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Quilts. 19th through 20th Centuries. The year is 1830. It is a cold winter night and you are tired and have just snuggled down into your bed with several quilts piled up on top of you.
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Quilts 19th through 20th Centuries
The year is 1830 • It is a cold winter night and you are tired and have just snuggled down into your bed with several quilts piled up on top of you. • If you are a boy, you have been up before the sun and have spent most of the day performing heavy manual work that includes chopping wood for the cook stove and fireplace to keep you warm and fed. • You have not had any idle time.
If you are a girl, you have also started working before the sun came up tending to animals, cooking, washing, cleaning and taking care of younger siblings. • Those quilts you are sleeping under are all lovingly handmade and are more that utilitarian blankets that are keeping you warm.
Believe it or not…. • They are works of art.
Quilts • Quilts and other cloth-based narrative art are part of many cultures. Made by hand -- often collaboratively -- using familiar materials such as scraps of clothing, quilts are both personal and communal objects. • Quilting continues to be largely a home-based form of women's artistic expression.
Quilts can be works of art as well as tell stories through pictures. • They also tell a story about their creators and about the historical and cultural context of their creation (quilting bees, historical and personal events) through the choices made in design, material, and content.
In 1842, John Logan of McDowell County, North Carolina put Hannah, a twelve year old slave girl, behind his daughter, Margaret, on her horse. • He then put Pharoah, a twelve year old slave boy, behind his new son-in-law, Thomas Young Greenlee, on his horse.
John said, "These are your wedding gifts." • Hannah became a house servant and Pharoah became a blacksmith. • They later married and took their new owners’ surname.
During the days of the War between the States, the Underground Railroad was active through the very heart of McDowell County. • Hannah pieced this quilt during those harrowing days, stitching into the pieces African symbols which served as messages and directions to would-be travelers on the 'railroad".
Some of the symbols are recognized as characters of the Vai Syllabary, an African alphabet.
Hannah pieced the quilt by hand using scrap materials of homespun cotton and wool, with some silk and velvet scraps interspersed.
The quilt lining was left unfinished until Emma "Em" Greenlee, Hannah's daughter, completed it in 1895.
We know little about them beyond this, except that the masterful quilt reproduced here was begun by Hannah Greenlee, perhaps in the 1880s, and finished by her daughter Emm in 1896, sometime after Hannah’s death.
Hannah Greenlee’s quilt is made of irregular scraps of fabric—some of them homespun—that are stitched together in the Crazy pattern developed in Victorian England and popular in America in the second half of the nineteenth century.
As a freedwoman after the war, Hannah probably continued the type of work she performed as a house servant: • cooking, cleaning, and sewing.
She may have intended to sell or give the quilt to her previous owners, since it remained with that family until they donated it to North Carolina’s Historic Carson House.
The quilt has been recognized in numerous publications including : • The North Carolina Quilt Project, • The Maryland Sun News: Artistry Knew No Bondage, • Janice Cole Gibson's: Carson House Quilts in Quilt World, • Stitched From the Soul: Slave Quilts of the Antebellum South.
A unique and beautiful appliquéd quilt of silk chintz imported from France was carefully sewn in 1810 by Kadella, the Carson family slave who became the seamstress for the family.
The slave of Colonel John Carson, Kadella, made the quilt as a celebration of his marriage. • She created the quilt according to traditional European appliqué standards of displaying ornate French lace in intricate patterns.
However, she also included African tradition in her quilt by cross-stitching long, vertical, strip-like lines onto the quilt.
Legend has it that Kadella was the daughter of an African Chieftain, and thus a princess in her homeland. • She was taken to Barbados by slave traders, where she was purchased by Col. John Carson and brought to his plantation in McDowell County. • Kadella was quite beautiful, and because she was considered royalty in her home country, the other slaves on the Carson plantation revered her.
When it was necessary for her to travel from the slave quarters to the “big house”, her fellow slaves carried her about on a palanquin. (Rickshaw) • She became a favorite of the Carsons and it was soon learned that she was quite accomplished at sewing.
She was given a special little house built especially for her across the river from the other slave quarters near the Carson family home and lived her life with the Carsons, making all the quilts and clothing for the family. • She was kept away from difficult labor and allowed to sew and knit.
Kadella was well respected and loved not only by her master but by fellow slaves as well. • Although never found, Kadella is said also to have produced one African strip-style quilt for each of her sons who were sent away because of their shameful likeness to their master John Carson.
Another special quilt, stitched in small pieces called a “crazy quilt” pattern was made by the mother of a Methodist minister who traveled to Oklahoma with the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. • It is said that this quilt comforted many Native Americans on this infamous journey.
Slave woman Jane Bond is braiding the hair of her mistress Rebecca. Although most likely they posed for the photograph, both women took pride in making dresses for one another and braiding one another's hair. • Jane Bond was born a slave in Kentucky, 1828. She was originally the property of Edward Fletcher Arthur. He gave her to his daughter Belinda as a wedding present in 1848.
The two women did not however get along very well and after the birth of the second son between Jane and Belinda's preacher husband Preston, Jane was sent back to her original owner. • Jane was then given to Preston's sister Rebecca. • The two formed a very close friendship and shared much of their lives, including quilting. The two quilts below are two of the remaining quilts from over twenty that they made together for their children.
Although both are traditional European strict patterns, they are made with bright contrasting colors and even the strict patterns are deviated from as seen in four of the squares in the quilt on the right.
Story Quilts • Story quilts often reflect the personal life of the one who created them. Harriet Powers was born into slavery in 1837 and married at the age of eighteen. • We do not know what her childhood was like since it was not recorded; however, she recorded some of her life as an African American slave woman in a story quilt. • Harriet Powers also quilted Bible stories; one is a priceless museum piece that resides at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Harriet Powers created two quilts which are the best known and well preserved examples of Southern American quilting tradition still in existence. • Using the traditional African appliqué technique along with European record keeping and biblical reference traditions, Harriet records on her quilts local historical legend, Bible stories, and astronomical phenomena.
Her quilts were first seen at a crafts fair by an artist, a Southern white woman named Jennie Smith. • Ms. Smith, who kept a diary and upon first meeting Harriet, recalls -- "I found the owner, a negro woman, who lived in the country on a little farm whereon she and her husband made a respectable living. • She is about sixty five years old, of a clear ginger cake color, and is a very clean and interesting woman who loves to talk of her 'old miss' and life 'befo de wah.'
At first Harriet Powers was unwilling to sell her quilts to Ms. Smith. • Yet when she and her family came into financial difficulty she agreed to sell them.
Ms Smith writes -- " Last year I sent her word that I would buy it if she still wanted to dispose of it. She arrived one afternoon in front of my door in an ox-cart with the precious burden in her lap encased in a clean flour sack, which was still enveloped in a crocus sack. She offered it for ten dollars, but I told her I only had five to give.
After going out consulting with her husband she returned and said 'Owin to de hardness of de times, my ole man lows I'd better tech hit.' Not being a new woman she obeyed. After giving me a full description of each scene with great earnestness, she departed but has been back several times to visit the darling offspring of her brain.
She was only in measure consoled for its loss when I promised to save her all my scraps." Although it was certainly painful for Mrs. Powers to sell her quilts, doing so she thus, unknowingly, preserved them for future generations.
Harriet Powers • The photograph, made about 1897, depicts her wearing a special apron with images of a moon, cross, and sun or shooting star. Celestial bodies such as these appear repeatedly in her quilts, indicating their importance to her.
This quilt looks very different from quilts made in the colonial period, when such items were confined to homes of the wealthy, where women had leisure time to devote to complicated needlework.
In colonial whole-cloth quilts, for example, the top was one single piece whose only decoration was the pattern of the stitching itself.
