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