Linsey Quilts 2: Regional?

Linsey quilt pieced of squares and rectangles of

linsey fabric, documented by the Arizona project---

from a family with Kentucky roots

In the last post we looked at patchwork quilts pieced of older fabrics woven from wool and cotton or linen yarns, colloquially called linsey-woolsey and in the U.S. Upland South usually called linsey. Over at our Facebook group 6KnowitAlls:ShowUsYourQuilts we saw a good variety and learned something about how regional they are.

The last post: Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE: Linsey Quilts 1: Identification

We'll try to answer our remaining questions about linsey in this post.

• Was weaving linsey cloth regional?
• Was cutting up linsey fabric to make quilts regional?
• Was linsey factory made?
• What is homespun about linsey?

Perhaps a last portrait of grandma, wearing a linsey

striped garment?

Linsey cloth was a staple of early 19th-century American textiles, woven at home for family use or family income or in small "factories" of a few weavers. Clothing fashioned from linsey seems to survive primarily in petticoats, worn under lighter skirts for warmth or worn as a dirt-resistant work garment.

Amy Barrick bought this petticoat in Wisconsin or Minnesota.

Source???

Pam Weeks, curator at the New England Quilt Museum, has seen the petticoats in New England; Merikay Waldvogel has seen them in Tennessee and there seem to be no regional style differences. 

The red crocheted lace on this one Pam saw at a New England sale is a bit alarming...

Is this the same petticoat from an old ebay listing?

The major difference in their flea market finds is that Pam and the New England weaving authorities find no patchwork linsey quilts at those New England sales whereas sales in Kentucky and Tennessee might yield a pieced quilt.

"I was quizzing the [New England] linen experts on linsey woolsey, which they say was never used in quilts." Pam

Barb Vedder's photo of a linsey strip quilt from New York she

saw in Rabbit Goody's workshop.

Weaving expert Rabbit Goody did a workshop at the AQSG seminar last week and showed her New York-found linsey quilts including this one. New Yorkers are NOT New Englanders, so apparently they made bedcovers of patchwork linsey and other wool pieces.

• Was cutting up linsey fabric to make quilts regional?

Recorded by the Tennessee project, attributed to Margaret Burdine 

Connatser of Sevier County, Tennessee

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=22-18-1047

These quilts pieced of rough, utilitarian fabrics do seem to be regional, usually from the upland South of Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. I would guess you can count on that as a clue to origin--- There are always exceptions but a pretty reliable clue. And then there is New York.

Rough idea of where linsey quilts were made---the upland South and places

like Missouri and Indiana where those people migrated.

Nancy Miller Grider lived from 1883 to 1960 in Rowan County, Kentucky.

When did she piece this medallion out of wool & cotton weave scraps?

Perhaps the most famous linsey quilt is the one on the cover of the Kentucky project's book published about forty years ago. See Nancy Miller Grider's quilt at the Quilt Index:
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1A-39-1D3

Questions continue---why the regional differences?

Lifestyle was quite different in industrial New England and agricultural mountain states.

This 1860 transportation map may explain it. Home-produced cloth was within the reach of many; the factory-produced cottons transported in all those red lines in New England and the upper midwest was not as available. You made bedcovers out of what you had, even if people living in the well-served areas thought the rough fabric was inappropriate for patchwork. This is a pre-Civil War map. Some areas became even more isolated and much poorer after the war.

• Was linsey factory made?
• What is homespun about linsey?

We tend to use the word homespun with no thought to the actual production history of a fabric. We like to fit textile history into the American myth, which often tells us about "hardy pioneers" and "old New England stock" who supplied their own needs within an agricultural economy.

American mythmaking reveres "homespun" often assigning the name to factory spun and woven cloth. Woven plaids, checks and striped fabric may indeed be homespun but one must look at the fiber content to be accurate.

Cotton is difficult to spin into yarn by hand. One reason the English and the northeastern United States dominated the cotton market is they developed machinery efficient at spinning cotton yarns. Many pieces of linsey (wool warps crossed with cotton yarns) (oops- UPDATE:  Merikay points out my error; it's cotton warps crossed with wool yarns) used factory-spun cottons and the weaver's own homespun wools. Cloth that is cotton warp and cotton weft is not going to logically be "homespun." But even if only the wool is home sourced we can probably call some of this fabric homespun because the wool was.

But, much factory cloth was "linsey." Alden O'Brien of the DAR Museum found a description of South Carolina fashion from Rhode Island merchant Isaac P. Hazard in the 1830s when he contrasted the Carolina hand-woven warps versus New England's factory yarns: “Many of the country small planters dress in just such Walnut Linseys as we make except that the warp is coarser being spun by hand.” 

Petticoat

Alden also noted Rhode Island mill owner William Davis's sale of factory-made linseys to a Baltimore merchant in 1838 ranging "in quality from 18 to 24 cents per yard...black and white, red and blue, 'mixed,' and plaid, heavy and even for linseys and well calculated for the Southern trade."

Home woven or factory produced? To confuse us further: An 1888 ad from a Mount Airy, North Carolina mill telling of a complicated system in which the sheep farmer brought in her sheared wool; they supplied the factory-spun cotton warp and delivered cloth from your own sheep.

Years ago Kim Leggett sent me photos of a two-sided,

tied linsey bedcover in her collection.

Collection of Virginia's Historic Crab Orchard Museum

For the exhibit Homefront & Battlefield ten years ago 

curators Madelyn Shaw and Lynne Bassett borrowed this 

linsey nine-patch attributed to two enslaved seamstresses recalled 

as Martha and Sarah of Stony Point, Tennessee. 

Linsey undersleeves under a printed plaid cotton garment?

"The maids here dress in linsey-woolsey gowns and white aprons in the winter—and in summer, blue homespun. These deep blue dresses and white turbans and aprons are picturesque and nice looking." 

Mary Boykin Chesnut describing dress at her husband's family plantation in South Carolina before war's end.

When were the linsey quilts pieced? Merikay believes most were made after the war when times were tough and the durable cloth remained available. Sue Young of Mississippi above used home-woven cloth; many must have resorted to cutting squares and rectangles from unfashionable garments.

Further Reading:

Madelyn Shaw, Slave Cloth and Clothing Slaves: Craftsmanship, Commerce, and Industry, MESDA Journal, 2021–2022, Vol 42–43.
https://www.mesdajournal.org/2012/slave-cloth-clothing-slaves-craftsmanship-commerce-industry/

Posts on linsey:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2018/10/linsey-civil-war-souvenirs.html
https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2015/02/confederate-quilts.html
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2020/07/calimanco-quilts.html