Millard Fillmore---Not a Quilt Inspiration

 

Quilt featuring embroidered portraits of presidents,

a popular late-20th-centuruy idea.

Millard Fillmore (1800-1874)

Brady Studios Photograph, 1949

Yale's Beinecke Library owns this photo of Millard Fillmore,

President of the United States from 1850 to 1853.

If one measures by surviving political textiles Millard Fillmore

 is possibly our most un-inspiring President.

The main problem may be that he was a vice-president who took over the job after President Zachary Taylor died in office.

General Zachary Taylor cut from a print celebrating victories in the Mexican War

 of the mid 1840s, quilt shown at the Virginia Quilt Museum in 2016

 Taylor had inspired many political and patriotic quilts and Fillmore just had none of that war-hero panache.

But Susan Price Miller recently called our attention to this quilt

 recalling the Lord's Prayer, General Winfield Scott and Fillmore

 entered by a Mrs. Smith in a Kentucky State Fair in 1852.

The only quilt right now in the Fillmore files is this Tumbling Blocks

quilt in the collections of the Fillmore House in East Aurora, New York.

It is attributed to the first Mrs. Fillmore, Abigail Powers Fillmore.

Abigail Powers Fillmore  (1798-1853)

1906

"Quilt made by Mrs. Fillmore while in the White House."

Perhaps this quilt.

1913 Buffalo social life

After Abigail Fillmore died of pneumonia caught during

the inauguration of her husband's successor Franklin Pierce in 1853

Millard married again five years later.

Caroline Carmichael McIntosh Fillmore (1813-1881)

His second wife was a wealthy widow from Albany, New York.

They moved to Buffalo and lived in this Victorian concoction for 16 years.

It may be that Caroline had something to do with the silk quilt.

It's such a classic style of mosaic silk patchwork it might have

been made before Abigail died in 1853.

But then again....