Domestic Fabrics

 

Here's an early Virginia quilt you may have seen displayed at the Rocky Mountain

Quilt Museum a few years ago. It's signed in cross-stitch: "Sally Lee Camden her Bedquilt"

 

 

Rusty who owns the quilt has found a Sally Lee Camden born in 1777 (or possibly 1785) in Amherst County, Virginia. Her parents were William and Sybell Dent Camden. She married Peter Dent in 1807 and changed her name to Sally Dent, so we can guess that the quilt was made before 1807. Sally died about 1850 in Bedford County, Virginia.

 

The Camden quilt seems to be a good example of a quilt made from domestically produced cotton prints. The simple calicoes  in shades of brown, brick red, pink and indigo blues could very well be the product of American mills.

 

 

The quilt, dated 1812, is made of similar prints

There's really no way to tell if these basic calicoes are domestic or imported but they illustrate well the kind of prints being manufactured in the United States before 1820.

Even with all the smuggling going on in coastal towns like Newburyport, Massachusetts, imported yardgoods were in short supply during the War of 1812. Searches for fabrics in the Early American Newspapers database come up with few hits for words like "calico" or "ginghams" in 1813 and 1814.

Newburyport Herald Fall 1813
 

Mary Jenkins had a little India Calico and some Factory Ginghams (which might have meant they were domestically produced.)  Sarah Emery remembered Mary Jenkins's store at another location,
"Mary Jenkins's millinery establishment was in her house on Water, corner of Market street."

Could this be the storekeeper's grave?

Mary born about 1746, died in 1837

Read more about smuggling in Newburyport at this post:

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2012/02/6-sarah-smith-emery-smuggling-english.html

Women like Lucy Bakewell Audubon, living in the far west ---Ohio and Kentucky---might have envied women in Newark, New Jersey who could shop at Moses Hedden's.

Newark Centinel of Freedom

In spring 1814, he advertised a "fresh supply of scarce and fashionable Indian and European GOODS," but he was still eager to buy or barter home woven fabrics, like these wool/cotton or wool/linen stripes below.

Linsey quilt, probably pieced

 mid-19th-century or later, but how old is the cloth?

 

Baltimore Patriot, Summer, 1813

Small "manufactories" like that of Dupont and Company in Wilmington, Delaware, shipped "superfine cloth" to stores in Baltimore. Superfine often meant wool broadcloth but they could also be weaving or printing cottons.

DuPont also made Superfine Gunpowder.

Several manufactories advertised calico printing---meaning woodblock printing on cotton or linen or combination fabrics.

New York National Advocate, 1813

One could go to Thomas Stephens & Company in lower Manhattan and leave an order for cotton yardage or a printed shawl, which would be printed to your specifications by W. Ovington.

New York Merchant Advertiser, 1813

Competitor Anthony Jones had printed vests, shawls and handkerchiefs on hand to sell. Apparently, he had more printing business than he could handle was looking for apprentices (country boys preferred.)

For more pictures of the Camden quilt see this post:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2011/05/early-virginia-quilt.html

Early Applique Pattern: Princess Feathers

Appliqued medallion inscribed in cross stitch "Mary Somerville May 26, 1818". Mary also recorded her age: 17 years old. Collection of the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Gift of Dorothy Jewell Sanders.

Early quilts in conventional applique often combined designs cut by the maker with florals and other images cut from chintz as in Mary Somerville's quilt. Her central design is what we would call a Princess Feather (or Prince's Feather---we have no idea what Mary called it)

The design is actually cut from a chintz but Mary ignored the print in cutting the whirling pinwheel and simple flowers.

In the borders she focused on the florals from the chintz, doing what we call Broderie Perse until she ran out of one design and then took up another. The final border is conventional applique, again a feathery frond. Mary's foresight in dating her quilt is evidence this rather complicated pattern was in use in the teens.

A fact that helps us date other early examples of the pattern as in this picture from the Pioneer Museum in Troy, Alabama. We don't see any furnishing scale chintz in this quilt. It seems to be smaller scale prints in indigo and madder.

Jerry Peak, the Museum's Director described this quilt in an interview.

“The oldest quilt that we have in the exhibit is a ‘feather’ quilt that belongs to the museum and dates back to 1775. It belonged to the Passmore family of the Monticello community and was made by Mrs. Sam Passmore’s grandmother in South Carolina and brought to Pike County around 1820."

Dating a quilt from a tiny photo is folly---but the family story could be accurate. There is no fabric evident later than 1800. The fan quilting looks very "Southern, late 19th-early 20th century," but it could have been quilted later.

Here's another indigo version by Elizabeth Alexander, now in the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, estimated date ca. 1830.

See more of their quilt collection here

http://americanartmn.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/bonus-exploring-19th-century-quilts/

Another blue feather in a field of stars, this one from the Kentucky Quilt Project. See the Quilt Index file here:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1A-39-276

Here's an indigo feather thought to be made between 1820 and 1840 by Mary Hicks Stovall, born in Virginia in 1751, died south of Jackson, Mississippi in 1845. It's on display at the  Old Mississippi State Capitol and Museum behind the silver.  It has the same fan quilting as the Alabama quilt---it's probably after 1830 and not really an early quilt. After 1840 we find hundreds of similar quilts.
See the pictures here:
http://travelphotobase.com/v/USMS/MSJE031.HTM

A medallion thought to be about 1820 from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. The fabrics look to be a madder orange with a chintz border.

http://mesda.org/collections/mesda_textiles_sprite.html

A similar quilt that Woman's Day showed fifty years ago  

at the Washington family house Kenmore.

They also showed this one that became known as Washington's Plume from the collection of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.

The design sources aren't hard to find. Feathers are so abundant in fancy quilting.

Here's a wholecloth quilt from the collection of the Museum of American Folk Art dated 1796.

http://www.folkartmuseum.org/

And an embroidered bedcover from my files---the source or date quite mysterious to me, but you get my point.
For more about Princess Feathers see Karen Alexander's post here.
http://karenquilt.blogspot.com/2012/08/princessprincess-feather-hats-or-trees.html

13 Lucy Bakewell Audubon: Englishwoman on the Frontier

In 1812 on the far western edge of the United States 25-year-old Lucy Bakewell Audubon was wife to a storekeeper in Henderson, Kentucky, a town overlooking the Ohio River. Catering to a population of about 150 people, the store began the War in precarious financial condition. Lucy's husband remembered the country was "so very new, and so thinly populated that the commonest goods only were called for. I may say our guns and fishing-lines were the principal means of our support, as regards food." The couple were happy with each other, their two young children and their neighbors, "but our sales small....[I] only now and then thought of making any money."

The green boundary line

is the western border of the United States during the War of 1812,

Henderson in red.

Surprisingly, for Lucy's husband never gave much thought to making money, the business prospered during the War. The family purchased a log home and began speculating in real estate, planning a mill and a branch of the store across the river in the Illinois Territory.

A new store in Georgetown, Kentucky in late 1813

 offered dry goods and military outfits. 

Good whiskey or home woven linsey would be bartered the same as cash.

Lucy Bakewell Audubon (1787 - 1874)

in the 1840s, soon after the invention of photography

In her log house Lucy created civilization on the frontier, presiding over a home with an extensive library, elegant furniture and enslaved servants who kept the house and worked the gardens, which had a small zoo of birds and animals John brought home from frequent hunting trips.

Mill Grove, the Audubon family's Pennsylvania estate,

painted here in 1820, is now an Audubon museum.

 

Lucy was British gentry, born into a wealthy landowning family. Her father inherited an estate in Derbyshire but sold everything and took his family to America in 1801 where he eventually purchased a Pennsylvania mansion. Neighbor John James Audubon, born in the French Colony of Sainte Domingue (now Haiti), refused to call on the British immigrants. "English was English with me... I wished to know none of the race." But one morning he ventured into the parlor "where only one young lady was snugly seated at her work by the fire..."

Last year this cotton dress attributed

 to Lucy Audubon was up for auction, deaccessioned by the

Anna Safley Houston Museum of Decorative Arts,

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Despite French/Engish antipathy the young couple married in 1808. They set off across Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh and the headwaters of the Ohio River, floating down the river to Henderson, an up and coming settlement.

John James Audubon (1785-1851)

The War's end in 1815 brought more success to the Audubons, but the good years were short. In the national depression of 1819 the mill failed and the Audubons lost everything, including two young daughters. John James was imprisoned for debt.

The Audubon's mill building stood in Henderson

until it burned in 1915

Audubon realized that art rather than commerce was his destiny. He earned some money with portraits but nature was his love. Until his bird paintings began to sell in the 1830s Lucy supported the family. Like many other immigrants, her European education and elegance qualified her to run a school and teach as a governess, which she did throughout the South.

Audubon's Birds of America was published

in several volumes in the late 1820s.

In 1840, prosperous once again, John James built a house for Lucy along the Hudson River.

Minniesland in 1851

Minniesland (Lucy's family nickname was Minnie) stood in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood until the early 20th century.

Minniesland in 1917, a Victorian oasis at 155th Street.

Lucy and her granddaughters about 1870

Read a book about Lucy Audubon:

Lucy Audubon: A Biography by Carolyn E. DeLatte, new edition 2012.

http://lsupress.org/books/detail/lucy-audubon/

In September we will consider early appliqued quilts

like this one dated 1812.

In these quilts the designs are generally cut from calicoes rather than chintz. Here the

 fabric may be domestic rather than imported.

This well-worn example, signed MMT (or WWT) was sold in an online auction a few years ago.

The seller documented it nicely.

A New England Applique? Fanny Lloyd Garrison

Here's a quilt from a historic home in New England, attributed to the year 1815, a date that seems quite likely given the fabrics and the style. The quilt or unquilted top looks worn and the picture from the files of Historic New England is fuzzy but we can tell a lot about the style. It's the combination contrasting cut-out chintz and conventional applique that is so typical of early 19th century quilts. It's a design full of contrasts--- the painterly chintz flowers in the vase contrasting with the folky simplicity of the striped calico vase; the pink birds cut from a toile looking down on the appliqued blackbirds perched on the inner border.

It's a  favorite of mine. I love the flock of birds of a different feather. I keep coming back to it because it's certainly an interesting quilt for New England in 1815 and perhaps the only cut-out chintz or Broderie Perse quilt in their picture files.

You can see the file in the Historic New England database here:
http://www.historicnewengland.org/collections-archives-exhibitions/collections-access/collection-object/capobject?gusn=GUSN-45010&searchterm=quilt

I'd like to know more about it. The catalog entry tell us it's cotton and linen and the copperplate print is red and white. It's 49-1/2" wide. It was donated to the house (which house they aren't saying) in 1950 by the accession number (1950.45). The quilt's date (which doesn't seem to be inscribed) is 1815 and the maker is "Garrison, Fanny Maria Lloyd, d. 1923."

Wait a minute--- if Fanny Garrison died in 1923 and made this quilt she'd have been way over 100. And wait another minute. Fanny Maria Lloyd Garrison---could she be related to William Lloyd Garrison---that pillar of abolitionist New England?

William Lloyd Garrison, 1833

By Nathaniel Jocelyn

National Portrait Gallery

 

A little web searching found that William Lloyd Garrison's mother was indeed Frances Maria Lloyd Garrison. Because she gave birth to a famous son---he was possibly the most vilified journalist in mid-19th-century America and a hero to many others---we can find out a lot about Fanny Garrison.

William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper The Liberator

was the voice of the abolitionist movement.

Her grandchildren (she never knew them) wrote a biography of William Lloyd and included information about Fanny with some of her letters. Those letters survive in several archives.

First of all she died in 1823---which makes a lot more sense than 1923.

Frances Maria Lloyd was born in the 1776 in Deer Island, New Brunswick (then Nova Scotia) into a seafaring family. Her father was an Irish immigrant. She married sailor Abijah Garrison on December 12 (family lore recalled the anniversary if not the year) about 1798.

The purported birthplace of Fanny's younger son

in Newburyport.

In 1805 Abijah, Fanny and children moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Abijah hoped they'd be "less expos'd to the Ravages of war and stagnation of business," during the Napoleonic wars that so affected shipping. William Lloyd Garrison was born in December of that year, followed three years later by a sister Elizabeth. Abijah Garrison moved back to New Brunswick soon after but Fanny stayed in Newburyport. A single mother, 32 with two boys and a baby girl, she took up monthly nursing, caring for mothers and infants at birth and afterwards. This assistance at a "lying-in" required she live with her clients for a month or so and her own children were not welcome. Each Garrison went his or her way with another family.

During the War of 1812 she moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, home to tanning and shoe industries, where she became close to the family of Paul Newhall. Mary Mudge Newhall gave birth to nine children, so one can imagine that Fanny was in demand there. When the Newhalls moved to Baltimore in 1815 the pregnant Mary invited Fanny and her children along. The new shoe factory failed. The Newhalls did not stay long in Baltimore and neither did Fanny's son William Lloyd who was lonesome for Newburyport. At ten years old he returned alone and soon became a newspaperman's apprentice.

Baltimore

By Sanford Robinson Gifford

Fanny continued as a lying-in nurse in Baltimore---probably serving rather wealthy clients, among them Elizabeth Pickering Dorsey, who lived in Elk Ridge, a few miles from Baltimore. Elizabeth's father was Timothy Pickering, an important politician in the young United States, and a particular friend to Martha Custis Peter, whose quilt you'll see at the top of this post:

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2012/08/washington-society-first-first-family.html

Rebecca White Pickering of Salem, Massachusetts

 by Gilbert Stuart,

 painted about the time her

daughter Elizabeth Dorsey died.

Elizabeth died in August, 1819  after an "illness of three weeks, commencing with bilious fever," a description that could include any kind of infection. Nursing was a dangerous profession and Fanny worried to her son about epidemics in the Southern climate. By the time Elizabeth died in 1819, Fanny herself was not well. Timothy Pickering asked Fanny's help caring for Elizabeth's 9-month-old baby. He complimented her nursing skills, writing that it was a "great satisfaction to know that, in all times of need, [my daughter] had so tender a nurse."

But Fanny was too sick to work. She lived in Baltimore as an invalid for several years, "on the charity of friends," she told William, with "all the sensations of mortified pride." She died in September, 1823, in her mid-forties, probably of tuberculosis. William, who spent little time with her, remembered her as a pious, pretty and brave woman.

Back to the quilt in the New England museum: I bet it's really not a New England quilt---Fanny lived in Baltimore from 1815 to 1823 and it seems very likely it was made in Maryland. It has a lot more in common with these Maryland quilts made about the same time:

This medallion by Mary Eby dated 1803 is the earliest quilt documented by the Maryland project. See it in their book A Maryland Album by Gloria Seaman Allen and Nancy Gibson Tuckhorn.

Baltimore quilt dated 1807 from Dr. Dunton's book.

See one in the collection of the D.A.R. Museum here:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=46-7A-42

Another from Dr. Dunton

See another post about Baltimore quilts
http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2012/06/cut-out-chintz-swags-in-rococo-style.html

 

Many of Fanny Garrison's letters are in at Wichita State University. See a short biography here:

http://specialcollections.wichita.edu/collections/pdf/74-6-a.pdf