Garden of Eden

Adam & Eve, appliqued by Shauna Christenson, 2001, 84" x 84"

Designed by Barbara Brackman and Karla Menaugh from 19th-century quilts.

Our Sunflower Pattern Co-operative was a group of women with various talents working together to reproduce vintage applique designs. My talent is researching and drawing the patterns. Among Shauna's many talents is applique. Karla's talent with this pattern was editing and publishing.

I'd been collecting photos of quilts in this Garden of Eden design ever since I realized there were two similar quilts at the Smithsonian Institution and the Johnson County (Kansas) Museum.

Garden of Eden Quilt 86" x 75" Estimated date: 1850-1880

Collection of the National Museum of American History.

 Gift of Dorothy Diffey Beldsoe in memory of Laura Doty Diffy.

Maker unknown, purchased in Fort Smith, Arkansas about 1900.

Garden of Eden Quilt

By Sylvia S. Queen (1804-1896), probably in LaPorte County, Indiana. Estimated date 1850-1880.

Collection of the Johnson County Museum

This quilt has been over dyed a purplish gray, accidentally or deliberately.

The similarities in this pair are the human figures telling the tale of Paradise, Eve's encounter with the snake and the banishment from Eden. In both the Victorian-era quilts the figures are clothed, Eve in a hoop-skirted silhouette. Also similar are the large multi-lobed florals and the winding grape vine. The Smithsonian believed that the two quilts must be by the same person---Sylvia Queen---but that is assuming too much, like saying that Mary Evans made all the Baltimore Album quilts.

I drew the pattern for Shauna's quilt by combining images from the quilts above.

Five years later Doyle Auctions sold this quilt for $7,000 in 2006. At points north, east and west are human figures telling the Biblical story. The center with the solar system is quite similar to the Smithsonian's. It looks to date from 1840-1880 based on the fuzzy photos.

Again the grape vine border and flat multi-lobed florals frame the center.

The Pilgrim-Roy Collection once had a fourth quilt in this group with the same solar system center enclosed by a scalloped circle.

Eve handing the apple to Adam is nearly identical to the version above.

I don't have an overall photo. What makes this quilt different from the others is the paisley-shaped Broderie Perse applique shapes. Based on the blues and chintzes in the detail shots I'd say this is the oldest of the four, possibly 1840-1860.

If there are four of these quilts with the hoop-skirted figures and the optional central solar system, there may be more. Right now I would have to conclude it was a pattern passed around hand to hand in the mid-to-late 19th century.

To read more about the Pilgrim Roy Collection click here:

http://www.pilgrimroy.com/

See another Garden of Eden quilt by Josephine Miller Adkins in the collection of the Museum of the Daughters of the American Revolution:

http://www.quiltindex.org/basicdisplay.php?pbd=DARMuseum-a0a0r4-a

A late-19th-century version at Colonial Williamsburg.

http://emuseum.history.org/code/emuseum.asp?action=newpage&style=single&singlepage=6&searchxml=%3CeMuseum%5Fsearch+site%3D%22Colonial+Williamsburg%22+date%3D%222010%2D02%2D22%22%3E%3Ccriteria%3E%3Cparams+searchcode%3D%22%2D1%22+pagesize%3D%226%22+currentpage%3D%221%22+orderfield%3D%22%22+orderdir%3D%22%22+profile%3D%22objects%22%2F%3E%3Cbasic+criteria%3D%22quilt%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fcriteria%3E%3C%2FeMuseum%5Fsearch%3E%0D%0A&style=browse&pagesize=6¤tpage=1&page=search&browsepagesize=6&searchtype=basic&profile=objects&wandering=no&term=quilt&basicterm=quilt&pagetotal=133&pagestart=1&pageend=6

The Cat's Meow has posted a detail of a quilt made from our Adam & Eve quilt

http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/photo/1334380180051689367iLHcZD

You can buy the pattern for Shauna's quilt at Quilters Warehouse

http://www.quilterswarehouse.com/p-6525-adam-eve-by-sunflower-co-op.aspx

Robert E. Lee's Birthday & Mary Custis Lee's Quilts

January 19th is Robert E. Lee's birthday, an official holiday in a few Southern states. I grew up in Cincinnati, across the river from the South. My BFF Linda was a transplanted Kentuckian and I a transplanted New Yorker so our cultures often clashed. She celebrated Lee's Birthday.

Although I am a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, Confederate General Robert E. Lee is one of my heroes, not for his fighting, but for his peacemaking. After reading Jay Winik's April 1865: The Month That Saved America, I realized how lucky we are to have had Lee leading the Southern troops rather than a man like Jo Shelby who refused to surrender. So many places in the world carry civil wars over many generations. We have Robert E. Lee to thank for our post-Civil-War world in which North and South manage to coexist peacefully.

Windham Fabrics printed a Grant and Lee commemorative fabric last year.

General Ulysses Grant and Lee agreed that Confederate soldiers would surrender their arms but keep their horses and mules to take home to rebuild their farms with no more consequences for the Rebellion. Lee spent his few post-War years as President of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia.

The story of Lee's wife Mary Custis Lee (1808-1873) is an American tragedy. She was a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington who grew up on a plantation in Arlington, Virginia, which she inherited right before the war.

Mary Lee, afflicted by a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, was wheel-chair bound by the time War broke out in 1861. Union troops soon occupied Arlington.

Mary and her children sought refuge in Richmond. Union occupiers saw an opportunity to create a powerful symbol and to insult Lee by turning Arlington House's front vista into a cemetery. Arlington remains America's national military cemetery.

Arlington was Mary's family home, not Lee's, and she only saw it once more after she fled in 1861. She spent her last years on the campus of Washington College. After her husband's death in 1870, the school's name was changed to Washington and Lee University. The Virginia Military Institute has in its collection a quilt made by Mary Custis Lee and her daughters to raise money for the campus's Lee Memorial.

Lee's Medallion, Jean Stanclift, quilted by Sharyn Rigg, 2000.

Jean Stanclift stitched a quilt interpreting Mary Lee's quilt for our Sunflower Pattern Co-operative. We designed an embroidered laurel wreath for the center to honor Lee. Mary Lee's quilt was a medallion checkerboard stitched of wool and silk combination fabrics in plaids, stripes and checks, the clothing of the era. We used woven cotton plaids and stripes.

Despite her arthritis, Mary Lee made at least one other quilt. The Carter House in Franklin, Tennessee has a small silk star quilt attributed to her, Varina Davis and others. Another quilt attributed to Mary Lee is in the collection of the Kentucky Historical Society. See that wool Log Cabin by clicking here:
http://kydgi.ky.gov:2005/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/quilts

The catalog says, "There is considerable dispute" about the quilt's origins. It seems unlikely to have been made by Mary Lee who died in 1873 before the fashion for Log Cabin quilts of heavy wools began. And the symbolism of a Log Cabin (associated with Abraham Lincoln) makes one doubt she'd have chosen that pattern.

See the quilts in the collection of Arlington House by clicking here and scrolling down to quilts:
http://www.nps.gov/history/museum/exhibits/arho/imgGal.html
None are attributed in the catalog text to Mary Lee but a few are old enough.