More Garden of Eden Quilts

 

We've been posting about Sylvia Queen and her Garden of Eden quilts.

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2023/09/sylvia-queen-and-garden-of-eden-quilt.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2023/09/sylvia-queens-second-quilt.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2023/09/who-is-sylvia.html

19th-century embroidered sampler

The theme is a popular religious image in the vernacular arts. 

Concrete Garden of Eden, Lucas, Kanas

S.P. Dinsmoor, early-20th-century

...Including quilts in a wide variety of imagery

Josephine Miller Adkins, collection of the 

DAR Museum, dated 1874, Maryland

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=16-12-184

But similarities in one group of quilts related to Sylvia Queen's pair raise many questions about patterns being passed around.

The Minnesota Historical Society attributes this quilt to Mary Worthington Walker Foster (1809-1907), born in Belchertown, Massachusetts. The caption implies Mary Walker may have sewn it in Massachusetts before her marriage, but this quilt that looks to date from the 1850s was probably made after Mary and her husband moved west, first to Wisconsin in 1846, then to Ohio and Illinois.

Do notice that Mary Foster's maiden name is Walker. Was she related to Sylvia Queen, who used the name Sylvia Walker before her marriage in Geauga County, Ohio to William Quinn?

Mary Walker Foster's son Addison Walker was a U.S. Senator from Washington state so we learn a little more about his mother. When he was a schoolboy about 1850 they lived in Geauga County, Ohio. (!)

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2015/01/another-adam-eve-quilt.html

Comparisons

Surely, the Great Geauga County Fair had something to do with

this mystery.

One more Ohio connection tomorrow.