"Mrs. P.G. Harrington
Sugar Creek
1856"
The Wisconsin quilt project recorded this quilt with Maryette Eldred Perry's name in the center. In 1856 Maryette was about 40 years old, married since 1836 to Perry Green Harrington (1812-1876) a well-to-do farmer and local politician in the community of Sugar Creek near Delavan in Walworth County.
Although worn and faded, Maryette's quilt is remarkable in many ways. The eagle is nearly identical to eagles in two other Wisconsin quilts from the same time period.
The quilt attributed to Mary Bell Shawvan (1824-1900) has survived in the best condition of the three. Read a post about it here:
https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2019/03/polly-shawvans-eagle-quilt.htmlFamily history tells us Mary Shawvan made this in the early years of the Civil War when she lived in Waukesha County.
A second eagle quilt on a yellow background is in the collection of the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts, donated at the bequest of Nancy Rabe who gave her parents' names as Ivan and Gertrude Fay and thought it might have been made in Diamond Lake in northern Wisconsin. Perhaps it was a family quilt but there is no quiltmaker attribution. And the Fays were probably Nancy's grandparents not her parents.
In 1856 she and Commodore Harrington as he was called (named for Commodore Perry during the war of 1812) had four boys and a girl according to the 1860 census for Walworth County. One child had died before he was five. Hobart the youngest was probably about 4 in 1860.
From the Atlas of Walworth County, 1873
Several components are similar in all three quilts, among them the slashed roses with three leaves.
Mrs. Harrington was affluent; Mrs. Shawvan was not. If there was a commercial aspect to the quilts' story it would seem most likely that Harrington was a purchaser and Shawvan the maker or the pattern seller. But it's all speculation.
Maryette Harrington died a month after Commodore Harrington of typhoid in 1876.
Her FindAGrave file:
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