Elizabeth Selby & The Battle of York

Death of American General Zebulon Pike at York.

This mid-19th century vision of the town depicts

it as much more substantial than 1813's reality.

The Battle of York in the spring of 1813 was one of the first land victories by U.S. troops. The capture and sacking of a small provincial settlement had consequences beyond the town's actual military importance.

The terms Upper and Lower referred to

location on the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

York is the red star.

Canada was divided into two governmental regions above the Great Lakes---Lower Canada encompassed Quebec, Labrador and Newfoundland. Upper Canada, the western province, was a frontier, small outposts in Indian country. York was the provincial capital, a village of a few wooden buildings along a harbor on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The area had once and would again be called Toronto (Tkaronto) but in 1813 it was York.  The British military and civilians of the outpost were rather poorly prepared for a naval attack from their Southern neighbors.

New York is on the eastern shore with

Sackets Harbor the red star on the right.

York in the west is the other star.

Major General Henry Dearborn and his fleet of 14 ships left Sackets Harbor, New York in April, sailed west across Lake Ontario and landed in the capital where outnumbered British, Canadian and Native soldiers abandoned the town after a week of battle.

On the retreat a gunpowder store was exploded killing Brigadier General Zebulon Pike and almost forty other Americans.

The Block House was the capital's largest building.

General Zebulon Pike

During a six-day occupation the town was looted and ransacked. Upper Canada's Parliament Building was set afire and trophies stolen, including a carved British Lion from the speaker's chair and the Parliamentary Mace carried by the assembly's sergeant-at-arms. These gilded wooden symbols of government found their way to the U.S. Naval Academy Museum at Annapolis. The nearly 5-foot-long mace returned to Canada in 1934 when President Franklin Roosevelt repatriated it as a good will gesture during Toronto's Centennial anniversary. The lion statue remains in Annapolis.

U.S. heroes included Generals Dearborn and Pike.

Eye witness Eli Playter wrote in his diary during the occupation:

"Not a building but show some marks of [the explosion] & some all torn to pieces. The Town thronged with the Yankees, many busy getting off the public stores. The Council office with every window broke & pillaged of every thing that it contained. The Government building, the Block House and the building adjacent all burned to ashes.”

While civilians abandoned the town their homes were robbed and vandalized. Elizabeth Powell returned to find her utensils, clothing and linen stolen and a New Yorker in her pantry eating the sugar. Elizabeth Selby Deranzy could not flee as her father Prideaux Selby was mortally ill in their cabin. Prideaux was in charge of the Provincial treasury of £3,000, which Elizabeth hid from the the invaders. Americans demanded the money; the financial officer was unconscious and couldn't resist and the Provincial government told Elizabeth to hand it over. Prideaux died shortly after the Americans left, unaware that the treasury was gone.

A Soldier's Wife at Fort Niagara

The Selbys were English. Elizabeth may have been born in London as her brother was, but her father had been stationed in Canada for over twenty years and in York for about five. In February, 1813 Elizabeth married soldier William Derenzy (Derency).

At the War's beginning Elizabeth had suggested Provincial leaders organize a relief society, The Loyal and Patriotic Society of Upper Canada initially spent its donations on clothing for local militia. After the invasion funds went to soldiers' medical care and relief for needy families. The Loyal and Patriotic Society's purposes sound similar to those of America's Civil War Sanitary Commission fifty years later, but the earlier group's activities are not so well recorded. One can imagine that like the Sanitary Commission the Loyal and Patriotic Society also provided bedding for militiamen, the wounded and the destitute.

Quilted and patchwork bedcoverings in Canada looked much like those made in the U.S. and Great Britain, but few early examples survive. We can find whole-cloth quilts, patchwork medallions and embroidered pieces.

They look like soldiers but it's a hunting party

The Mary Morris quilt, attributed to an Ontario girl, is one of Canada's quilt treasures. It was discovered by Canadian quilt historian Ruth McKendry whose collection of 315 quilts was purchased by the Museum.

Embroidered medallion by Mary Morris,

Elgin, Leeds County, Ontario

Collection of Canadian Museum of Civilization

The central embroidered panel is signed in cross stitch Mary Morris Aged 14 1825 .

See more about this quilt by clicking here:

http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/treasure/120eng.shtml

Ruth and Blake McKendry with the Morris quilt in the 1970s.

This month we will look at pictorial designs found in early quilts in America and Britain.

For more about the Battle of York:
Eli Playter's diary is from the Archives of Ontario
http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/on-line-exhibits/1812/niagara-1813.aspx

The city of Toronto has a Bicentennial website:
http://www.toronto.ca/1812/

Toronto's anniversary events include an exhibit: Finding The Fallen: Battle of York Remembered at the Market Gallery until September 8, 2012.

Read about the show here:

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1143823--battle-of-york-soldiers-remembered-in-war-of-1812-exhibit

To read a book about the Battle of York see Robert Malcomson's book Capital in Flames: The American Attack on York, 1813

The Austen Quilt

The Austen patchwork

This spread with a central basket is

attributed to the Austen women.

"My dear Cassandra, have you remembered to collect pieces for the Patchwork? -- We are now at a standstill." In 1811 Jane Austen reminded her sister they were working on a bedcover at Chawton Cottage.

Chawton Cottage where Jane Austen,

 her sister and her mother lived after 1809

Patchwork (presumed to be made by the family) is on display at this shrine for Austen fans. A look at the quilt can tell us a lot about fabric in the teens. It's actually called a bedcover as it is not quilted. Much English patchwork of the time was a single layer like this piece.

See a video---a few seconds of a tour of the bedroom here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alisabethpix/3464487483/ 

The main part is a patchwork field of rather oddly proportioned diamonds in a grid. They are not true 60 degree diamonds, a little off.

I am just going by photos so I cannot say if that grid patchwork is a grid of dots or another tiny figure, but they certainly look like round dots. 

Observations:

• Polka Dots are old---they go back to the 18th century at least, before anybody called them polka dots.
• Dots are a good option for a neutral print in an early reproduction.

A Question?

• Is the use of dots in this era more English taste than American? (Notice the George III quilt in a recent post.)

The center features a larger diamond with a wicker basket full of flowers.

About a dozen years ago Makower printed a reproduction of that basket panel. Eat your heart out if you didn't get one then. It's too late now.

But Moda's French General has a similar isolated basket in a collection called Paniers des Fleurs---in shops now!

Question:

• What fabric did the Austens use to cut the center diamond?

Answer: I asked Merikay Waldvogel, who keeps a list of early panel prints, and she showed me a quilt with the same fabric---proving it was cut from a panel. And then there is a recent post about a quilt at England's Bowes Museum with the same print.

Detail of center of a quilt made by Elizabeth Norman

Collection: Bowes Museum

See photos of this quilt at the PiecenPeace blog:

http://piecenpeace.blogspot.com/2012/02/bowes-museum-textiles.html

And see a better photo of it in Dorothy Osler's book North Country Quilts: Legend and Living Tradition from the Bowes Museum. (page 15).

Here's a link to one at the Bowes Museum website:

http://www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk/collections/objects/category/15/214/

The center patchwork field in the Austen quilt is bordered by a field of  patchwork of smaller diamonds without the white grid. It looks like the border is on three sides here but I am guessing the top border is folded over in this photo...

...As it's displayed with a border over the pillow and at the foot of the bed. In some photos the border echoes the rather soft colors of the central diamond patchwork.

But in other photos there seems to be a clash of color as well as print style.

Here's a men's patchwork dressing gown from about 1820 in remarkably similar style in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

See the whole piece by clicking here:
http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/80097446

Observations:

• The outer border is pieced of brighter fabrics
• The outer border is pieced of smaller-scale fabrics.
• The outer border seems to be pieced of roller printed calicoes rather than block printed furnishing prints.

Question:

• Is the border later than the inner field?

There is a distinctive style difference in the prints in the two areas.

The inner patchwork looks more like the classic floral chintzes popular for furnishing fabrics. The outer diamonds look more like small calicoes that became quite popular in the teens when roller printing and new dye combinations began to change taste.

Question:

• Is this a classic case of dawdling over a project so long that taste and technology completely changed?

 Perhaps the two Cassandras (mother and daughter) finished the quilt years after Jane's death in 1817.

Textiles to Feature in a Medallion

Pieced Medallion (1790-1810)

from The Winterthur collection

We don't find multicolor, imported chintz panels with American commemorative images,

but there is a tradition of using single color toile-style textiles for medallion centers with a patriotic theme. The detail shows a handkerchief with Benjamin Franklin at the top and Washington in the center. It looks to be a bordered composition rather than a vignette cut from a scenic toile as in the quilt below.

 See the whole quilt here:

http://content.winterthur.org:2011/cdm/singleitem/collection/quilts/id/401/rec/15

This quilt attributed to Martha Washington in the late-18th century features a scene cut from a William Penn toile. See more about this quilt here:

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2011/10/martha-washingtons-penns-treaty-quilt.html

The framed panels were probably printed as handkerchiefs. Quite a few handkerchiefs in the single color on white combination survive. This one includes the Declaration of Independence with the words "Just the Thing for a Child to Love." These copper-plate textiles dating to the years before 1820 MAY have been printed in the United States. Any printer could run a piece of cotton or linen through his newspaper press. But the ink was not color fast.

It took a technical sophistication to print the mordant for a permanent dye with a copper plate, skills we do not find in the United States before the War of 1812.  So we assume that madder-dyed toile pieces from the 18th or early 19th centuries were done in England or France for export.

Washington's death in 1799 caused a national mourning that inspired this handkerchief, found in both red and brown colorways.

Two more Washington mourning bandanas.

Handkerchiefs were marketed as teaching tools for a children.

The Spencer Museum of Art owns a quilt from about 1825 with a child's teaching handkerchief in the center.

Masons also commissioned handkerchiefs that found their way into quilts.

Quilt with a Masonic Handkerchief

National Heritage Museum

The central textile dates to 1817.

See more about this quilt here:

http://nationalheritagemuseum.typepad.com/library_and_archives/2009/11/new-to-the-collection-a-masonic-quilt.html

Collection of the Noah Webster House

Here's a detail of a quilt from the 1780s featuring a Masonic kerchief dated AD 1769. See more about it in a newsletter from the Noah Webster House.

http://noahwebsterhouse.org/about/newsletter/pdf/Spectator%20Summer%202010.pdf

One exception to the idea that the permanently dyed handkerchiefs were imports is John Hewson's Washington kerchief. Printed by woodblocks rather than copperplate technology, this madder-printed square was sold in Philadelphia at the Hewson printworks in the Revolution's early years, the mid-1770s.

You can buy a reproduction (shown above) at the New York Historical Society store:
http://www.nyhistorystore.com/shop/accessories/george-washington-kerchief

See their original here:
http://www.nyhistory.org/node/32627

British Commemorative Panels

English panels were exported to the United States but several were made exclusively for the home audience. The English quilt on the cover of Averil Colby's book above features a floral panel with the inscription in the border "G-50-R" 

Americans would have been unenthusiastic customers for fabric celebrating the Golden Jubilee, King George III's 50th Anniversary in 1810.

King George III

The cover quilt is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. See these links:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-03/x-radiography-as-a-tool-to-examine-the-making-and-remaking-of-historic-quilts/

http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/quilts/detail/1434/Two_jubilees_-_George_III_Jubilee_with_Victoria_Jubilee_corner_patches

The Duke of Wellington's Victory over Napoleon in 1815 would not have inspired customers to line up at the wharves in Boston or Charleston.

See Celia's blog post about a quilt with the Wellington panel by clicking here:

http://daybook-celeste.blogspot.com/2011/08/greystoke-coverlet-curious-textile.html

"Princess Charlotte of Wales Married

to Leopold Prince of SaxeCobourg May 2, 1816"

A few years after the American/British War, George III's granddaughter Princess Charlotte married. This panel made to celebrate the wedding might have made it across the Atlantic. Royals-watchers were broken hearted when Charlotte died in childbirth a year later, making her cousin Victoria heir to the throne (Victoria married Leopold's nephew Albert.)

This English medallion quilt with a different colorway of the Princess Charlotte panel sold at Christies four or five years ago.

See more here:

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5072374

The New England Quilt Museum has another fabulous medallion quilt featuring this panel. See a picture at the Quilt Index:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=21-41-1A

And read about a reproduction Princess Charlotte panel at Penny's blog here:

http://penelopetucker.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/princess-charlotte-medallion/

In 1821 the late Princess Charlotte's father was crowned as George IV. This panel celebrates her mother, "Her Most Gracious Majesty Caroline Queen of England." Caroline of Brunswick and George despised each other and she was barred from the Coronation, although she had her supporters, the customers for this panel.

A woodcut on paper from the time

This portrait was advertised as actress Anne Brunton Merry (1769-1808), born in England and died in Virginia. There must be many other unidentified portrait and commemorative textiles out there.

See a George IV commemorative calico at this post

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2009/09/chintz-george-iv.html 

America and Washington on a toile

It's interesting that American-themed scenic toiles were imported but we do not find any of these multicolored commemorative panels featuring Franklin, Washington, Jefferson or Liberty for the American market during this period.

UPDATE: In the comments box Hester noted the quilt on the right from a Kerry Taylor auction in 2007. Similar style and proportion in the frames; another octagonal panel.