Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE: Whose Orange Peel? Material Culture

Saturday, February 7, 2026

Whose Orange Peel? Material Culture

"LaFayette Orange Peel"

Rhode Island Project & the Quilt Index

Signed Amanda Dodge (Rose)

About 1875, Block Island

This repeat block pattern is one of the earliest of American fashions in quilt design with at least a dozen surviving variations in the fabrics of the early-19th-century from 1800-1830 or so. Although not published with a name until the late-19th-century the design now has many names, several with a historical association to an early-19th-century celebrity the Marquis de Lafayette.

See more quilts here:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2026/02/early-american-patchwork-orange-peel.html

An 1824 set of playing cards featured French aristocrat

Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, as the Ace of Spades

In 1824 Americans became celebrity-crazed when the hero of the

Revolution was invited to tour the U.S. at our expense.

Maine Memory Network

Gilbert du Motier (1757–1834)

By Orramel Hinkley Throop

The name Lafayette Orange Peel was published by Ruby Short McKim in her 1929 book 101 Quilt Patterns where she told us that the pattern name is associated with the Marquis who had come as a young man to the American colonies to fight and fund the American Revolution.

McKim 1929

McKim "proudly [added] the name of 'Lafayette' " to the Ladies' Art Company's older name of Orange Peel to commemorate the return of the Marquis as "the Nation's Guest" where he was feted in cities large and small.

Triumphal Arch in Philadelphia

"The story is....in Philadelphia a fair guest at the banquet took home a most beautiful fruit as her souvenir...To preserve her treasure and the memory of the day a pattern was carefully made from the pared rind...." McKim

New Jersey project & the Quilt Index

Lambertville Historical Society

Over the years the "history" expanded. We never find the name of the Philadelphian but the citrus story has expanded to the idea that Lafayette impressed the guests by deftly peeling an orange with his penknife. From a recent blog post:

"Lafayette chose an orange, which he cut into four segments before he peeled it. One of the female guests later picked up the discarded segments and, in honour of the French hero, used them as the basis for her next quilt pattern."

Is there any truth to this story? I found a recent history of the 1824 return tour, Ryan L. Coles's The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic, published in September.

Orange Added

The only references to the word "orange" in the book mention the arboreal Southern landscape and the county of Orange in Virginia where the population gave him a memorable reception recorded in an 1824 issue of the Washington Gazette.

Stories about the above festivities in Virginia are also the only pre-1900 reference to the linked words Lafayette and orange in Newspapers.com's enormous print file.

Delaware Project, date-inscribed 1840

with five sets of initials

So here I am ranting about a historical attribution of very little consequence.

Hubert VerMehren sold quilt patterns in the 1930s,

adopting McKim's "Historical" name.

It's certainly not the equivalent of the false history told in the "Quilt Code" tales of the Underground Railroad. But as with that problematic story: Bad history tends to drive out good. I bet very few of you are familiar with the material culture of Lafayette's tour over 200 years ago.