Kentucky's Earliest Quilts #2: Missing Quilts

 

Kentucky Historical Society

Quilt attributed to Catherine Gaither (1785-?) of Nelson County, Kentucky

Kentucky museums own a few cut-out-chintz quilts like this one. The style tends to be attributed to the years 1810 to 1850 after which other styles of fabric and applique took over.

Linda LaPinta's caption relects the museum's information about this

Broderie Perse or Cut-Out-Chintz quilt, said to have been sewn

about 1820, perhaps with assistance from Gaither family slaves. Catherine

is described as a daughter of Greenbury Gaither.

The Prussian blue cotton prints in the quilt indicate this date is

20 years too early. The bright blue scrolls and border were

quite popular in the United States after 1840 or so, particularly as stripes. 

Prussian blue yields a distinctive color and is prone to migrating as a brown stain, thus

is a good dating clue to "after 1840" in the U.S.

The genealogical information on Catherine Gaither (there are several of them) is confusing and needs to be pursued through our contemporary digital records. There is a Catharine Close Gaither (?-1870), married to Greenberry Gaither, buried in Baltimore (!)

1870 Baltimore obituary

See a recent post about another cut-out-chintz quilt attributed to a Kentuckian here:

civil war susan short (not yet posted)

Cut-out chintz style was replaced after 1840 by the technique of constructing florals from small-scale or solid bright cottons---conventional applique. Kentucky museums have quite a few of these mid-century fashionable pieces, standard style based on Germanic folk traditions featuring simplified flowers arranged in symmetrical repeats. These appliqued beauties in 1840-1865 style are frequently seen in Kentucky but certainly no evidence of early Kentucky quilts.

 D.A.R. Museum Collection

Red & green applique quilt attributed to Kentucky-born

 Lucy Kemper West (1792-1876.) Probable date: About 1850 

when red & green was high style.

Lucy, born there the year Kentucky became the 15th state, was one of 13 children of Virginians Judith Burdett & John Kemper. She lived in Garrard County where some spectacular mid-19th-century quilts were made. 

See a post here: https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2024/03/2024-applique-kentucky-classic-block-of.html

And here is my last post on the lack of surviving early Kentucky quilts:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2024/10/kentuckys-earliest-quilts.html

Aside from surviving quilts we can look for evidence of 18th-century bedding in memoirs, diaries and letters of the time and in the contemporary newspapers. Unfortunately---all  also in short supply in Kentucky’s first decades 1780-1820. 

Another option is probate records, wills and inventories of goods distributed after death. In 1933 June Estelle Stewart King published an investigation of early Kentucky wills and inventories, finding only four vaguely described bedquilts. For example: Peter Cartwright of Caldwell County died in 1809 leaving 2 feather beds (feather stuffed comforters), 5 bed quilts plus blankets and sheets, a bed tick and two beds. Five quilts for $16 meant each was worth more than a 1-year-old steer.

Alden O Brien, curator at the DAR Museum, helped me out by doing some searching in Kentucky probate records on Ancestry.com. Mercer County is an early county with records on line. She looked at the 1790s and found very few bed linens listed among the mentions of clothes, tools and livestock. She reports: "Bed and furniture," with "sometimes bedstead separately because, of course, bed means the mattress; furniture may mean the pillows and...what else? Never any sheets, once in a few instances a coverlid or other thing. Just ONE inclusion of bedquilts." The Mercer County records duplicate King's findings.

One explanation for the lack of quilts is that objects require a value to be counted and distributed to heirs. It is possible that by the time early Kentuckians died their family bedding, whether made in Kentucky or brought from an older state, was so worn that it had no value.

Gloria Seaman Allen examined Maryland probate records from 1710 to 1820 for her master’s thesis. She found far more quilts in that well-established colony and state than in Kentucky at the same time.  Inventories, wills and administrative accounts mentioned 311 quilts. (See her paper for the American Quilt Study Group in the 1984 Uncoverings Volume 5 here:

ttps://digitalcommons.unl.edu/aqsg-uncoverings/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFz7hRleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHX5K0lcRl5t_NtVkrD1A5VZnfPqzUF8-5PzAkDPogp1ODKAJPoPq5Tx5_Q_aem_25nqg1soVTddcUR-50p3JA   )

Noting that it was people of wealth who had goods to be probated, Allen described bedding types as fashions changed. In colonial times before 1780 bedrugs (shaggy outer bedcovers) were the dominant bedding. 

Elaborate bedrug from Connecticut dated 1781

Lynne Zacek Bassett is our expert on Connecticut bedrugs; this one

was displayed in her exhibit at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme

several months ago. They look just like the "hooked rugs" my friends

are making today---just larger, a lot larger.

UPDATE: Lynne tells me they are NOT hooked; they are embroidered.

In the 1760s quilts appear in 28% of inventories. This finding tallied with her count of surviving pre-1780 quilted bedcovers in museum collections. 

MESDA owns a rare survivor, attributed to Marylander Elizabeth

Webster Downing, 1796.

See more: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3627362760614293&id=951087428241853&set=a.2103489566334961

“Almost no Maryland quilts survive from the period 1780,” Allen wrote. Bedding styles changed after 1800; quilts and coverlets became popular with the upper classes who left records. Between 1800-1820 quilts were 2/3 of the described bedcovers. Quilt ownership was a “subject of wealth,” e.g. slaveowners owned more quilts than non-slave holders. 

What did quilts look like in 1800?

An Orpah Harris (1774-?) lived in Providence, Rhode Island

 where this quilted bedcover might have been pieced

of strips of monochrome toile fabric, typical style at the time.

Allen’s Maryland findings help explain the lack of early Kentucky quilts. Before Kentucky’s statehood in 1780 quilted bedcovers were not the coastal colonists’ dominant bedding. Numbers of quilts increased after independence as the property of the wealthy. Wealthy people were not the type to emigrate across the Alleghenys to the rough frontier. New Kentuckians, the middle and lower classes, had no quilts to bring with them.

Silk quilt top pieced over Kentucky papers dating

 from 1857-1860; online auction

And apparently, Kentuckians did not become enthusiastic quiltmakers until after the 1840s when making patchwork bedding became a fashion.

Kentucky's Earliest Quilts

 

In 2011 I wrote an essay for the Quilt Index on our earliest quilts. A dozen years or so has passed since we identified these two quilts as early Kentucky quilts, made before 1830 or so. I thought I'd revisit that essay considering Kentucky's earliest quilts. You can read the essay at this link:

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=essays&kid=1-112-12

Until the American Revolution commenced in 1776, the area that became Kentucky was part of the great colony of Virginia, stretching from the Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay west across the Appalachian Mountain range up to the Great Lakes. Virginia claimed what would become the states of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana as well as all of Kentucky.

During the Revolution Virginia's colonial government, attempting to administer a large, inaccessible area populated by dozens of native tribes, began to deal with Virginians hoping to move west by consolidating boundaries on the western side of the Appalachians into a single county named Kentucke with an e.

Kentucke County before the Revolution

Kentucke was used by the Indigenous tribes as hunting land and it's that abundance of game that first attracted Virginians settled east of the mountains.

The green line is a high point in the Appalachian range,

 a barrier to settlement. The blue line is the Ohio River.

One could float the Ohio or cross the Appalachians to get to Kentucky.

By the turn of the century the natives were gone, replaced in the familiar, shameful story by settlers of European and African heritage who created dynasties at one social level and at another families working the hardscrabble soil to depletion. 

Early immigrants became "First Families," as in this 1920 book.

Population figures show the 1790 census counted 74,000 new immigrants in the area; ten years later there were 221,000 living in the state. Population figures also tell us that the sources of immigration changed. By statehood most Kentuckians were from neighboring states other than Virginia---North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Living across the Ohio in Cincinnati I grew up with Kentucky quilts and wondered what those early European immigrants brought in the way of quilts. The most recent book of three on Kentucky quilts (see list at page bottom) is Linda LaPinta's Kentucky Quilts and Quiltmakers: Three Centuries of Creativity, Community, and Commerce. She writes that the state's “earliest quilts arrived with their makers who migrated over the Wilderness Road.”

Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap

By George Caleb Bingham, born in 1811

Collection of Mildred Lane Kemper Museum at Washington University

Bingham's painting from about 1850 has created an indelible image of the Cumberland Gap, the natural Wilderness Road through the Appalachians to Kentucky. How accurate? Do notice the narrow gap between rocks and the limited transportation---human foot and equines---horses and probably mules.

Knowing what we do (or think we do) about bedcoverings and migration LaPinta's statement seems logical. Early settlers brought their Virginia culture with them but did they bring their quilted or patchwork bedding? 

Travel on the Ohio about 1780 meant flat boats powered by humans, not 

the comfortable steamships, the floating hotels of the mid 19th-century.

Early quilts (1775-1830) supposedly brought through the Cumberland Gap or on the Ohio River are in short supply. Surveys of Kentucky’s major museums and national collections that might be repositories reveal no 18th-century examples attributed to Kentucky residents. Identifying quilts before that date is relatively easy because new technologies, trade and taste developed in style, techniques and fabric in the 1830s.

Sarah Runyan Anderson (1771 - 1828) converted drapes into

a quilted bedcovering, now in the collection of the Kentucky Historical Society.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/19817696/sarah_anderson

The Kentucky quilt books show one example that might have been made prior to 1830. Sarah Runyan Anderson’s wholecloth bedcover was assembled from a European monochrome toile first printed with copper plates in 1785 (and reprinted several times.)  Her toile quilt was accompanied by a family history with historical support. New Jersey-born Sarah moved to Kentucky where she attended an estate sale and bought the old window curtains recycled into this quilted piece. As she died in 1828 this may be the earliest surviving Kentucky-made quilt.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Kentucky_Quilts_and_Quiltmakers/L3ufEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=sarah+runyan+anderson+kentucky+historical&pg=PA15&printsec=frontcover

Kentucky museums own several examples of white work bedcovers, which are wholecloth monochrome quilts, quilted, stuffed and/or embroidered on high-quality white cotton (or a cotton/flax mix.) Some may date to the early-19th century when American mills developed the technology to produce such luxury fabric. 

Whitework exhibit at Western Kentucky University

The bedcovers have to be examined in the cloth to appreciate

the fine needlework. The style was popular in the first decades

of the 19th century when classical white imagery was a fashionable

link to Greek ideals.

The Kentucky Museum at Western Kentucky University owns a whitework quilt attributed to Temperance Wren Sharp (1783/1788-1858) and an appliqued, stuffed quilt they attribute to her daughter, another Temperance Sharp (1829-1877.)

https://books.google.com/books?id=L3ufEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&dq=quilt+catherine+gaither&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjisb_io_iIAxWmpIkEHfdND_0Q6AF6BAgOEAI#v=onepage&q=quilt%20catherine%20gaither&f=false

This all-white stuffed and quilted piece is attributed to the elder

of the Temperance Sharps made, it was said, before her wedding in 1816. 

The technique uses a filler of plain quilting---diagonal lines here to make the

stuffed work (grapes) and corded lines (vines) pop out.

Western Kentucky University

The red & green applique quilt on the right is attributed to the younger Temperance. Similarities in the stuffed work designs are striking with leafy vines growing out of simple rosettes. In the catalog headings the whitework quilt at left is dated as 1806; the applique as 1807 (both then by the elder Temperance?) We know so much more about dating quilts now we can view the red and green quilt's alleged date as far too early. It must be after 1840 or so, style disputing the early date of 1806 for the similar quilt on the left.

See a link with a more accurate date for the second quilt in the actual caption here:

https://westernkentuckyuniversity.pastperfectonline.com/Webobject/5382B3C5-BB44-4332-B2DC-629591526659

1850 Census Garrard County, Kentucky

Mother and daughter living with son Will, a merchant.

The elder Sharp may have been among the ambitious Kentucky seamstresses who stitched these but one also must take into account that such luxury bedcovers were consumer goods, a French export. Any whitework masterpiece we might view as a pleasant picture of early rural elegance could actually reflect a cottage industry in France.

Another possible source for early Kentucky quilts is national museums. Neither the Smithsonian nor the International Quilt Museum show Kentucky-made quilts attributed to the pre-1840 changes in techniques and fabrics. The D.A.R. Museum owns two older quilts that I cited in my essay as early quilts/ Kentucky made. Their genealogical work and mine, however, put those Kentucky origins in doubt.

Returning to the Kentucky-made quilts in my Quilt Index essay. This quilt, now in the DAR Museum, is attributed to Martha Harness Darst, It measures almost 120" wide.

Martha Harness Darst (1788-1854)

Martha married Isaac Darst (1790-1844) in 1817 when the quilt may have indeed been stitched. But there is so far no evidence Martha or any of her immediate family lived in Kentucky. (I have no idea where I found that geographical source.) She's buried in Circleville, Pickaway County, Ohio, about 30 miles south of Columbus. Her birthplace is thought to have Moorefield, Virginia (now West Virginia.)

The D.A.R. has two stuffed-work quilts) attributed to the Darst family

Lovely early quilts, but I am afraid they have nothing to do with Kentucky.

Next Posts: More on early Kentucky quilts. Why don't we see them?

Three books on Kentucky quilts:

Mary Washington Clarke, Kentucky Quilts and Their Makers. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1976.

Jonathan Holstein, John Finley & the Kentucky Quilt Project, Kentucky Quilts 1800-1900. Kentucky Quilt Project, 1982.

Linda Elisabeth LaPinta, Kentucky Quilts and Quiltmakers: Three Centuries of Creativity, Community, and Commerce. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2023. 

Herbarium Finishes

 

Herbarium

Deanna Street's red and green traditional applique top

Deanna's finished our applique block of the month for 2023

from the free patterns over at my CivilWarQuilts blog.

See a post on the patterns and the original inspiration here:

Civil War Quilts: Herbarium Pattern Posts: 2023 Applique BOM

Susie Mullins

Both Susie and Deanna used traditional red and greens on a light background

but followed the more contemporary suggestion of piecing the

backgrounds into a four-patch.

Elsie Ridgley's clear bright range of color reflects

a mid-20th century take on applique.

Helen Vanderloop

Helen's lavender and grey---21st century

Kathy Suprenant

Kathy used a busy contemporary print

for otherwise traditional design.

Rebecca Schenkenberger

Rebecca's palette: clear, bright shades around the color wheel.

She added birds---always a good idea.

And here's our Facebook group---ignore the t-shirt ads, some relentless spammer has intruded.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1956642391352208

Do post your finishes and progress....

Alamance Applique: A Regional Favorite

Southern quilt dealer Illiana Villazon posted pictures of a quilt top in
an unusual pattern on our 6KnowItAlls:ShowUsYourQuilts Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/6knowitalls

Very much like one recorded decades ago by the North Carolina project.

It's attributed to Nancy Stafford Spoon Shoffner (1834-1906) ---also

spelled Schoffner---of southern Alamance County. 

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=21-17-694

See more in the book North Carolina Quilts pages 3 & 25.

This is applique pattern Number 31.99 in my Encyclopedia of Applique.

From an Alamance County auction

When the North Carolina Quilt Project published their book North Carolina Quilts in 1988 they'd documented four quilts in the design, all from adjacent Alamance and Guilford Counties. Since then more examples have been found.

Michelle Owens owns one.

Michelle's looks post-1930 by the green shade.

Kathlyn Sullivan discussed the "Alamance Applique" pattern in Mary Kerr's book Southern Quilts.

Southern Quilts back cover

 Kathy noted most makers had ties to the Brick German Reformed Church

 in the Guilford/Alamance county area.

Most examples are 6 blocks with characteristic strong Southern sashings.

Mary Ellen May Neese (1900-1986), Guilford County

See Diana Bell-Kite's Quilt Speak catalog from the NC Museum of History.

Unknown maker---4 Blocks

Lynn Gorges Collection

Neva showed this one.

Virginian Neva Hart is a fan of the pattern and for

a year or so managed a Facebook page discussing the Alamance

Applique or Alamance Rose as they have been calling it

in North Carolina.

 https://m.facebook.com/groups/713565760679390/
Pictures still up there.

The majority of the quilts come from Alamance County and adjacent Guilford 

as shown in Neva's map here.

Glenda Shepherd Hughes showed this one on Neva's page made by her grandmother Helen Elizabeth Shepherd Hughes of Guilford County in the early 20th century.

An exception: The South Carolina project recorded this album sampler made for J. Adam Rickard in Pomaria, Newberry County, South Carolina. The block below his initials looks like an Alamance Rose far from home. 

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=53-155-2247

The Alamance Piecemakers are stitching a challenge based on the pattern. In December the Artsy Group is showing their 18" interpretations.     https://alamancepiecemakers.org/2024-artsy-challenge/

I'd hoped to give you a pattern for the Alamance Rose but it's not finished after spending days on it. I do not recall an applique with so many different pieces.

 My experience indicates stitchers did not just copy a quilt they liked at the fair. If I am having so much trouble drawing a pattern in Photoshop my guess is there was a paper pattern or pattern block passed around or sold in the area.

When I get this pattern done I'll add it.

UPDATE

Three sheet pattern finished. You will probably want to enlarge the shapes. 18" block fits in your printer but is probably too small.

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