blankets were most prevalent by far, though woven coverlets and bed ruggs (which are woven from coarse woolens) were also enumerated. Quilts were few, but they were valued much higher than other bedcovers (24).
JANE MCJUNKIN DEFENDS HER QUILT
The record of an actual event involving an 18th century quilt offers a trifle to consider. During the Revolutionary-war era, the South Carolina backcountry was the scene of frequent skirmishes between neighboring Patriots and Tories. In 1780, a Tory raiding party led by Col. Patrick Moore commandeered the home of Samuel McJunkin, a patriot, in Union County, South Carolina. As recorded by Elizabeth Ellet, a nineteenth-century historian:
They stayed all night; and when about to depart stripped the house of bedclothes and wearing apparel. The last article taken was a bed-quilt, which one Bill Haynesworth placed upon his horse. Jane, Mr. McJunkin's daughter, seized it, and a struggle ensued. ... For once the colonel's feelings of gallantry predominated, and he swore if Jane could take the quilt from the man, she should have it. Presently, in the contest, Bill's feet slipped from under him, and he lay panting on the ground. Jane placed one foot upon his breast and wrested the quilt from his grasp. (Ellet 1848:262)
Other sources provide additional details for a fuller understanding of the meaning of the incident to the participants. The raiders would have known that Jane's two elder brothers were serving in the regular continental army. The eldest, Major Joseph McJunkin was providing information on British army movements to General Daniel Morgan. Two younger brothers had enlisted in the local partisan militia, and eighteen-year-old Robert had been killed by "Bloody Bill" Cunningham's Tories only a few weeks earlier. Sixteen-year-old Jane was the eldest of the four children still at home. Had Colonel Moore felt less gallant, her resistance could have led to injury or death.
The story of Jane McJunkin's quilt is one of many published descriptions of enemy occupation and plundering of household belongings during wartime. But hers is the only example in Ellet's extensive research, of a woman challenging the seizure and succeeding in the retention, of a bedcover. Jane's idiosyncratic behavior is a trifle inviting further observation. The quilt that triggered her resistance might have been simply the last straw, the culminating indignity that unleashed her frustration. It is more likely, however, that the quilt held such special significance that she risked violence for its protection. The story of Jane McJunkin suggests the strong feeling that connected American women with their household textiles.
American textile researchers in the twentieth century cited the presence of early white quilts and counterpanes, in addition to the much larger representation of patchwork quilts in their published books and articles. These elegant textiles were sometimes assumed to have been made for a young woman's "hope chest." It's true that many of them were made by women in their teens and twenties, but the American tradition of white wedding dresses and other textiles developed after Queen Victoria wore a white dress for her wedding in 1840.
RESEARCH ON SURVIVING QUILTS AND REAL WOMEN
Textile researchers in the 21st century have documented a large body of white bedcovers made by American women during the late 18th and early 19th centuries (see Bakkom 2015; Horton 2021). This research indicates that these women actively participated in a patriotic effort to boycott British goods, particularly tea and textiles. "The chosen tactics could succeed only if white housewives and their daughters refused to purchase imported goods and simultaneously increased their production of homespun. Even the work assignments of female slaves would have to be changed if the colonial policy was to be fully effective" (Norton 1980:155-170). These activities continued to a significant degree and expanded in the early nineteenth century. In 1807, the United States Congress enacted a Non-importation Act, in an effort to disrupt British trade and influence, and to promote the home production of textiles, instead of the purchase of the finished products of British factories made from American cotton (See Beeston and Horton 2013; Tryon 1966:123).
A study of some thirty documented white bedcovers in Kentucky museum collections indicates that all of the makers were the daughters of patriot families from Virginia. (Horton 2021). Surviving family narratives claimed that the makers spun the yarn and wove the cloth, and analyses of fiber and weave structure support many of those claims. (Ordoñez (2021). These young women, the literal "daughters of the American Revolution," were re-enacting the patriotic efforts of their mothers' generation. (Horton 2021:23).
INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY AND IDENTITY: POLLY ARMISTEAD'S TUFTED COUNTERPANE
In 1980, MESDA's textile collection acquired a white embroidered counterpane, inscribed with the initials "PA" and the date, August 16, 1793.
It was initially attributed to her sister Priscilla, who would have been only ten years old at the time. In 2010, a search of online resources located the will of Priscilla's brother William, who referred to their sister Mary by her nickname "Polly," who was five years older than Priscilla. Furthermore, the counterpane had been handed down through Polly's descendants (Horton 2009).
The majority of early American white quilts and counterpanes were designed with a central motif featuring an expansive array of entwined flowering vines, emanating from a basket or urn, surrounded by one or more borders.
In contrast, Polly's center motif consists of a single, daffodil-like blossom atop a stem which descends to a suggestion of curled roots.
Additional tri-lobed blossoms, leaves, and curlicues attach to the stem, and a loose scatter of knots fills the space above and below. Polly encaged these elements within an unusual oblong cartouche rimmed with the double-walled band that holds the embroidered inscription. Instead of extending out from the center in a profusion of vines, leaves, and blossoms, Polly's central motif is tightly contained. Another abnormality, a trifle to observe and ponder. It lacks the typical characteristics of other white quilts and counterpanes of the period.
However, Polly's central motif does share similarities with mourning jewelry from the late eighteenth century. Such brooches, lockets, and pendants include ovals with rims inscribed with names and dates.
The possibility that mourning jewelry may have influenced the design of Polly's cartouche is strengthened by the numerous deaths in her family.
Polly was born in 1777, the same year in which her mother, Sarah Jordan Armistead, lost both of her parents. It is likely that Sarah wore mourning jewelry while holding her baby daughter. Further deaths in the Jordan family included Sarah's brother Joseph in 1785, and her two remaining brothers in 1790. Polly's own brother Anthony died in 1789, at age 25, followed by the death of their father, William Armistead, age 61 in 1791 (Garber 1910: 245-247).
By then, Polly's mother was not only the newly widowed head of her household, but the eldest of the three surviving Jordan sisters. By all accounts, Sarah Jordan Armistead was a capable woman, but, in addition to her own household and her late husband's businesses, she would have been involved in the settlement of multiple entangled family estates. Polly's two older sisters had married, leaving Polly at home with two younger siblings and a very busy mother.
Women of countless generations have turned to the physical practice of needlework for solace in times of sorrow. In 1793, approaching her sixteenth birthday, Polly made use of the skills she would have learned as a daughter of gentry. Embroidered counterpanes are generally worked from the center, and the inscribed date of August 16 likely refers to the day she began the project.
The central cartouche appears to embody Polly's emotional state, and becomes her surrogate, both protected and restrained by her social identity. Moving outward, the cartouche is surrounded by a swag-and-tassel inner border. Variations of this motif are widely distributed across the decorative landscape, in textiles, wallpaper, furniture, and architecture.
Though somewhat awkward, the swing and drop of Polly's swags and tassels trace a definite movement away from the constraint of the center, suggesting a loosening of her grief.
Centered on each of the four sides, a basket issues long, curved vines adorned with various leaves and flowers, similar to the designs on other quilts and counterpanes. Other women have embroidered names or initials, dates, or other inscriptions on their quilts and counterpanes. When Polly Armistead embroidered her initials and the date in the center of her counterpane, she understood that she would probably marry, lose her name, and take on a new identity as a wife and mother. And she knew, very well, that, sooner or later, she would die.
In 1795, Polly, age eighteen, married David Minton Wright, and her legal name became Mary Wright. Through the rest of her life, she may have regarded her counterpane as a touchstone, a material reminder of her individuality and a testament of her submission to her own mortality. Having married Mr. Wright, Polly bore six children, five sons and one daughter, before her death in 1817. In many families, special quilts and counterpanes were handed down to the eldest daughter. It is likely that Polly would have bequeathed her counterpane to her daughter, Sarah Jordan Armistead Wright, but, due to a tragic event, it passed through the descendants of her brother.
David Minton Wright, Jr., the youngest of Polly's children, was born in 1809. By 1860, he was a doctor living in Norfolk, Virginia, with his wife and eight children. In July 1863, his son Minton Augustus Wright died at Gettysburg. During the Civil War, Fort Monroe, the only fortified Union base in the Upper South, became known as the "Freedom Fort" by Blacks who sought escape from bondage. In August 1863, Norfolk was occupied by Union troops, and a niece of Dr. Wright submitted this report of the event:
A negro regiment, commanded by a Yankee, marched through the streets of Norfolk. Doctor Wright was standing on the street, and as the regiment passed, remarked, 'My God, did ever I expect my country to come to this? Did ever I expect to see such a regiment on the streets of the city of Norfolk?" The officer, hearing the remark, stepped before Doctor Wright with his sword uplifted and attempted to slap him on the cheek with his sword. The Doctor drew his pistol and shot him dead." (Garber 1910:245-247)
Dr. David Minton Wright, age 54, was tried, sentenced, and executed. His daughter, Sarah Jordan Armistead Wright Warren, inherited the counterpane, which then became associated with her father, rather than her grandmother. Sarah Warren passed it to her son, David Minton Warren, who left it to his son, David Minton Warren, Jr, who died in 1966. In 1980, his widow, Rebecca Wood Drane Warren, placed the counterpane with MESDA. She knew only that it had been handed down through the Warren family.
Polly and her husband were buried in the cemetery of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Edenton, North Carolina. However, by 1964, no legible stone remained. As it turned out, Polly succeeded in creating for herself a more lasting memorial for future generations to acknowledge her existence.
THE LIFE STORY OF A WOVEN COUNTERPANE
Other white bedcovers were handed down through the generations with their provenance intact, including a white woven counterpane made by Elizabeth O'Neal ( Horton 2022).
Elizabeth was born in 1786 in Nelson County, Kentucky Territory, Virginia. She was the third of the five children of Jackie O'Neal and Fannie Hall.
Jackie had acquired land on Plum Run, near Bloomfield, where he operated a grist mill and farmed. The whole family would have been involved in farm work, producing their own food, tending livestock, and raising row crops and flax. Early Kentucky families planted flax, processed the fiber, and wove it into linen, for their own use and as a medium of exchange. Local stores accepted handwoven cloth in trade for coffee, sugar, and other commodities. The sturdy, hardwearing twill fabrics produced by Kentucky weavers were in demand throughout the southern states (Tryon 1966:141142; 203-214).
Elizabeth learned to weave from her mother. Fannie's parents, Michael Hall and Rebekah Hepworth, were born in the village of Golcar, near Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire, England. One or both of them were skilled weavers. In 1750, as textile factories mechanized, displacing handweavers, the Halls emigrated to Fairfax, Virginia. Fannie was born in 1752, the fifth of their nine children. In 1779, the estate accounts of a man named Thomas Moss, deceased, recorded a payment to Frances Hall "for weaving." At age 27, weaving appears to have been her occupation before she married Jackie O" Neal and came to Kentucky. Fannie O'Neal died in 1799 at age 47. Elizabeth's older siblings had married, leaving her the eldest of the six children at home. In 1804, Elizabeth, age 18, wove a White counterpane in a traditional weft-loop style her grandparents had brought with them from Yorkshire.
Before weaving, Elizabeth first gathered and prepared the fibers. She spun flax for the long, strong warp yarns.
For the weft yarns, however, she blended flax and cotton fibers together, as was the common practice. (Ordonez 2021: 38-48)
Elizabeth had planted "a patch of cotton," harvested the bolls, picked out the seeds, and carded the fibers to align them before spinning.
Instead of the twill weave she would have used for everyday clothing, she dressed her loom for a basic, plain weave. For the weft-loop technique, she used a thin yarn as the primary weft, then at regular intervals, she inserted a thicker, secondary weft yarn. Before beating the secondary yarn to secure it, she used a hook to pull it into loops.
She formed a simple "checkerboard" design, with alternating squares of pulled loops and unpulled ribs. A stray thread of indigo-dyed yarn from another woven fabric became embedded in the counterpane.
When Elizabeth finished her counterpane, she maintained possession of it for the next 85 years.
On February 18, 1808, Elizabeth O'Neal, age 21, married Hugh McKay. The McKay and O'Neal families were neighbors on Plum Run, and they all attended the Bloomfield Baptist Church. By 1810, Elizabeth and Hugh McKay were living in neighboring Spencer County with two children. In 1811, the family moved to Indiana Territory, newly opened to settlement. Hugh purchased land and built a house on Indian Kaintuck Creek. Hugh and Elizabeth had six more children during the two decades they lived in Indiana. Their eldest son, George Neal, recalled his childhood there:
Our land ran to the creek, most of it being upland, but it was very rich, and we most always had two or three hundred bushels of grain to sell, and as the county road ran by our place, we could sell all we could spare. ... We always had plenty of hogs, cattle, sheep, and always two horses. ... We raised flax and Mother spun and wove all our clothing, and no family on the creek lived as independent as we did (Horton 2022:139).
By 1927, the family had returned to Kentucky, where Hugh bought land near Taylorsville, in Spencer County, and built a large log house. Their ninth child, Charles McKay, was born in 1827. The 1830 census listed Hugh and Elizabeth, with their five younger sons, ages three to seventeen. In September that year, Hugh McKay caught "a severe cold" and died three months later, at age 48.
The 1840 Census shows Elizabeth as Head of Household in her Taylorsville home. Others in the home included her younger sons: Charles, age 13, Ludwell, 17, and 24-year-old Allen and his wife Martha, who had married the previous year. Allen was identified as a cabinetmaker. By 1860, Allen was a "merchant," and he, Elizabeth, and Martha had the house to themselves. Of Elizabeth's younger sons, Ludwell had married Josephine Linthicum, the daughter of a prominent judge in Bardstown, and Charles had moved to Iowa.
On June 4, 1886, The Louisville Times reported the following:
This is a gala day in Taylorsville. The friends and neighbors of "Aunt Betsy" McKay are celebrating her centennial anniversary. The occasion is a joyous one, prompted not more by her remarkable age and rare preservation, than by the great worth and virtues of the beloved old woman. ... Of her nine children, all are alive but one, and of the eight surviving, all are here today ... excepting William who is in Ш health in Denver. ... There are now living thirty-four grandchildren [and] fifty-four great-grandchildren, so that Aunt Betsy and her living descendants number 112. Several representatives of each generation are visiting here now, the youngest being a babe in arms. ... A table for a banquet is spread in the yard of the Spencer Institute, the centerpiece of which is a large cake surrounded with 100 wax tapers, which are to be lighted. The cake has in icing 17861886, the figure of an old lady with a flag in each hand, and the name "Aunt Betsy McKay." (141)
A later report of the event provides additional details.
She was escorted to the banquet in a carriage driven by an 82-year-old man and pulled by a horse "more than 30 years old. ... A special feature of the general feast was a separate table for Aunt Betsy, her family, and guests more than 80 years of age. At this time Aunt Betsy was able to read and her hearing was good. In fact, she was remarkably preserved (141-142). The only known photograph of Elizabeth O'Neal McKay was almost certainly taken during her birthday celebration.
In 1889, Elizabeth gave her white woven counterpane to a visiting grandson, Walter Noble McKay. She reportedly told him, "I have seven living children. If I give this to one, the others will be jealous. As your father [Charles] was my "baby boy" and my favorite, and you are the only one of his family who ever came to see me, I am giving you this relic as a keepsake" (142).
On February 6, 1892, Elizabeth O'Neal McKay died at home, at the age of 105. Her counterpane then traced a convoluted trajectory among aging cousins across five states. In 1889, her grandson Walter had taken it home to Des Moines, Iowa. By 1920, he had retired to Winter Haven, Florida. In 1936, at age 80, he sent the counterpane to his sister, Cora McKay, back in lowa. In 1942, Cora, age 81 and in poor health, entrusted 1t to a visiting first cousin, Adelaide McKay McGriff, age 75, the daughter of Hugh McKay, Jr.
Back home in Illinois, Adelaide wrote to her cousins, Elizabeth and Aileen Bryan, the granddaughters of Ludwell McKay, in Louisville, Kentucky: "I would love to keep it the rest of my life-but life is uncertain. ...I want this to belong to the McKay family. ...I feel that it should be handed down from one direct descendant to another. You know the relatives and know best how to plan its career. Will you please take this responsibility?"
Adelaide's cousin Elizabeth, called "Bess," responded, "I am hastening to write to let you know how honored we feel that you suggested that we keep the coverlid made by Grandmother McKay, and arrange to place it in the hands of someone in the newer generation." Bess, who was born in 1885, had been the "babe in arms" at her greatgrandmother's centennial.
In 1974, Bess and Aileen Bryan passed the counterpane to their niece, Marcia Bryan Horton, a great-greatgranddaughter of the maker. Marcia died in 2007, and her daughter, Laurel McKay Horton, took the counterpane home to South Carolina. Dr. Margaret Ordoñez, a textile conservator, cleaned and repaired it, and in 2021, at the age of 216, it was placed in the collection of the Kentucky Museum, in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
WOMEN, QUILTS, AND AMERICAN HISTORY
During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, women throughout the new American republic understood their home-production efforts as a patriotic act. According to historian Dr. Mary Beth Norton, "The prewar boycotts initiated the politicization of the household economy and marked the beginning of the use of a political language that explicitly included women. Each spinner was to feel strengthened by the sense that she was part of a long line of women stretching back to antiquity. Women "devised their own interpretation of what the Revolution had meant to them as women, and they began to invent an ideology of citizenship that merged the domestic domain of the preindustrial woman with the new public ideology of individual responsibility and civic virtue (Kerber 1980: 41-42)." For women like Elizabeth O" Neal McKay, that interpretation included the home production of textiles as proof of their identity as citizens of the New Republic and the New Eden of Kentucky. They recognized their white quilts and counterpanes as material evidence of the significance of their lives, and they handed down the home-production narratives along with the textile heirlooms. Over time, the meaning of the narratives shifted for succeeding generations. Stories of the struggle for independence focused on battles and constitutions, the activities of men as the fathers of the country. The notion that women's work might transcend the domestic sphere was forgotten.
During this period, the descendants who inherited white quilts and counterpanes continued to pass down the narratives, but they reframed the tasks of spinning and weaving as part of the necessary labors of self-sufficient frontier women.
The survival of a two-century-old bedcover is not random or accidental. Were it not for the material survival of a quilt or counterpane with attendant written or oral information, a descendant's knowledge of the maker might well be limited to a twig on a family tree. "Very few historic quilts are accompanied by written documentation, and orally transmitted data is fragile. The untimely death of a single elder can erase all knowledge of the significance of an heirloom." (Horton 2005:155). Quilts, counterpanes, and other trifles, large and small, have been donated to museums by descendants who provided names, dates, and places, making it possible to verify and document the lives of those who made and used them.
Returning to James Deetz:
It is terribly important that the "small things forgotten" be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured. We must remember the bits and pieces, and we must use them in new and imaginative ways so that a different appreciation for what life is today, and was in the past, can be achieved. (Deetz 1997:259-260)
Such trifles and small things recovered and remembered can convey evidence of the "expressive forms, processes, and behaviors" that "serve as evidence of continuity and consistency through time and space in human knowledge, thought, belief, and feeling" (Georges and Jones 1995:1).
CONCLUSION
I have spent fifty years, so far, learning and writing about quilts and the people for whom they have had meaning. My introduction to the subject advantageously coincided with one of the periodic revivals of an interest in quiltmaking, providing opportunities to share discoveries with like-minded people. We had many questions and gradually learned to be suspicious of easy answers. We became aware that quilts played important roles in the lives of women, past and present, even as cartoonists and humorists portrayed them as meaningless trifles. I remember clearly the first question that revealed the possibilities and the challenges of my research direction. I was photographing quilts and interviewing descendants of the makers. I thought about the lives of 19th-century women and I wondered "How did they acquire the fabric?
When I was invited to present the 2024 Archer Taylor Lecture, and ultimately this article, I wasn't sure where it would lead me. As I reviewed earlier articles and presentations, I felt less and less sure. I asked myself, "How could I start with these individual studies and look at them from a new perspective." This question turned out to be exactly the attitude I needed to delve into not only the material behavior and historical context behind one or another quilt, but to look for clues to the states of mind and heart of those who made them. One of my earlier papers was titled "Looking for Polly Armistead," and that is the kind of question that has always been at the heart of my research. The lore of quiltmaking is easy enough to describe, and the makers can often be identified, but who are they as the folk behind the lore?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I dedicate this article to Dr. Daniel W. Patterson. As Chair of the Folklore Curriculum at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, Dan encouraged me to write my thesis on quilts. His own research interests involve historical subjects, including Shaker spirituals, shape-note songsters, and a family of stone carvers. Since 1977, the majority of my research projects have examined historical quiltmaking traditions. Dan is now ninetysix. When I emailed him about my Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture, he responded, "Bring them back to history, Laurel!
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