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The Romance of Your Grandmother's Quilt
February 1913
Wilene Smith Legacy Project
New York City, New York (NY), United States
"The Romance of Your Grandmother's Quilt" is a lengthy article in McCall's Magazine, February 1913, by Eliza Calvert Hall, author of "Aunt Jane of Kentucky." The article illustrates eight quilts, an engraving of a grandmother teaching quiltmaking to a young girl, and discusses the history and romance of the quilting tradition. Dozens of quilt designs are named in the text several of which include local stories about selected designs. The author also discusses the calicoes of an earlier time, that "I never look at the calico in an old quilt without wishing that some manufacturer would give us the calico of our grandmother's day." She ends the article with the persuasive argument that "the quilt of my grandmother's day seems to me something worth studying and worth commemorating."
By Eliza Calvert Hall, Author of "Aunt Jane of Kentucky"
TO THE imaginative reader, words are pictures. The word "quilt" suggests at once an old-fashioned room, whose furnishings are a four-poster bed, a chest of drawers, a claw-footed mahogany table, a high mantel, on which stands an old-fashioned clock and a pair of brass candlesticks. In the middle of the room a quilting-frame is stretched, and bending over it is a group of women who seem to have stepped out of the family album or the frames of your old daguerreotypes. Two of them, standing opposite each other, are holding a cord on which they are rubbing a piece of chalk. They lay the cord on the surface of the quilt, draw the string taut, then lift it and let it snap back into its place, leaving a white mark to guide the needle of the quilter. This is called "laying off" the pattern of the quilting. Others are threading needles or bending over the frame in the tedious labor of joining two pieces of cloth through an intervening layer of cotton.
BUT when we go back to those mysterious years in which lics [sic] the origin of things, we do not find history telling us of women making soft, warm bed-covers by stretching cotton between two layers of cloth. Instead, the story is of soldiers going to war, armed with swords and javelins, and protected about the body by quilted armor. In his "Conquest of Mexico," Prescott says that the Aztec warriors covered their bodies with "a close vest of quilted cotton," and their shields were often "a frame of reeds quilted with cotton." As we read Prescott's glowing pages, we see that it was not Spanish valor alone that accomplished the conquest of Mexico. The forces of Cortez had "suffered grievously from the arrows of the Indians," but when the Spanish commander was assembling his forces on the island of Cuba he had wisdom enough to learn from his enemy, and had the jackets of his soldiers thickly quilted with Cuban cotton. Thus clad, the Spanish soldiers were more than a match for the Indian warriors. Without this quilted armor, light, but impenetrable to the arrows and javelins of the Aztecs, there might have been no conquest of Mexico. So, along with the picture of the old-fashioned room goes another picture of semi-barbarous warriors marching to conflict, and a faded, ragged, calico quilt makes me see the gleam of spears and the splendor of feathered mantles and head-pieces worn by the Tlaxcalan army, that matched its strength with the Castilians, and again I realize that the most commonplace things when traced to their beginnings are found linked with strangeness and romance.
Yet I cannot think that men and soldiers originated the art of quilting. The first quilter must have been a mother, and quilted armor the device of a soldier who remembered how his mother made coverings for her sleeping children. There are three varieties of the quilt. One is the quilt proper, made of two pieces of plain cloth, usually white, padded with cotton and quilted together; another is made of pieces of cloth, cut in various shapes, sewed together to form a design, and a third, the patch-quilt, is made by cutting the cloth into patterns, appliqueing them on a foundation, and then quilting around this applique of "laid work." We women of the lowlands use the word patchwork to designate any quilt made of scraps of silk, calico or woolen goods, but the mountain woman discriminates carefully between the piece-work quilt and the patchwork, or "laidwork" quilt.
Of late years old-fashioned things have come into great favor. The woman who owns her grandmother's mahogany-table and four-poster bed considers herself twice blessed, and, if she has a sense of the "eternal
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[illustrated top left] "POLK IN THE WHITE HOUSE," COLORS, RED AND WHITE. THIS PATTERN RESEMBLES "THE BROKEN CIRCLE"
[illustrated center] "THE RUSSELVILLE FAIR," MADE SIXTY YEARS AGO, BY MISS VIRGINIA IVEY, OF LOGAN COUNTY, KENTUCKY
[illustrated top right] "THE PINEAPPLE" QUILT OF LAID-WORK, BORDER IN "OSTRICH-FEATHER" PATTERN
[illustrated bottom right] "DEVIL'S PUZZLE," OR "I WILL AND I WON'T," OR "BORROW AND LEND," PROBABLY, ALSO, "THE FOOL'S PUZZLE"
Contributor's note: Virginia Ivey's Russelville Fair quilt, 1856-1857, is in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History collection in Washington, DC (http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&gkey=169&objkey=7223). The author describes this quilt in detail on page 66a.
THE ROMANCE OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S QUILT
By Eliza Calvert Hall, Author of "Aunt Jane of Kentucky"
[text continued from page 18]
fitness of things," she knows that her bed-coverings must be of the same era to which the bedstead itself belongs, hence the revival of the quilt. Two years before Major Archibald Butt met death in the Titanic disaster he was advertising for a calico quilt of the "Possum Paw" pattern, to complete the furnishing of an old-fashioned room which was one of his hobbies. I made a note of the name, "Possum Paw," and now it stands at the head of a list of one hundred and fifty names of quilt patterns that I have collected in a few weeks' search. Collecting quilt names is a fascinating hobby.
"Where do you get all these names?" people ask, and my answer is, "Everywhere." A friend who was summering in middle Tennessee sent me thirty-eight quaint names, collected from the region about Tullahoma. When any member of my family goes out in the country, he or she usually comes back with a list of names like these, which come from Polkville, a little village near my home: "Shoot-About," "Old Maid's Puzzle," "Lone Star," "Hexagon," "Bunch Hexagon," "Double T," "Sunshine in the Shade" and "Kentucky Pavement."
"Steps to the Altar" and "The Road to California and Back" are two patterns in use at the Allanstand Industries in North Carolina. The design called "Friendship" contains no two pieces alike, and each piece must be contributed by a friend. "Lover's Leap," "String Band," "Stairs," "Spider Web," "Coxcomb," "Old Star," "Checker Board," "Poor Man's Quilt," "Tea Box," "Tay Quilt," "Kentucky Plume" and "Ostrich Feather" (shown in the "Pineapple" quilt of "laid work" illustrated, owned by Mrs. S. G. Rogers, Bowling Green, Kentucky), are other odd names of intricate patterns. But enough of names!
I have found the quilt designs far more orderly and law-abiding than the hand-woven coverlet designs. The latter are like tricksy elves, disguising themselves and taking innumerable aliases; but when a quilt design is once named, the name seems to stick, and I have found only one or two designs with more than one name. "The Devil's Puzzle," "Borrow and Lend" and "I Will and I Won't" all belong to the same perplexing design--probably the "Fool's Puzzle" is another name for it.
THE professional weaver often wove into his coverlets shields, eagles, flags, stars and patriotic mottoes, and the mountain women occasionally use these designs in their quilting, but, so far, I have found very little of politics or history in the names or designs of quilts. "Tippecanoe Club," "Whig Rose," "Abolition Rose," "Polk in the White House" and "Democrat Victory" are the only historic names I have. The first of these originated in the Presidential campaign of 1840 when the cry was: "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" "Polk in the White House" came five years later; and the "Whig Rose" was named during Jackson's administration, and before or during the Civil War a "Whig Rose" with a black center was called "The Abolition Rose." Miss Elizabeth Dangerfield [sic; see also page 66b], of Lexington, Kentucky, tells me an amusing story of a mountain woman who sympathized so strongly with the South that she refused to visit a neighbor who had an "Abolition Rose" quilt on her bed.
Perhaps you think, as I once did, that piecing a quilt is a very ordinary form of work, requiring merely some scraps of silk, calico or woolen goods, a pair of scissors, a needle and a spool of thread, "Oh! anybody can make a calico quilt," I hear you say. But if you begin to study the design, the mystery and the complexity of the calico quilt becomes apparent, and if, as a daring experiment, you essay the piecing of a block, say, of the "Job's Trouble"
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[illustrated top left] "AUNT JANE OF KENTUCKY," COLORS, RED AND WHITE. 1683 PIECES
[illustrated bottom left] "HEEL AND TOE," A GEOMETRICAL PUZZLE THAT WOULD HAVE DELIGHTED THE SOUL OF OLD EUCLID HIMSELF
[illustrated center] "JOB'S TROUBLE," PIECE-WORK QUILT, MADE AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN YEARS BY MARY CARTER WARD, OF GRAYSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY
[illustrated top right] "HEXAGON STAR," OWNED BY MRS. E. MCKEE, WARREN COUNTY, KENTUCKY
Contributor's note: Elizabeth Daingerfield was one of several women who collected Kentucky quilts around 1905-1915. Marie Webster referred to her in 1915 as "Miss Bessie Daingerfield, a Kentuckian." Author, "Patch Quilts and Philosophy," Craftsman (August 1908); "Kentucky Mountain Patchwork Quilts," Ladies' Home Journal (July 1909); "The Kentucky Mountain Quilt," Ladies' Home Journal (February 1912). A daughter of Foxhall Daingerfield, manager of Castleton Farm and its stable of racing horses in Lexington, Kentucky, Elizabeth was born in Virginia, December 10, 1870, and died in Fayette County, Kentucky, December 9, 1951.
THE ROMANCE OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S QUILT
By Eliza Calvert Hall, Author of "Aunt Jane of Kentucky"
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pattern or the simpler "Heel and Toe," you discover that the making of a calico quilt calls for something more than thread, needle, scissors and calico.
A calico quilt is a creation that would have delighted the soul of old Euclid himself. I can fancy the great geometrician turning from the demonstration of the fifth proposition to gaze admiringly at a "Hexagon Star" wrought out in many colored calicoes, and he would have described the quilt owned by Mrs. E. McKee, which took a blue ribbon at the Warren County Fair, held in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in October, 1912, thus: "Hexagonal stars within other hexagonal stars. The small stars composed of rhombuses, the large surrounding star of rhombuses and equilateral triangles." "Polk in the White House" is an arrangement of squares, quarter-circles, circles, twelve-pointed stars and double rows of isosceles triangles fitting into each other. In pattern it resembles "The Broken Circle." The quilt illustrated is owned by Mrs. R. B. Shanks, Rockfield, Kentucky. "Aunt Jane of Kentucky" (designed, pieced and quilted by Mrs. Emeline S. Hilton, Duluth, Minn.) expressed in geometrical terms is: a combination of squares, rhomboids, equilateral triangles and right triangles. "Heel and Toe" is a combination of squares, parallelograms, rhombuses and triangles, and "Devil's Puzzle" is a square with a quarter circle cut out of it, the square and the quarter circle made of different colors and sewed together. Isn't it strange to think that Aunt Betsey, in her cabin down in old Kentucky, and the mountain women of Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, are cutting quilt pieces in circles, ellipses, squares, right triangles, isosceles triangles, equilateral triangles, rectangles, trapezoids, parallelograms, pentagons, hexagonal prisms and hexagons--the same figures that the great Euclid used when he evolved the principles that lie at the foundation of geometry?
MERELY to cut these geometrical figures one must use the same accuracy that is required in the most difficult forms of skilled labor; the precision, for instance, of the cabinet-maker who cuts two pieces of wood and dove-tails them into each other; and in arranging the pieces to form a design, sewing them together and making the corners "hit," the quilt-maker's work is very like that of the worker in mosaic. A piecework quilt is really a mosaic done in calico, worsted or silk, instead of in stone. In Mary Carter Ward's "Job's Trouble" (now owned by her daughter, Mrs. Kate Ward Sumpter, of Bowling Green, Kentucky), there are ten blocks, each containing one hundred and seventy-six pieces, one thousand seven hundred and sixty pieces in all, besides the large plain white squares that join the piece-work! Is there any child of your acquaintance who would undertake and carry through to completion such a work as this? Ah, no! the Little Girl of Yesterday is very different from the Little Girl of Today. In the "Hexagon Star" quilt there are nine thousand two hundred and sixty-six pieces. Think what a task it was to cut those small triangles and diamonds, most of them only an inch long, and then sew them together without puckering or spoiling a single block. Surely the days must have been longer in the vanished time when women pieced quilts!
IN EVERY house there is a dark closet or heavy chest filled with the things that belonged to a former generation. Here is the queer calash [a folding bonnet] your great-grandmother wore on her wedding-day, and the veil of figured lace that hid her blushes; here is an old flowered muslin with surplice waist and "angel" sleeves that belonged to great-aunt Matilda; and at the very bottom of the chest, or on the topmost shelf of the closet, there is sure to be an old calico quilt. The bonnet and the flowered muslin tell a story of the Woman of Yesterday, but when you lift the old quilt and begin to count the pieces and estimate the number of stitches it contains, that Woman of Yesterday grows more and more real to the eye of your fancy and the calico quilt becomes a page on which you read the history of her life. That Woman bore children, nine, ten, eleven, twelve or more. She made her own soap and candles; she spun and wove, and if she was a Southern woman she had to train a small army of servants in all the arts of housewifery. There were no sewing-machines, no electricity, no gas, no bathrooms with hot or cold water for the turning of a faucet. Even wealthy people then lived under conditions from which we of the present day would shrink in dismay, yet the wearer of that queer calash found time to "feed her soul" by making something that was beautiful as well as useful. If anyone had told her that "the beautiful is as useful as the useful--perhaps more so," she would have thought the sentiment a sinful one; but quilts were needed for the family beds, and her conscience approved as she cut and pieced and quilted.
THE age in which we live might be called the Age of Silk. Even the maid in the kitchen wears silken hose and silken petticoat, and if we use cotton goods it must be mercerized to look like silk. But when quilts were in vogue it was the Age of Calico. Cotton was King then, and, as "Aunt Jane" says: "A calico dress was something worth buyin' and makin' up in them days." The highest art of the dyer and designer was employed in the making of calico, and in the calico quilt of your grandmother's day you will find colors and patterns as beautiful as in the finest organdies on your merchant's counter. All around the edge of Mary Carter Ward's quilt runs a border of blue and white calico, and the blue is exactly the tint seen in the forget-me-not blossom. Often you find scraps of the old French chintz which was as beautiful as the printed silks of today and almost as expensive, and I never look at the calico in an old quilt without wishing that some manufacturer would give us the calico of our grandmother's day, with its good texture, unfading colors and varied designs, and thus enable us to have a revival of the calico gown and the calico quilt. "People can't make quilts nowadays," I heard a farmer's wife say, as she gazed at the display of quilts at a country fair; "there's no calico, now, worth piecing." So if you own a calico quilt made in the good old days when everybody wore calico, take care of it, not merely because of its fine needlework and pretty design, but because it shows a fabric that we shall probably never see again.
Like the hand-woven coverlet, the quilt has the power of drawing to itself a host of memories and traditions, and in every town and village a fair or a loan exhibit will suffice to bring from their hiding-places quilts that are linked with historic personages and historic events. In Danville, Illinois, there is a quilt that once belonged to George Washington, and one of the most interesting relics owned by the Kentucky Historical Society is a quilt more than a hundred years old. It is made of printed chintz brought to this country from London in 1792, and the print shows William Penn making his treaty with the Indians. The original owner of the chintz was Colonel Carneal, and he used it for curtains in the parlor of his pioneer home. At his death the furnishings of his house were sold and the curtains were bought by a Mrs. Anderson. This lady had a beautiful daughter, who, at the age of fourteen, danced with Aaron Burr, and fascinated him with her grace and wit. When this daughter, at the age of sixteen, married a Mr. Sawyer of Ohio, the old chintz curtains were given to her as a bridal present. She made a quilt of them, and when she died, at the age of ninety-nine, left the quilt to her son, Dr. Sawyer. When he died it became the property of his widow, and in her will she devised it to the Kentucky State Historical Society. The maker of this chintz and all the former owners of the quilt are dust
[text continued page 66a]
[Caption:] THE QUILT OF GRANDMOTHER'S DAY
THE ROMANCE OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S QUILT
By Eliza Calvert Hall, Author of "Aunt Jane of Kentucky"
[text continued from page 20]
and ashes, and, like "Aunt Jane," one marvels that a piece of calico can so outlast a human being.
In the South Kensington Museum there is a padded quilt of Sicilian workmanship which was made in the year 1400, more than a century before the time of Cortez. It is nine feet square, of fine cream-colored linen and padded with carded wool. There are fourteen panels, and each shows a scene from the story of the hero, Tristan, and the tyranny of Langris, the Irish king who oppressed Cornwall. One panel shows the king seated on his throne, surrounded by his councillors [sic], while an ambassador from Cornwall kneels at his feet; and in the distance we see the king's palace. The figures are outlined with a brownish linen thread and the entire surface of the quilt is closely quilted with white thread. Thousands have gazed wonderingly on this masterpiece of needlework, and it is probably reckoned among the chief treasures of the museum; but down in Kentucky there is a modern quilt just as wonderful as the old Sicilian one, made about sixty years ago by Miss Virginia Ivey, of Logan County, Kentucky, and now owned by her niece, Miss Lilian Lewis, Bowling Green, Kentucky. [See page 18.]
It was made to commemorate the first fair ever held in Russelville, Kentucky. Around the edge of the quilt is the old-fashioned board fence that usually surrounded a country fair-ground. Within are trees, maples and locusts, the latter in bloom, and under the trees are men on foot and on horseback and vehicles of different kinds drawn by horses. In the center of the quilt is the ring, also surrounded by a board fence. In the center of the ring is the "grand-stand" (not shown in our illustration), and around this we see all the live stock that figures in an old Kentucky fair, horses, cows, bulls, sheep and chickens. Above the fence are the words: "A Representation of the First Fair Ever Held in Russelville, Kentucky." Besides the quilting that outlines the various objects, the entire surface of the quilt is a mass of fine stitches. The number of stitches approximates three million, and every one is fairylike. I wonder how many readers can see in this quilt what I see.
Two years ago I was walking with a friend through the aisles of a country fair. On the tables were fruits and vegetables, fancy work and cookery, and over-head hung quilts of silk, worsted and calico. "What a waste of time!" exclaimed my companion as she looked up at a gorgeous old calico quilt, yellow with age and elaborate with its tracery of tiny stitches. What a waste of time! That is the thought that occurs to most of us when we look at the calico quilts and samplers that constituted the art work of our grandmothers' day. But the criticism is as shallow as that of the disciples who found fault with the waste of precious ointment that a certain devoted woman poured on the feet of her Lord; and we need to be told, as they were told, that it is the motive of the work that determines whether or not it is to be commended or condemned.
"A waste of time!" That might be
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THE ROMANCE OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S QUILT
By Eliza Calvert Hall, Author of "Aunt Jane of Kentucky"
[text continued from page 66a]
said of the Taj Mahal, but no one says it, for we know that every inch of carving on that priceless mausoleum represents a man's love for a woman. Likewise, every stitch in an old quilt represents a woman's love of beauty; and the time spent in creating beauty is not wasted.
Even the commonest quilt is full of significance. The units of its design are borrowed from the science of higher mathematics; a woman's taste arranged the units into a design, and a woman's imagination named the design. Each piece of calico is a souvenir of love or friendship, and the piecing and the quilting are witness to a woman's industry, patience and perseverance. Any woman who has the will to work can make such a quilt, but still other qualities than patience, industry and perseverance went into the making of "The Russelville Fair."
Miss Elizabeth Dangerfield [sic; see also page 19] has a very interesting collection of mountain quilts, and among them is one whose pattern is an original combination of two patterns, "The Rising Sun" and "The Wilderness Road." The mountain woman who designed this said that "her man had seen the Rockies," and when he told her about the long way he had gone from home and how the sun looked coming up over the mountains, she "run right quick and mapped out the pattern of that quilt."
There was the true poetic imagination which "bodies forth the forms of shapes unseen."
Around that mountain quilt the pathos of an undeveloped talent hangs like an aura, and shall we think lightly of the work merely because it was done without an artist's proper tools?
Virginia Ivey drew the picture of a Kentucky horse with needle and thread; Rosa Bonheur would have drawn it with a pencil; but in the outlines of the figures on that snowy quilt I see a Gift so compelling that no untoward circumstance could wholly repress it, and back of the careful seamstress who put in those millions of stitches I see The Artist Who Might Have Been, and because I see this the quilt of my grandmother's day seems to me something worth studying and worth commemorating.
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