A 1682 Quilt in Alabama #5: The Persistence of Memory

The last 4 posts have examined the tale of America's oldest quilt, featured in the book Alabama Quilts where it is dated 1682. Facts do not substantiate that claim. 

Links to the previous four posts:
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-1682-quilt-in-alabama-1-oldest.html
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-1682-quilt-in-alabama-2-new-england.html
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-1682-quilt-in-alabama-3-break-in.html
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-1682-quilt-in-alabama-4-who-was-sarah.html

Why do such stories linger?

The quilt fragment is attributed to the hand of Sarah Kemble Knight (1626-1727) pictured here as the author of a journal from 1705. The absurdity of the whole tale of Madam Knight is illustrated in this portrait. The source is unknown but it was probably published in a late-19th century version of her journal, which is likely a fictional forgery. She looks quite a bit like a late-19th-century version of a woman.

Why forge diaries? 

1) It's entertaining for writer and reader---a narrative form that might start out labeled as historical fiction but seems so authentic that it's hard to differentiate. 

2) There is money to be made. You may recall Clifford Irving going to jail decades ago for the financial chicanery in forging a diary by eccentric celebrity Howard Hughes.

Reprint about 1850

3) Then there is slander, such as the anti-religious propaganda of the Maria Monk diaries, attributed to Theodore Dwight, thought to be the author of the forged diary of Sarah Kemble Knight. 

4) And, unfortunately, some people have psychotic episodes believing voices are dictating stories to them.

6) Often it is the message that matters. Some people desire an idea to be true so firmly that they see nothing wrong in a little lying. 

Messages: Family history as noble, regional history as honorable and righteous, a more aristocratic background than truth would tell? 

Colonial history of northern European immigrants as more authentic than history of the indigenous people or later, darker "foreigners"? 

Post Civil-War nostalgia for a lost Southern way of life?

I did some Photoshopping to show

what the other side (dark blue wool) might look like.

Did Alabama teacher Adeline Morse embellish a Massachusetts family quilt with a lengthier pedigree---just as she may have shortened her own when telling the 1870 census taker that she'd been born in 1820.

The complex tale of the 1682 quilt, America's "oldest quilt," its link to Sarah Kemble Knight and the Journal of Madam Knight probably weaves threads of various motivations. Slander would have little part in it and nobody seems to have heard voices so the strongest motivation for the persistence of the Sarah Kemble Knight myth might be the message this tale tells us.

Sarah Anne Hobson (1874-1953)
Anne and sister Margaret were keepers of
family heirlooms like the quilt fragment & family stories 

in the first half of the 20th century.

The message is complex but very durable, much like Anne Hobson's 1903 dialect fiction about African-Americans In Old Alabama, Being the Chronicles of Miss Mouse.

We could find a parallel in the image of the Southern plantation historic home.

Tara, the colonnaded mansion in the film Gone with the Wind. 

It's a movie set.

Karen L Cox in Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created notes that in the Gone With the Wind novel Margaret Mitchell described a more typical and more modest house but set decorators created a new fiction. Mitchell "feared that Hollywood might add columns 'on the smokehouse, too.' "

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)

 Mitchell: "Southerners could write the truth about the ante-bellum South [but] everyone would go on believing in the Hollywood version."

I'm afraid the "1682" quilt relates more to the Hollywood version than to the accurate textile history version.

And that's a wrap on quilts from 1682.

Although you could read Karen L. Cox's Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Dreaming_of_Dixie/luw0oCagYLQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=karen+l+cox+Dreaming+dixie&printsec=frontcover

A 1682 Quilt in Alabama #4: Who was Sarah Kemble Knight?

The oldest quilt in America?

The fragment of the quilt in question is 16-1/2" tall, 

showing what was probably a floral medallion center framed 

by a vine and next a field of clamshell quilting. 

We've made some educated guesses about this quilt fragment supposedly made in 1682 by Sarah Kemble Knight, estimating its actual date as a century or more later (1750-1840) and speculating that Massachusetts teacher Adeline Morse brought it to Greensboro, Alabama in the 1830s, where somehow it was transferred to neighbors the Croom/Hobson family.

Why is it connected to Sarah Kemble Knight? An attached note is said to have written by Sarah before she died in 1727.

If the note is indeed in her hand there are many researchers into Colonial diaries who would be thrilled to see it. People have been discussing Sarah Kemble Knight's travel journal since 1825 when Connecticut-born author Theodore Dwight published it in book form. It is a book that Greensboro teacher Adeline Morse might have been familiar with from her New England girlhood.

Theodore Dwight II (1796-1866) at 32 in 1828, a few years 

after publishing his Sarah Kemble Knight journal. 

Portrait by John Trumbull

New York Historical Society 

Scholars with far more credentials than I have presented evidence for and against the authenticity of the Sarah Kemble Knight diary. New England textile historian Lynne Z. Bassett refers us to an essay by Peter Benes, published in the Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, "In Our Own Words: New England Diaries, 1600 to the Present" (Boston University Press, 2009). Lynne tells us, "it reveals serious doubt as to the authenticity of the diary that made Madame Knight famous (a doubt that has overshadowed the diary since the 1840s)."

Sarah Kemble Knight (1665-1727)

There is no doubt there was a woman named Sarah Kemble Knight who left much evidence of her existence in Massachusetts and Connecticut. But did she leave a journal?

From an 1865 edition of the diary, republished many times.

The journal tells the story of two 1704 journeys by a 38-year-old Boston widow who traveled without escort to settle estates in New Haven, Connecticut and Manhattan, New York. The Journal of Madam Knight has been enjoyed over the past two hundred years for the liveliness of its narrative, the unusual nature of a lone journey by an intrepid female and her saucy nature, rather ahead of her time for a Colonial dame. Someone actually called her the Dorothy Parker of the early 18th century.

Theodore Dwight's first edition included two diaries. Read excerpts from Madam Knight's journal here in a PDF:
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/growth/text1/connecticutknight.pdf A university curriculum recommends it:

"This journal is one of the most teachable colonial documents at the undergraduate level. Students respond positively to Knight's humorous portrait of herself and her surroundings. Through this document--and others--a teacher can counterbalance the still all-too-common stereotype of Puritans as dour, somber, unsmiling, and morbidly pious."

The charm in the words of the unusual and forward-thinking Madam Knight (to say nothing of the fact that it is reported to be the earliest known journal by an adult American woman) has led many to wonder if Dwight, the manuscript's supposed transcriber, did not compose it himself.

We could go into detail about Theodore Dwight's publishing career but his most relevant book is another personal narrative with which he's associated, published in the periodical The Protestant Vindicator in 1835. The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal was then published as a salacious anti-Catholic book, supposedly a memoir of rape, murdered babies, etc. that was a sensational best seller, igniting the Nativism politics of the next few decades. Dwight is considered by many as the ghostwriter to whom alleged nun Maria Monk told her stories or most likely, the author who fabricated the tale out of whole cloth shall we say (and made a fortune.)

Maria Monk's confessions about sin in Catholic convents is still in 

circulation, believed by gullible haters.

Examining Sarah Knight's original manuscript might put to rest all doubts about its authenticity.

But as Dwight wrote to Charles Deane in an 1846 letter, there really was no manuscript to show.

"Unfortunately I have but two or three leaves of Madam Knight's original manuscript remaining; for, after preserving it some years as a precious piece of antiquity, an Irish servant, one unlucky morning used the greater part of it to kindle the fire....Painful it is to add that....a number of letters of the same Madam Knight...was committed to the flames a few years ago in New London. Traces of them were found...."

The current whereabouts of those remaining manuscript leaves and letters are unknown.

A little Photoshopping to show the quilted imagery

and the filler quilting in parallel lines behind the florals.

Scholars of Colonial history can and will discuss the journal's authenticity---I haven't much to add. But I do know quilts and I have to say there is no way the Alabama quilt fragment had anything to do with either Sarah Kemble Knight or the 17th century.

Quilts did exist in 1682. Museums own well-preserved examples of silk, whole cloth quilts from the 17th century and earlier with a similar look.

Silk quilted bedcovering, ca. 1600

Collection of Colonial Williamsburg

But the imagery and the sources are completely different; these very early bedcovers were commercial products for world trade, luxury goods sent to the West from China and India. The earlier quilts also are stuffed and corded, techniques rarely seen in New England's wool and silk quilts.

 Collection of the Wadsworth Anthenaeum

A black & white photo shows the imagery, ships and seas depicted with

corded lines of quilting

Lynne Z. Bassett has examined another quilt attributed to Sarah Kemble Knight now in New London, Connecticut. As it is a printed monochrome toile giving more clues to date Lynne assures us: "It was indisputably not made by Madame Knight, as it was made of a later 18th-century toile.

A late-18th century fabric, a monochrome toile, printing

techniques invented long after Madam Knight's death.

Tomorrow's Post: Why do the stories linger?

A 1682 Quilt in Alabama #3: A Break in the Chain of Sarahs?

 

Yesterday we looked at the chain of women named Sarah who inherited this New England wholecloth quilt, said to be from 1682 (A date about a century too early.)

Similar quilt dated 1808 attributed to Betsy Payne

Connecticut Historican Society

Somehow the quilt fragment's reported chain of ownership switched families from New England to North Carolina/Alabama. The last Northern alleged owner Sarah Prout Christophers died in 1745 in Connecticut (before the quilt associated with her was actually made.) The next owner is said to be North Carolina native Sarah Pearson Croom born in 1797, 52 years later. 

None of the Crooms seem to have had any New England connections so their acquisition of the quilt is a mystery---but here is a possible New England link. In looking at Alabama's Greensboro District where Magnolia Grove is a landmark, we see the home of a neighbor, "The Morse-Christian House, 1838 home of a New England school teacher."

Adeline Morse came from Massachusetts in the mid-1830s to open a school in Greensboro (a rather courageous move for a young single lady.) She bought a lot on Main Street in 1836 and opened what looks to have been a successful school for young children, which she operated for 40 years until her death in the 1870s.

 

A 1948 article in the Greensboro Watchman tells the story of her house.

After Miss Morse died, William C. Christian bought the house; he, his mother and his grandmother Augusta Hobson Tunstall (1843-1912) had been her students. (It was a small town so everyone is related---except of course Miss Morse.)

The 1870 census tells us that Adeline Morse was born about 1820 in Massachusetts. Did she fudge this date? If 1820 is accurate she'd have been about 16 when she arrived in Alabama.

Times were tough in post-Civil-War Alabama but Miss Morse could afford to live alone. Interestingly, her neighbors were all Black, the Thorpes and the Gibsons, the older people probably former slaves living in the outbuildings of the more substantial houses. 

Outbuilding at Magnolia Grove photographed in 1934, 

identified as former slave housing

Did Adeline Morse bring quilts with her from New England in the 1830s, perhaps a whole-cloth  quilt that she or one of her family members had stitched? And did she give it to a neighbor before her death in the 1870s?  And to make it more special to a Sarah perhaps she created a story about a Boston quiltmaker named Sarah Kemble Knight?

William Christian substantially altered Adeline's two-story brick house, one room deep with a chimney on each end. He is said to have added the Greek Revival porch with its triangular pediment and columns in the early 20th century.

Tomorrow's Post: The Sarah Kemble Knight Connection

A 1682 Quilt in Alabama #2: New England to Alabama

In yesterday's post we looked at this quilt purported to be from 1682, associated with Sarah Kemble Knight, a 17th-century Boston woman famous for her journal.

There's more to intrigue the skeptical historian in the tale. Sarah Kemble Knight (1665 or 1666-1727) was quite the historical figure for those interested in Colonial history in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But what is the evidence for the quilt fragment's association with this important woman?

Apparently a note dated in 1727 came with the quilt, now kept with the Alabama fragment at Magnolia Grove. Sarah Kemble Knight was the note's reputed author who wrote she'd made the quilt 45 years earlier.

Magnolia Grove today. Greensboro is in Hale County in west central Alabama

 Sarah Prout Christophers 1684-1745

From her Find-A-Grave site in New London, Connecticut

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11349725/sarah-christophers

FOR SOME REASON THE LINKS DO NOT WORK.

COPY THE URL AND OPEN A NEW WINDOW IF YOU WANT TO SEE THEM.

The bedcover or just the fragment has belonged to a succession of Sarahs over the years, said to have passed from Sarah Kemble Knight to relative Sarah Prout Christophers of Connecticut in the early 18th century.

Sarah Anne Pearson Croom (1797–1878) 

About 1845

 Magnolia Grove Collection

Then the New England chain is broken and the next recorded owner (with a gap of 52 years between their lives) is Sarah Anne Pearson Croom, born in North Carolina, Her father, a Virginia native, was  Rowan County's largest slave holder. Sarah's husband Isaac Croom, also a North Carolinian, built Magnolia Grove in 1840 where the quilt fragment resides today. The Greensboro, Alabama house was the Croom's town home. They were cotton planters with rural farms extending into nearby counties. The 1860 census valued his Marengo County assets at $246,810 (slaves included). The Crooms had no children.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/72246418/sarah-anne-croom

 

Sarah Croom Pearson Hobson (1843-1904)

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/72604475/sarah-croom-hobson

Sarah Croom's niece, Sarah Pearson Hobson from North Carolina, bought the house in the 1870s after the Crooms died and raised her six children there.

Sarah Anne Hobson (1874-1953

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/72604474/sarah-anne-hobson

This Sarah called Anne was an Alabamian, born and died at Magnolia Grove, single all her life. She published a 1903 book of folk stories told in the ever-popular dialect form of the era. In Old Alabama, Being the Chronicles of Miss Mouse, the Little Black Merchant she mentions quilts in the context of a tale about her Black neighbors, noting patterns Rising Star, Log Cabin and Sugar Loaf. 

Here's a digital copy of the book, recalled as somewhat valuable for her transcriptions of songs and hymns.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_Old_Alabama/pHERAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=In+Old+Alabama,+Being+the+Chronicles+of+Miss+Mouse+quilt&pg=PA46&printsec=frontcover

Portrait of Isaac Croom over the late Victorian 

fireplace about the time Vera Henry visited and 

interviewed Margaret Hobson

In 1938 Vera Henry, collecting local stories for a W.P.A. project, wrote about Magnolia Grove, noting two Hobson sons and two daughters lived there: Perhaps Samuel who was about 60; Joseph 58, Sarah Anne 54 and Margaret 55, all of whom never married.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/wpalh0.07013203/?st=gallery

It seems many of the Croom/Hobson family were keepers of family traditions, including the quilt apparently promised to Sarahs over the years. 

Next Post: A break in the chain of Sarahs.

 

A 1682 Quilt In Alabama #1: The Oldest American Quilt?

 

"Oldest known quilt in the Western World"

Textile history is not a case of oldest, first, only, etc.

Let sportscasters spout competitive statistics.

Checking "facts" like "the oldest American-made quilt" is often a piece of cake. It's too easy to debunk such competitive stories. Ten years ago we had a lot of fun with an Ebay post of the piece above, the "Oldest Known Quilt in Western World, with a buy-it-now price of  $3,200,000.

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/06/oldest-known-quilt-reduced-by-millions.html

Well, sometimes it's not a piece of cake, it's more like arugula soup; you hate to serve up a bitter concoction, but.....

Here we have a 45" wide fragment of a whole cloth bedcover allegedly cut from the oldest quilt made in what would become the United States, allegedly made in Boston by Sarah Kemble Knight. It's not date-inscribed but the caption lists an estimated date of 1682. We also read that it's silk with a wool batting. Is this the back or the front? The other side looks to be dark blue.

A statement touting the country's oldest quilt in 1915 in the middle of the Colonial Revival slant on American history would have raised doubts in only a few skeptics who might have taken the Colonial attribution with a grain of salt. A statement like that in 2020 raises many questions.

The quilted fragment is in the collection of an Alabama historic home in Greensboro.

... pictured in the new book Alabama Quilts: Wilderness Through World War II: 1682 - 1950, mentioned in the book's subtitle.

Read a preview here about the quilt in question.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Alabama_Quilts/HQECEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=sarah+prout+chritophers+quilt&pg=PT61&printsec=frontcover

Magnolia Grove about 1940

Library of Congress

Alabama Historical Commission Property since 1980

An obvious fact:

That quilt looks exactly like bedcovers being made in the former colonies from the mid-18th century through about 1840---at least a century later than the caption.

Spencer Museum, University of Kansas

The Spencer Museum of Art where I volunteer to help with

the quilt collection has a beautiful example of a similar whole

cloth quilt based on a medallion format with florals and feathers.

It's wool rather than silk, estimated date 1775-1820.

The images are not stuffed but pop out due to diagonal lines of quilting, filler quilting. Sallie Casey Thayer, who shopped in New England in the early 20th-century, donated her collections to the University of Kansas.

 Collection of Independence Hall

Whole cloth, silk quilt with names of Philadelphia Quakers 

Hannah Callender, Sarah Smith and Catherine Smith and a date of 1761

American quilts from 1750 or later of silk and wool are found in many museums, particularly in New England.

Whole Cloth Quilt signed and dated Betsey Payne, 1808

Connecticut Historical Society.

This quilt dated in the middle of the fashion for such elegant wholecloth quilting is not silk but a fine wool that is polished to a shine to imitate more expensive fabric.

Detail of a pale blue silk quilted petticoat

associated with Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818), 

wife of President John Adams. Peabody Essex Museum

The bedcovers are linked to extremely fashionable underskirts of the 18th century with similar imagery of feathers and tulip-shaped florals.

The "1682" quilt

An anachronism

Lynne Bassett's drawing of a wholecloth quilt, estimated date 1800, 

Molly Howard (1773-1852)

We're not going to spend much time here on style and fabric in the purported 1682 quilt, although we could see many similar examples with enough provenance and style to date them from about 1750-1850. Lynne Z. Bassett is the expert on the style. 

She has commented on our QuiltHistorySouth Facebook page:

"The 1682 quilt in the Alabama book attributed to Sarah Kemble Knight is clearly very old, and without examining it in person I can't say for sure if it could be what it's purported to be----but after studying New England's early whole-cloth wool quilts for more than 20 years, from the design I would say that it dates no earlier than the mid-18th century...[likely] the second quarter of the 19th century."

Pepper Cory agreed with her:

"I've seen several New England or New York wholecloth [quilts] from this period and that large tulip-Like central motif was popular then. Michigan State University has a beautiful indigo wholecloth with the tulip central motif. I am thinking the possible dates on the Alabama wholecloth ought to be 1820s-40s."

Read Lynne Z. Bassett's chapters in the book Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth in a preview:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Massachusetts_Quilts/quNEcnPiM1cC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=chelmsford

This story gets so complex it's going to take all week to tell it. 

Next Post: How a New England quilt wound up in Alabama.