By: Virginia Eisemon
In 1863, Susannah G. Pullen, a Sunday school teacher in Augusta, Maine, with her class completed a quilt for use in the Civil War hospitals in Washington, D. C. This paper is the result of research on both the quilt as a textile document as well as the information that was revealed in two letters written by soldiers who were patients in the hospitals where the quilt was utilized.
» Read more about: Uncoverings 2004 Sunday School Scholars Quilt: Civil War Textile Document »
By: Loretta B. Chase and Pamela Weeks Worthen
Nineteen-year-old Charlotte Hawkins made an album quilt in 1848 that was inscribed with forty names and verses of friendship, parting, death and eternity. The quilt represented a small rural community in the Blue Hills of Strafford, New Hampshire. Charlotte had gathered inscriptions of neighbors, friends and family who lived nearby. There was little documentation of these men’s and women’s lives because most of them lived below the level of historic scrutiny.
» Read more about: Uncoverings 2004 A Blue Hills Quilt: To Miss Charlotte Hawkins »
By: Mary E. Gale and Margaret T. Ordonez
Printed textiles played an important role in decorating eighteenth-century beds and displaying a family’s pecuniary status. Among the fabrics popularly used for bed furnishings and curtains were indigo-resist prints, distinctive because of their blue designs on a white ground. Extant examples today include lined hangings, quilted hangings and bed covers, and yard goods. The designs of these rare textiles share a rich Indian and European heritage.
By: Lucinda R. Cawley
A friendship quilt, pieced of Rolling Stone blocks, found on the Eastern Shore of Maryland led to the identification of a group of quilts inscribed in fraktur calligraphy made in Lehigh and neighboring counties of southeastern Pennsylvania between 1851 and 1870. Almost every quilt contains a dedication block identifying the owner by name with the phrase Ihr Teppich and a date. It appears that most of the quilts were inscribed by professional calligraphers,
» Read more about: Uncoverings 2004 Ihr Teppich: Quilts and Fraktur »
By: Laurel Horton
Selected quilts from three generations of a South Carolina family illustrate the shifting functions and status of quiltmaking from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. As printed fabrics became less expensive and more available, the quilts made from them diminished in value. A high-status wedding quilt made in the 1850s was made from uncut yardage of imported chintz. Carefully designed pieced quilts made in the1880s featured a variety of printed cottons from New England mills.
By: Kaaren Beaver-Buffington
A Quilt For General Grant tells the story of a red, white, and blue silk quilt made to raise funds for the United States Sanitary Commission during the last year of the Civil War. The Ladies Social Circle of Eureka, Humboldt County, California fashioned a quilt which was raffled off again and again on the evening of April 5, 1865 gathering $1,000 for the cause. The funds were sent to aid Union soldiers and the quilt was sent to Lt.
» Read more about: Uncoverings 2004 A Quilt for General Grant »
By: Barbara Brackman
A few weeks ago a woman from a small town in Alberta, Canada, called with two questions. The topic of discussion in her quilt shop was the role of quilts on the Underground Railroad. Her first quest: “Isn’t it true that Log Cabin quilts with black centers were hung on the clothesline during the days of slavery to alert escaping slaves to the presence of a ‘safe house.’” The second question: “Were quilts read as maps to tell escaping slaves the route to safety?”
» Read more about: Uncoverings 2004 Rocky Road to Analysis: Interpreting Quilt Patterns »
