Cooper Union Sanitary Commission Quilt #2: The Cooper Institute

"School of Design

Engraving Class

Cooper Union"

When I read the inscription on this sampler quilt I knew what it meant. I'd done a little research on quilts made in the Cooper Union building in New York City during the Civil War. I realized this is likely a rare Civil War survivor---a quilt made there to donate to the Union Sanitary Commission.

Peter Cooper (1791-1883) with a granddaughter

The Cooper Union was (and is) an art school in New York City. Wealthy entrepreneur Peter Cooper founded The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1859. The beautiful building housed offices, classrooms and studios and a Great Hall seating almost a thousand people in one of the city's tallest structures at the time.

The Cooper Union building about 1890

Cooper's liberal ideas included a free education not only for talented men but for women. Once accepted students  paid no tuition. “To better the condition of woman and to widen the sphere of female employment I have provided seven rooms to be forever devoted to a Female School of Design.” The Engraving Class prepared art students for a career in commercial art. One acceptable female occupation was wood engraving, the process widely used to illustrate publications.

Wood engraving picturing students learning wood engraving at the 

Cooper Union, 1883 

They drew and cut images on the end of blocks of boxwood.

Small hands, acute near vision, a talent for drawing, and attention to detail

were qualifications that made it a good job for young women.

The Engraving Room was in a well-lit studio...

Probably on the fourth floor on the side behind those Gothic arched windows

The inscription is beautifully embroidered in blue thread.

During the Civil War the Cooper Union building housed the offices of the New York Branch of the Sanitary Commission, called the Women's Central Relief Association, organized by the elite of the city. A founding member was Sarah Bedell Cooper, Peter Cooper's wife.

Sarah Bedell Cooper (1793-1869)

The Association's offices were on the ground floor of the building. In this Civil-War-era 

photo men address crates of donated hospital supplies to be sent to 

Sanitary Commission agents in the field.

The quilt is 54" wide by 88".

Sanitary Commission guidelines asked for

long, narrow quilts to fit hospital beds.

Women's groups all over the North donated supplies to comfort wounded Union soldiers. The supplies included bed quilts.

The New York organization alone reported that in its first two and a half years

they received 20,444 quilts to distribute to hospitals.

The war dragged on for over another year.

Quilts were gathered and shipped by the Subcommittee on Receiving and Forwarding Supplies. My quilt descended in the family of Samuel W. Bridgham, who was chair of that committee.

Engraving by Guilielma's student Alice Donlevy

Quilts were not only stored in the building but were stitched in the building. Gulielma Field (1814-1875) who taught wood engraving also knew how to quilt. Alice Donlevy, one of her students, recalled:

"Under her guidance many patchwork quilts were made during the Civil War, in an upper room in the Cooper Institute, where the students of the Art School came to quilt for any half hour they could spare after lesson times....Every student that I remember had to learn to quilt."

Skylights on the top floor may have provided light for quilting.

Alice also recalled that Gulielma opened "the every day quilting bee with poetry" and she was a "diplomatic teacher."

"One of her warmest admirers was a young Southern girl. Gulielma would cut off her criticisms of President Lincoln with a question about books, and succeeded in keeping the atmosphere of that quilting bee restfully sympathetic."

The blocks are well-pieced. Gulielma must have been

an exacting teacher in quilting as well as engraving.

I'd guess you pronounce her name Julie-Elma.

The products of the Engraving Department's restful quilting bee went to the Sanitary Commission offices on the first floor. My new quilt must have been one of many stitched at the Cooper Union.

More about this quilt tomorrow.

See a post from 2016 on the Cooper-Union soldiers' aid society:
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2016/12/stitching-soldiers-quilts-at-cooper.html

Read Donlevy's biography of her teacher Gulielma here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=aILTAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA452&dq=gulielma+field+cooper&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNgrz1pK_iAhUGSa0KHRE4BSgQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=gulielma%20field%20cooper&f=false

Cooper Union Sanitary Commission Quilt #1: Style

Not the most elegant quilt in the world.

But it jumped out at me when I was scrolling through

Stella Rubin's online shop, looking for something else.

Pieced sampler of mid-19th-century cottons with narrow white sashing.

And only half a quilt? Indeed it is 54" wide by 88" long.

Piecing is quite accurate

Just the size for a hospital bed.

Maria Hall on a cold day in a field hospital.

Could this be a quilt made by a Soldier's Aid Society during the Civil War?

I checked my files of quilts thought to have been made specifically for the Sanitary Commission, the Union soldiers' aid society that asked for quilts of inexpensive cottons about 50" wide and 84" long. 

Susannah Pullen made this narrow hospital quilt with her 

Sunday School students. She asked to have it returned if not used up 

after the war and she got it back. It's now in the Smithsonian.

In an American Quilt Study Group paper on quilts made for Union Soldiers Virginia Gunn estimated that 125,000 quilts and comforts were distributed by the Sanitary Commission during the war. But they were used in the dirty business of hospital bedding, washed repeatedly and discarded; any survivors probably sent home in hard times and used up. 

Scholars have found fewer than 20 thought to have been made for the Sanitary Commission in museum and private collections today.

See a post on surviving Sanitary Commission quilts here:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2019/05/how-many-sanitary-commission-quilts.html

Fussy cut flower, not an inscription

The quilt at Stella's just looks like a Sanitary Commission quilt. I decided to gamble on my instincts and buy it, mainly so I could have the fun of researching it. It arrived in short order.

Several of the survivors have a stamp of some kind, indicating

the source of the supplies.

Jan Dodge found this nine-patch in a thrift store decades ago. 

The stamp on the back, which I recall said "San.Com.", 

meant it had been stitched for a soldier.

 I was hoping there were other inscriptions--- and oh! for a smoking gun as evidence, the Sanitary Commission stamp.

It is in great condition.

I was a little disappointed to find no Sanitary Commission stamp. There was just one rather obscure inscription in embroidery. But I was certainly not disappointed in the quilt, which is pieced of fabrics likely from the 1840-1865 years.

The obscure inscription wasn't obscure to me. I'll tell you why in the next few days.

String Quilts #2---Dated Examples

String star pieced over a newspaper dated 1899

String quilts aren't often dated or signed. I've got a small file of dated examples that can help pinpoint when the style began and how it evolved.

Silk quilt dated 1883

The earliest date-inscribed example of a string quilt that I have in my picture files.

Probably started as embroidered silk squares in 1883 and finished years later with string

blocks along the edge. Does it count as a dated string quilt?

Collection: International Quilt Study Center & Museum

1997-007-0803

Crazy quilt dated 1883-1884 with some blocks I'd call more

string than crazy.

1885 Made in Athol, Massachusetts

Massachusetts Project & the Quilt Index

A few of the blocks look like string piecing to me.

Also one of the earliest cotton crazy quilts I've seen.

Collection: International Quilt Study Center & Museum

1997-007-0247

Crazy quilt with some string-pieced blocks and some regular patchwork.

String Star dated 1886

Several of the diamonds are indisputably string pieced.

1889, Collection of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum

Now, this is a string quilt but it is interesting how the strings rotate

around a center in many of the blocks.

Detail of the quilt above

1893, Collection: International Quilt Study Center & Museum

1997-007-0838

Similar style but centers feature pictorial cretonne prints

1893, same year as above, a string-pieced star.

1894, covered with names, a fundraiser.

1897 by Felicia O Dessie Law

Noble Co. Ohio

I'd call it a Rocky Road to Kansas pattern.

1897 Mary Feldsend

See a post on Rocky Road to Kansas here:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/08/rocky-road-to-kansas.html

 1898, Rocky Mountain Quilt Shop inventory

1898, Laura Fisher's shop inventory---a sampler of string

quilt styles.

1905, maybe silks

1905 Clara Wigman

1906, structure is getting looser

1910

Wool embroidery

1909, first one I've found in the blue and checks and stripes style.

Made by Isa Salmon, Partridge, Kans.

3-19-1917

Collection of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum

Is it really a string quilt if the strips are cut to the

same size?

Rhetorical question. We each have our own opinion.

Another 1917 string star

of velvet with pom-poms.

1918, Julie Silber's Inventory

1925, Pat L. Nickols collection at the Mingei Museum

1925

1926

I'd have guessed 1910

1926 - a taste for pastels showing up.

1927

1928---wools and combination fabrics

1932, for Alfred

It's kind of surprising how late some of these utilitarian examples are dated.

I'd have guessed ten or twenty years earlier.

1938

1943, rather old-fashioned for 1943

1944, Deb Rowden's collection

1950

The date-inscribed examples indicate the string quilt fashion paralleled the crazy quilt style,

beginning in the 1880s. Both are stitched to a foundation. String quilts, not so fancy, continued on

their own tangent and were probably most popular in the early 20th century.