Looking for the Garden Quilt: The Original

My start on the Garden quilt. We were going to have two of these quilts for the book The Garden Quilt: Interpeting a Masterpiece. I didn't get too much further than this. I'll show more pictures another day. I AM going to finish it. I don't have the affection for making grapes that some people do.

The original Garden quilt was pictured in Ruth Finley's 1929 book and it inspired many quilters to draft the pattern and applique their own versions.

From the Garden quilt file:

Snapshots of two mid-20th-century versions of the Garden.

On the left Pine Eisfeller's, 

the right unknown maker from Shelly Zegart's collection.

See a better photo of Pine's here:

http://www.cah.utexas.edu/news/press_release.php?press=press_jgross

 

The "exquisite quilt" in the black and white photo above was, according to Finley, made by Arsinoe Kelsey Bowen, a minister's wife in Cortland, New York, who finished it in 1857 after years of work and "millions of tedious stitches." Mrs. Edward Irish, who loaned the quilt for photography, recalled her Great-Aunt as an artist who also worked on paper, crafted hair jewelry and did "all the various kinds of fancy work in vogue at the time."

We had no luck in a search for Arsinoe or her original quilt despite reading Finley's papers, contacting the New York quilt project and looking at years of photos of antique quilts for sale. We did genealogical work on any Bowens or Irishes in the two towns of Cortland, New York (upstate and down). Our project languished until the internet age. 

At last I've found the quilter if not the quilt. A web search for the unusual name Arsinoe Kelsey Bowen leads to a New York minister's wife.  

Arsinoe was a royal name in Egypt.

Arsinoe Kelsey was born in December, 1812, in Smyrna, New York, in the far western part of the state between Lake Erie and Pennsylvania. 

In 1838 she married Henry Bowen who eventually became minister at the Baptist Church in Skaneateles, a town in the Finger Lakes region. [There is another New Yorker---Henry C. Bowen, a famous for getting tangled up with minister Henry Ward Beecher, but this is not the same man.)

This may have been Henry Bowen's last church,

still standing in Skaneateles.

We find no records of children. Indeed the only other fact available now is that the couple died within forty-eight hours of each other in 1868 in Skaneateles. She died on November 12th at 45; he on the 14th at 59.  This caused a problem with Henry's will which left property to his wife, who had predeceased him---so there is a court record of a contest.

Since writing the book on the Garden quilt I've found a little more about Arsinoe's homes. Here's a record of Baptist ministers from 1852 suggesting that Henry Bowen did live in Cortlandville. The history of Cortland Village (Cortlandville) mentions he was minister at the Baptist Church there from 1851 to 1861.

 Skaneateles by Fanny A. Coney (1814–1838)

from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum.

See the whole painting here:

http://www.folkartmuseum.org/?p=folk&t=images&id=4141

Arsinoe and Henry each had many siblings with many children who might have married a man named Irish. We can just hope The Garden still holds the admiration of today's owner and that someday the "exquisite quilt" that has inspired so many copies will surface again.

Josephine Craig's version of the Garden

in the collection of the Kansas Museum of History.

Read more here:

http://www.kshs.org/p/cool-things-the-garden-quilt/10141

  The Rochester Museum and Science Center

 has one by Verna M. Sutherland and her mother
Bertha Garrett, 1948.

See it here:

http://collections.rmsc.org/Quilts/DataSheets/92-111.html

See a page of Kelseys from Smyrna New York here

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=ssgtal&id=I8525

And read more about our new book The Garden Quilt: Interpreting a Masterpiece
https://www.pickledishstore.com/productDetail.php?PID=1306