In 2011 I wrote an essay for the Quilt Index on our earliest quilts. A dozen years or so has passed since we identified these two quilts as early Kentucky quilts, made before 1830 or so. I thought I'd revisit that essay considering Kentucky's earliest quilts. You can read the essay at this link:
During the Revolution Virginia's colonial government, attempting to administer a large, inaccessible area populated by dozens of native tribes, began to deal with Virginians hoping to move west by consolidating boundaries on the western side of the Appalachians into a single county named Kentucke with an e.
Kentucke County before the Revolution
Kentucke was used by the Indigenous tribes as hunting land and it's that abundance of game that first attracted Virginians settled east of the mountains.
The green line is a high point in the Appalachian range,
a barrier to settlement. The blue line is the Ohio River.
One could float the Ohio or cross the Appalachians to get to Kentucky.
By the turn of the century the natives were gone, replaced in the familiar, shameful story by settlers of European and African heritage who created dynasties at one social level and at another families working the hardscrabble soil to depletion.
Early immigrants became "First Families," as in this 1920 book.
Population figures show the 1790 census counted 74,000 new immigrants in the area; ten years later there were 221,000 living in the state. Population figures also tell us that the sources of immigration changed. By statehood most Kentuckians were from neighboring states other than Virginia---North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Living across the Ohio in Cincinnati I grew up with Kentucky quilts and wondered what those early European immigrants brought in the way of quilts. The most recent book of three on Kentucky quilts (see list at page bottom) is Linda LaPinta's Kentucky Quilts and Quiltmakers: Three Centuries of Creativity, Community, and Commerce. She writes that the state's “earliest quilts arrived with their makers who migrated over the Wilderness Road.”
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap
By George Caleb Bingham, born in 1811
Collection of Mildred Lane Kemper Museum at Washington University
Knowing what we do (or think we do) about bedcoverings and migration LaPinta's statement seems logical. Early settlers brought their Virginia culture with them but did they bring their quilted or patchwork bedding?
Travel on the Ohio about 1780 meant flat boats powered by humans, not
the comfortable steamships, the floating hotels of the mid 19th-century.
Early quilts (1775-1830) supposedly brought through the Cumberland Gap or on the Ohio River are in short supply. Surveys of Kentucky’s major museums and national collections that might be repositories reveal no 18th-century examples attributed to Kentucky residents. Identifying quilts before that date is relatively easy because new technologies, trade and taste developed in style, techniques and fabric in the 1830s.
Sarah Runyan Anderson (1771 - 1828) converted drapes into
a quilted bedcovering, now in the collection of the Kentucky Historical Society.
Kentucky museums own several examples of white work bedcovers, which are wholecloth monochrome quilts, quilted, stuffed and/or embroidered on high-quality white cotton (or a cotton/flax mix.) Some may date to the early-19th century when American mills developed the technology to produce such luxury fabric.
Whitework exhibit at Western Kentucky University
The bedcovers have to be examined in the cloth to appreciate
the fine needlework. The style was popular in the first decades
of the 19th century when classical white imagery was a fashionable
link to Greek ideals.
The Kentucky Museum at Western Kentucky University owns a whitework quilt attributed to Temperance Wren Sharp (1783/1788-1858) and an appliqued, stuffed quilt they attribute to her daughter, another Temperance Sharp (1829-1877.)
This all-white stuffed and quilted piece is attributed to the elder
of the Temperance Sharps made, it was said, before her wedding in 1816.
The technique uses a filler of plain quilting---diagonal lines here to make the
stuffed work (grapes) and corded lines (vines) pop out.
Western Kentucky University
See a link with a more accurate date for the second quilt in the actual caption here:
1850 Census Garrard County, Kentucky
Mother and daughter living with son Will, a merchant.
The elder Sharp may have been among the ambitious Kentucky seamstresses who stitched these but one also must take into account that such luxury bedcovers were consumer goods, a French export. Any whitework masterpiece we might view as a pleasant picture of early rural elegance could actually reflect a cottage industry in France.
Another possible source for early Kentucky quilts is national museums. Neither the Smithsonian nor the International Quilt Museum show Kentucky-made quilts attributed to the pre-1840 changes in techniques and fabrics. The D.A.R. Museum owns two older quilts that I cited in my essay as early quilts/ Kentucky made. Their genealogical work and mine, however, put those Kentucky origins in doubt.
Returning to the Kentucky-made quilts in my Quilt Index essay. This quilt, now in the DAR Museum, is attributed to Martha Harness Darst, It measures almost 120" wide.
Martha Harness Darst (1788-1854)
The D.A.R. has two stuffed-work quilts) attributed to the Darst family
Lovely early quilts, but I am afraid they have nothing to do with Kentucky.
Next Posts: More on early Kentucky quilts. Why don't we see them?
Three books on Kentucky quilts:
Mary Washington Clarke, Kentucky Quilts and Their Makers. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1976.
Jonathan Holstein, John Finley & the Kentucky Quilt Project, Kentucky Quilts 1800-1900. Kentucky Quilt Project, 1982.
Linda Elisabeth LaPinta, Kentucky Quilts and Quiltmakers: Three Centuries of Creativity, Community, and Commerce. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2023.
