Pennsylvania State Museum
American patchwork quilt thought to be about 1800, attributed to a
woman in the Robinson/Wells/Drum family.
Examples of surviving 18th-century American quilts give us answers about the earliest American patchwork but they also generate more questions. See a post on a style of patchwork framed medallion dating from about 1780 to 1810 like the quilt above:
Yet, other styles seem to have been stitched. One fashion shows great influence from the Netherlands---Dutch quilts. Today is St. Nicholas's day...Santa Claus to Americans. We can celebrate that Dutch custom by looking at some very old patchwork..
SinterKlaas in Holland
Santa Claus is a Knickerbocker gift
A little Dutch-American history: In 1609 Dutch capitalists from the Dutch East India Company sent English explorer Henry Hudson to find a shorter water route to India where they were buying goods to sell to the rest of the world. Instead, Hudson found the river that bears his name far from what he was looking for--- India's Coromandel Coast . Five years later Netherlandish entrepreneurs capitalized on his error and founded the Dutch West India Company to establish a colony with a port at the Hudson River's mouth on the Atlantic. Their "New Netherlands" extended from Pennsylvania and New York south to what is now Delaware.
National Park Service map of New Netherland altered to
highlight the Hudson River and add the fictional
Diedrich Knickerbocker who came to personify Dutch New York.
New York (Knickerbocker himself) pulls the strings
in a 1901 illustration by Louis Dalrymple.
Dutch settlers did not arrive until 1624, establishing Fort Orange (later Albany) and two smaller settlements on an island in the Delaware River and another in what is now Governors Island near Manhattan.
Thirty years later their trade rival England began fighting for control of the area with skirmishes that lasted a decade until the English took control of a renamed New York.
Did colonists in New Netherlands and their descendants make quilts? If so, what did they look like?
Perhaps like this top dated with initials.
Link to the files: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_556465
The patchwork field is seen in the earliest of quilts. The most common names today for half-square triangle variations are Broken Dishes and Yankee Puzzle (don't tell Diedrich Knickerbocker) because these fanciful names were published in the first half of the 20th century by Ruby McKim and Ruth Finley---a New Yorker. Those books have had staying power in their rather dubious histories.
Quilts pictured above are cotton (plus linen) quilts. In North America we also have surviving quilts of wool and silk or all four natural fibers .
This early silk bedcover is thought to have been made in England. As it is not quilted, just backed, paper templates can be seen, cut from a handwriting copybook, letters, texts and malt makers' legal regulations ---we presume in English and Latin. Curator Jacqueline Beaudoin-Ross noted that the border brocade is typical of English or Dutch silks at the time the quilt is dated, the rival countries that were the powerhouse international textile traders at the time.
With better access to genealogical records we now know more about the maker and the Tuels family. Lilian H. Zirpolo found records of the probable quiltmaker---Anna's mother Experience Taylor Tuels (her dates according to FamilySearch: 1722-1789) who lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Both she and her husband Barnard Tuels were born in Massachusetts. (Tuels in its variations is a Welsh name.) Anna (1759-1848) was one of seven children, in her twenties when the quilt was made. Experience died a few years later in her sixties.
Family Search records of Martha Agry Vaughan
Silk quilt attributed to Catherine Penniman Bradford (1777 or 1778- 1827) of Massachusetts about 1825, pictured in the Wisconsin project's book Wisconsin Quilts: History In The Stitches by Ellen Kort. 1825 is a cut-off date for "Early" quilts but this silk spectacular attributed to a century after the McCord's 1726 piece in pieced and embroidered in similar style. 
The capital on "Manhatans" was called New Amsterdam
20th-century version of Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant's 1664 surrender
And that's about all we have learned about Knickerbocker history, a lack
Washington Irving regretted in 1809 when he invented Diedrich Knickerbocker.
Collection Los Angeles County Museum of Art
71" x 62"
Perhaps like this top dated with initials.
"1807 M.B."
Although it has the same high-contrast color scheme as the patchwork medallion at the head of this post --- an emphasis on dark brown and white typical in the cotton prints of the 1780-1820 period---this top contains a wider variety of prints compared to the medallion quilts shown in my November post. The major difference is in the overall design, which we could call a medallion format with a central focus floating in a field of patchwork triangles. No concentric borders of plain or patchwork.Unfortunately LACMA knows nothing about it. Who was MB and where was it made?
Perhaps in the Netherlands...
...where this piece is in the collection of the Dutch Open Air Museum in Arnham
(Nederlands OpenLucht Museum)
Stylistically similar top from the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg NL
Another from the Groninger Museum in Groningen NL
Surprising similarities: Tops with a star center floating in a field of triangles in high contrast.
What do those visual similarities tell us?
Could the LACMA quilt top have been made in America?
There are American-attributed bedcovers in the Dutch style format.
Winterthur Museum Collection
Pieced quilt with commemorative handkerchief in center,
American, 1790-1810. Cotton. 94 x 74"
The triangles are rather large.
National Museum of American History Collection
No history with this quilt but fabrics indicate a date of "1790-1800" with the
border's plate-printed toile "similar to English plate prints of 1770-1795."
D.A.R. Museum Collection
Gift of New Yorker Susan Greene
Adaptation: Stars rather than being a central focus are in the corners.
High contrast brown and white prints with a later stripe border.
Copied this one from the files of the Ohio Historical Society
years ago, attributed to Sally Howard Bailey but I cannot find
the file today. Rather than patchwork, Sally incorporated recycled embroidery
into her center and her triangles.
The circular or star center in a field of patchwork is seen in both English, Dutch and American quilts.
Collection of the National Museum of American History
Unknown maker, late 18th -19th century
Gift of Mrs. Robert Stephens
Stella Rubin's Inventory
Doll quilt signed
"Ann Crisford
Aged 8 Years
1826"
The patchwork field is seen in the earliest of quilts. The most common names today for half-square triangle variations are Broken Dishes and Yankee Puzzle (don't tell Diedrich Knickerbocker) because these fanciful names were published in the first half of the 20th century by Ruby McKim and Ruth Finley---a New Yorker. Those books have had staying power in their rather dubious histories.
Quilts pictured above are cotton (plus linen) quilts. In North America we also have surviving quilts of wool and silk or all four natural fibers .
McCord Museum, McGill University, Montreal. 81 ½ x 77 ½"
Silk quilt inscribed IN 1726
Wadsworth Atheneum Collection
Circular center in a field of patchwork triangles inscribed
"Anna Tuels her bed quilt given to her by her mother in the year Au 23. I785"
Wool, silk, and printed cottons, wool backing and batting.
Winterthur Museum
Quilt attributed to Martha Agry Vaughn [Vaughan] (1786-1856),
ca. 1805. Silk with cotton and linen, backing wool
Caption from Robert Shaw's American Quilts
Laurie LaBarr in Maine Quilts dates it to 1795-1815 and notes it's pieced over newspaper templates, probably English-language papers. Martha's father was Thomas Agry II (1756-1821.) Mother Hannah Nye Agry died at 29 in 1794 when Martha was about 8. The family lived in Maine when it was Massachusetts---in Hallowell near Agry's Point in the Kennebec Valley where they built ships and smaller boats. No records found yet indicate that either of the two men named Thomas Agry was a ship's captain.
Catherine's genealogy from FamilySearch
More Questions!!!
Two Dutch-style quilts found in the U.S., both now at the International Quilt Museum
One possible idea: If we are looking at historic styles for a 250th anniversary quilt we should
have a pattern for a Dutch-inspired Knickerbocker Quilt. But that's a lot of triangles.
---Further Reading
Lilian H. Zirpolo, "The Anna Tuels Quilt in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT: Stylistic, Technical, and Historical Considerations"
An Moonan, A History of Dutch Quilts
Lilian H. Zirpolo, "The Anna Tuels Quilt in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT: Stylistic, Technical, and Historical Considerations"
An Moonan, A History of Dutch Quilts
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