Southern Spin: Kentucky Stars

19th-century quilt

Believed to be made by Lura Eyestone's mother. Donated to ISU Museum.
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=16-33-14D

While looking through the Illinois Quilt Museum's collection on the Quilt Index I came across this silk star quilt.

It's seen better days; silk is so prone to deterioration. Jan Wass, former curator, noted it's predominantly green (although it looks brownish here) and bound with a pink silk ribbon.

Lura Eyestone is famous in Normal, Illinois where a one-room school museum is named for her. She was a teacher at Illinois State University in the first half of the 20th century.

The Lura Eyestone School is on the college campus.

Lucky for us Lura's mother blessed her with an odd name so she is easy to find in the digital world. I had a hunch as to where Lura was from based on the quilt's style.

But I was wrong. Lura was born in 1872 in Bloomington, Illinois, which is where she is buried. It doesn't look like an Illinois quilt. The quilt is probably older than Lura so what about her mother?

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13175860/martha-m.-eyestone

Her mother Martha M. Johnson Eyestone is

buried near her. Martha, born in 1853, could have made the quilt.

But the date is not so important to me as where it was made.

Find-a-Grave tells us:
BIRTH 2 Jan 1853 Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky

I KNEW IT! That is one Kentucky quilt. I bet Martha or someone in her family made that quilt in Kentucky.

Bardstown is in Nelson County southeast of Louisville and way southeast of 

Bloomington/Normal, Illinois.

Mountain Mist Pattern

A star with points of four diamonds always catches my eye as I am ever on the lookout for the missing Kentucky quilt that won the 1933 contest at the Chicago World's Fair, published as Star of the Bluegrass by Mountain Mist after the fair. Their pattern included a leaf pattern to stuff.

Quilt dated 1938 with stuffed work quilting

Made from the pattern published after the Fair.

Stars pieced of silk and quilted closely have a Kentucky connection.

The older Eyestone family quilt is in the same pattern as the 1933 World's Fair winner.

Jan noted that the blocks are unpieced and the stars are created out of the sashing between them,

the same as the winning quilt. The Eyestone star is quilted simply but densely with double or triple diagonal lines. No stuffed work, however.

Why do I think Kentucky? Here are two quilts that have formed my thinking:

Silk star of 4 diamonds per points made at the 

Morton home near Russellville, Kentucky.

Collection of the National Museum of American History-Smithsonian

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_556181

Silk Star of 9 points with stuffed work in the plain squares, 1837-1850.

Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Attributed to

Ellen Morton Littlejohn & Margaret Morton Bibb.

Made at the Morton's Knob Plantation near Russellville, Kentucky

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/13884

These quilts from Russellville are so much alike it is hard to keep them straight.

Not only are they elaborately stuffed

they feature similar stuffing patterns...

For example: the feathery leaf in the border area of the Smithsonian's quilt...

...also in the lower border rectangle visible here on the left side in the Met's quilt...

is similar to the stuffed work in the cotton 1933 World's Fair winner.

Here's a kit ready to piece into the stars.

Smithsonian's

One way I keep the two stuffed-work silk stars straight is by the star pattern: The Smithsonian's has 

four diamonds in the points

The Met's has nine.

I'm focusing here on the silk stars. The quilting deserves about six posts. It was done by two enslaved seamstresses, Ellen Morton Littlejohn (1826–1899) & Margaret Morton Bibb (ca. 1832–ca. 1910). Read more about them at the Met & NMAH links.

Merikay Waldvogel and I wrote a book on the winner in the 1933 World's Fair contest about 25 years ago. We still think about that quilt. When we saw the Littlejohn Quilt in the Met we were astonished at the similarities between it and the winner. The woman who entered the quilt in the 1933 fair (she commissioned it) must have seen the Littlejohn quilt.

See a post about the star pattern:

https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/search?q=bluegrass

And see a post about more stuffed work quilts from Russellville, Kentucky.
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2016/11/virginia-iveys-quilt-honoring-henry-clay.html

Marti Phelps of Prince Frederick, Maryland made this small silk quilt inspired by 

the Smithsonian's quilts for an AQSG Quilt Study on stars.

 Kentucky had its own regional style within the general region of "South."

See our Facebook page: QuiltHistorySouth

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2427588900863781/