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

6 Sarah Smith Emery: Smuggling English Cottons

A View of Newburyport in 1835

Sarah Emery (1787-1879) of Newburyport, Massachusetts, had been married a little over a year when the war began. Her husband owned a tavern---combination hotel, restaurant and bar in the town on the Merrimack River.

Few in that area with an economy based on international shipping profited during the war or the earlier embargoes, but David Emery’s tavern prospered once the war began. High unemployment allowed customers more time and more reason to drink. Most important--- the tavern was situated on a road used by smugglers.

A nostalgic look at "the carrying trade," as roads replaced waterways.

“We could not have engaged in a more lucrative business,“ she wrote in her memoirs. “British manufacturers having quantities of goods upon their hands, ran cargo after cargo into their eastern provinces [in Canada], thence they were passed across the border and taken South [to Boston] by ox teams; as our accommodations were excellent, the teamsters made ‘Emery's tavern’ their headquarters.”

She recalled a steady stream of drovers throughout the War.

“At sunset I have often counted a dozen or fifteen drawn up by the sidewalk, opposite the long barn, their motley coverings of patchwork quilts, coverlets etc., presenting a gypsy-like, semi-barbarous appearance.” Under the quilts covering the ox-carts were the luxuries New Englanders were not producing. Sarah listed them: flour, sugar and molasses, gloves, muslins, laces, ribbons, crockery and glass. 

British china in America

 “All imported goods commanded an exorbitant price. Flour rose to fifteen and eighteen dollars per barrel, brown sugar was twenty-five cents a pound…. I paid a dollar a yard for calico.” She remembered one shipment in particular, a load of cotton prints and shawls. Soon the young Emerys were smugglers themselves.

A Massachusetts tavern keeper could hope to look as fashionable

 as this French woman in a white paisley shawl with a high-colored border---

 a painting from 1810 by Francois Henri Mullard

“The shawls were quite pretty, having white or buff centres and high-colored borders; they sold for four dollars apiece. I took calico for a dress and a shawl; two other shawls were sold in the house; the remainder of the goods were slyly conveyed in the evening to the store of Miss Dolly Carnes. This new stock brought a rush of custom to that spinster's establishment… Shawls were in great demand.”

So much trade went through Newburyport that it had a custom house, this one built in 1835.

Sarah entertained the customs inspectors while the men loaded smuggled goods.

One night a knock at the door:  “Mr. Emery hastily dressed, when it was found that Capt. Bartlett had a stagecoach at the door, filled with merchandise… These were hastily placed in my best bedroom, from whence they were gradually taken to the stores in town. Capt. Bartlett continued to bring goods for some time. We often had bales of valuable cloth hidden in the hay mow.”

Bales of imported cloth....

Maybe we should be checking the barns around Newburyport

While David drove the goods to warehouses Sarah entertained the customs officials in the tavern.  Everyone was in on the plot. Her other job was to keep the rest of the tavern customers from giving in to an “unseemly outburst of merriment.”

Sarah’s memoirs were published in 1879 and were actually written by her daughter Sarah Anna Emery, a novelist who probably embellished the tales. (Were patchwork quilts so commonplace they could be used as wagon covers?) In The Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian Sarah Anna explains:

"This volume, as its title implies, has been chiefly derived from the recollections of my mother; but recitals by my father, grandparents and other deceased relatives and friends have aided the work, and I have obtained many anecdotes and facts from several aged persons still living… My desire has been to give a graphic history of 'Ye Olden Time'…”

Newburyport a century after the War of 1812

Yet Sarah's memoirs of ye olden time give us enough detail to realize how imported cottons, barred by embargoes, got into the eager hands of American quilters. Smuggling went on up and down the Atlantic coast and across the Canadian border. As diarist Minister William Bentley of Salem wrote in 1813: "The public mind much interested in the schemes of smuggling." He described one modus operandi. An American vessel meets at sea an English ship, which has agreed to be a "prize," a captured ship brought to shore with its goods declared forfeit. "We are already the greatest adepts at smuggling in the Universe."

Variations of these "palm trees and gamebirds" printed in England were popular with Americans

We see many variations. Jeremy Adams in the catalog Calico & Chintz summarizes the dating of these prints: "From about 1814 to 1816 and during the decade 1825-1835, designs containing exotic and game birds were popular patterns on English chintz."

We see them as borders, as wholecloth quilts and as cut-out chintz applique.

Quilt by Violet Elizabeth Alexander, Charlotte, North Carolina, Date-inscribed 1830, Collection of the Smithsonian Institution

Read more about Violet's quilt by clicking here:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&gkey=169&objkey=9567

Center of a North Carolina quilt by Cynthia Clementine Johnston.

See the whole quilt and more information at the Quilt Index:

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4B-82-495

The fabric seems to have been printed in England, much of it at the printworks known as Bannister Hall in the teens, and used in quilts here from about 1810 to 1860.

In February we'll consider English prints---the bales of imported cloth in Sarah Smith Emery's hay mow.

Read The Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian  here at Google Books

http://books.google.com/books?id=RQbHOrNqDhsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

British?

And if you want to read a day-by-day account of life for a bachelor minister in Salem during the war see The Diary of William Bentley, volume IV (Salem: The Essex Institute, 1914)

Broderie Perse Evolves

Chintz applique medallion dated 1837-1838 by Mrs. James Lusby

Collection of the Smithsonian Institution

Cutting chintz images from one piece of fabric and stitching them to another was a technique that remained popular with Americans through the middle of the 19th century. Mrs. Lusby's quilt above has much in common with the Broderie Perse medallions made about 1810. Dogtooth applique and chintz borders frame a central floral. The major clue to date, had she not inscribed it, might be the Turkey red final border, a very popular fabric choice from about 1840 through the end of the century.

Another quilt from the Smithsonian collection with a basket holding the florals.

Center with a lattice-work basket from an online auction

It is pirmarily the fabrics that help us date these cut-out-chintz medallions as style changed so little.

Again, an emphasis on Turkey red, a fabric rather rare in 1815, dates this quilt to after 1840.

The maker combined the new fashion for conventional applique in the Germanic primary colors with the now old-fashioned cut-out chintz.

Another open-work basket medallion, hard to date from just a photo in an online auction. These baskets and containers seem to have replaced tree-of-life compositions as the century wore on, but you don't want to really use that as a clue to a later date since these quilts are all so similar. If you wanted to put a basket or a cornucopia as a container in an 1812 reproduction quilt you could make a case for it.

The one thing you don't want to do is make a block-style Broderie Perse quilt.

Like this one from the Proudfoot family in the collection of the Smithsonian.

I know it's tempting. Blocks are so portable.

But it would be like wearing a bustle to Dolley Madison's Wednesday night squeeze.

Irish Chain with Broderie Perse

from Laura Fisher's collection

It's an idea whose time hasn't yet arrived.

Blocks and Broderie Perse---about 1840.

4: Ann Randolph Morris: Virginia to New York

A collage of Ann Cary Randolph Morris (1774-1837)

and a late 19th-century piece of cut-out-chintz applique

"Mr. Madison's  War" had strong opposition, primarily from members of the Federalist party who blamed Madison's Democratic-Republicans for diplomatic failure. The Federalist party of ex-President John Adams was centered in the north, led by several Founding Fathers who'd invented the Revolution. New York's Gouverneur Morris, a younger member of the older generation, had been a primary author of the Constitution. Gouverneur (it was his mother's family name) had a strong voice in the anti-war movement, calling it a "wicked war of conquest...a moral wrong."

Gouverneur Morris about the time

 he was a minister to the French court before the French Revolution

Sixty years old in 1812, he'd  inherited the 2,000 acre family fiefdom called Morrisania in what is now the South Bronx. A bachelor bon vivant until late in life, he spent the early 1810s developing the canal system linking New York City to the Great Lakes. Private life trumped politics during the War. In 1813 his 39-year-old wife Ann Cary Randolph (Nancy) gave birth to Morrisania's heir and the following year her family and his plunged them into a public scandal with allegations that Gouverneur II was perhaps not of Morris blood, his mother a promiscuous murderess, his peg-legged father a cuckolded old man.

Morrisania north of New York City,

an estate worth fighting about

America remained enough like England to provide this plot for an Austen novel. The extended Morris family had counted on inheriting from the bachelor squire. Late love, marriage and a young family were not in their plans.

The house overlooking Long Island Sound

Nephews gave the baby a pseudo-Russian nickname "Cuttusoff" but snide family jokes were not enough to disinherit. They had an ally in Nancy's famous cousin John Randolph of Roanoke, a Virginia Congressman temporarily out of office due to his anti-war oratory. Randolph was a 19th-century combination of William F. Buckley and Truman Capote, a mesmerizing speaker with an opium habit and vindictive streak. Like one of his muses Lord Byron, John Randolph was "mad, bad and dangerous to know." Nancy made the mistake of inviting him to Morrisania.

The Harlem River was a Morrisania boundary.

 The High Bridge, an aqueduct, was begun in 1837, 

the year before Nancy died.

Nancy had known him since childhood. Her Morris cousins included John's brothers Thomas, husband of Jefferson's daughter Martha, Richard who married Nancy's sister Judith, and Theodorick who impregnated Nancy before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 21. Eighteen-year-old Nancy suffered a miscarriage at a friend's, awakening the household with her screams. Scandal!!! An unwed, pregnant teenager from an aristocratic Virginia family---but things got worse.

Although a body was never found, the slaves whispered a baby had been murdered. A trial followed, called not by the state but by Nancy's brother-in-law Richard who hoped to put an end to rumors he was the father who had conspired with Nancy to kill the innocent evidence of their affair. He was acquitted but reputations were ruined. Then Richard died, leaving Nancy, John and Judith together at the plantation called Bizarre.

John Randolph in 1811

Painting by John Wesley Jarvis, National Portrait Gallery.

Whittier wrote a poem about his

"serpent hiss of scorning."

A decade later Nancy left Bizarre. Unmarriageable, penniless and alienated from the Randolphs, she sought work as a governess (It is just like Jane Austen!) in Newport, Rhode Island. Gouverneur Morris heard of her plight and invited her to be his housekeeper at Morrisania. Here the plot switches from Austen to Bronte. "Reader, she married him."

Nancy was housekeeper for a few months

 before becoming mistress of the estate

John Randolph's letter-writing campaign against the Morrises began in late 1814. He accused Nancy not only of infanticide but of murdering Richard, of prostitution and of sex with the gardener (in this rendition the murdered infant was black). Nancy was a vampire who sucked "the best blood of my race...and struck her harpy fangs into an infirm old man."

Private battles were made public in open letters

Nancy parried with her own letters including one to the First Lady, Mrs. Madison. "I pray you to shew the enclosed [calling Randolph a 'malignant madman'] to every Virginian in Washington who possesses honor."

Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816)

Detail of a portrait by Charles Willson Peale

Wait a minute, we digress. We were talking about Gouverneur Morris's opposition to the War of 1812. I know Nancy's troubles make a better story so I suggest you choose one of the books below to read more about it and I'll go on to quilts of the era.

I couldn't find any quilts attributed to the large Randolph family but the first style that comes to mind is Cut-Out-Chintz applique, in which images are trimmed from one piece of fabric and arranged on another, a technique popular in Virginia and the Chesapeake area in the early 19th century. 

Cut-out-chintz quilts were also made in New England, New York and the Carolinas. The quilts pictured here might have been made in any of the United States (although we tend to see them originating in areas close to the Atlantic coast.)  The style can represent Ann Randolph Morris, a Southern transplant in New York.

This cut-out chintz center was auctioned recently in London

but could be from the U.S.

Quilt attributed to the family of Thomas Hammond in Virginia

in the collection of the George Washington Foundation.

Click here to read more about this quilt.

http://www.kenmore.org/collections/textiles/quilt.html

The early examples often feature a central tree.

This one was published in Dr. Dunton's book Old Quilts

and said to have been date-inscribed 1807.

This one was auctioned in London, probably English.

Because American chintzes came through London we tend to believe the cut-out chintz style
originated in England, but the date-inscribed English versions aren't significantly earlier than
 those in America.

The tree-of-life compositions reflect a fashion for "arborescent chintzes" (arbor= Latin for tree) that feature gnarly branches so popular in Indian and Chinese imagery and in Jacobean embroidery.

Arborescent chintzes printed in England were quite popular in America in the teens. Many pieces made it through the embargo. A tree-of-life center framed with dogtooth applique seems to be a typical early 19th-century design convention.

This lovely example was featured in the Folsom History Museum's annual Antique Quilt and Vintage Fashion Exhibit in the fall.

Click here for more:  http://www.folsomhistorymuseum.org/

Another name for this applique style is Broderie Perse (French for Persian Embroidery).

I'll post more on cut-out-chintz as it was such an important early 19th century style. For more about Ann Cary Randolph Morris see these books.

Non-Fiction

Alan Pell Crawford, Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Cynthia A. Kierner, Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor & Reputation in Jefferson's America. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Richard Brookhiser,  Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution. Free Press

Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. Harper Collins, 2005

Phillip Hamilton, The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia. University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Fiction

Jay & Audrey Walz, The Bizarre Sisters. Duell, Sloan & Pierce, 1950

Barbara Bentley, Mistress Nancy. McGraw Hill, 1980

The house at Bizarre burned to the ground in 1813.

John did not blame this misfortune on Nancy.

St Ann's in the Bronx was built by

Nancy and Gouverneur's son as a tribute to his mother's memory.

She and her husband are buried here.