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This article accompanied the "All
Wool and a Yard Wide: New England Wool Quilts, 1750-1925" exhibit
at the 2003 Vermont Quilt Festival. I would like to thank Richard Cleveland,
former chairman of VQF
and co-curator of the exhibit and Lynne Z. Bassett, chief advisor and author of
this article, for permitting me to
reprint this information on whole cloth wool quilts from their program.
I was
able to attend this exhibit and to hear Lynne's gallery talk on whole cloth
quilts, her area of
special interest and study. We can look forward to the results of
her close look at quilting patterns on wool whole cloth quilts in an
upcoming research paper. Through the designs of the quilting stitches she can name the
likely region of origin and time it was made.
The quilts on display were from a variety of
collections, public and private. I have incorporated web links, within Lynne's
article, to provide pictures of quilt examples. Some link to quilts shown in
this exhibit, many are from the Bidwell House Museum's fine collection, and two
are from Old Sturbridge Village.
from the private collection of Sharon Briggs, Hemet CA
Romantic but unsubstantiated history credits
American colonists with stitching the first quilted bed covers of colorful
patchwork, salvaged from precious bits of cloth. In
fact, the first quilts on colonial beds were made of whole cloth, in which the
quilting pattern, highlighted by the gloss of elegant fabrics such as silk and
glazed worsted (“calamanco”), created the visual interest. These quilts were rare and costly imports from India, England, or France,
professionally made and available only to the wealthy until the 1700s.
Over the course of that century, more and more New England women began to
make their own whole cloth quilts—often with faces of expensive English
calamanco and backs of locally produced wool.
These bed covers
are popularly called “linsey-woolsey” quilts today, suggesting that they
were made of fabric with a linen or cotton warp and wool weft. However, the faces of these quilts are virtually always entirely wool,
and the backs, too, are far more likely to be wool than linsey-woolsey. Although “linsey-woolsey” is a period fabric name, it was not a term
used in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries in connection with quilts.
By the early
nineteenth century, whole cloth wool quilts were largely displaced by other bed
cover fashions (including elegant whitework quilts — another whole cloth type)
in prosperous urban households, but they remained popular in rural New England
homes until at least the 1850s. In
her 1883 reminiscence, New England Bygones,
Ellen H. Rollins recalled of her childhood in the 1830s in Wakefield, New
Hampshire, “The winter lull of vegetation was often spent by my
grandmother…in the spinning and weaving of woollen [sic] fabrics, to be
afterwards fashioned into quilts.” [i]
Rollins also
noted that “the most esteemed” quilts were made of “glossy, dark flannel,
lined with yellow, with a slight wadding of carded wool.” [ii] Indeed, it was traditional in New England for the back of wool quilts to
be yellow, probably because it was an easy color to dye, it didn’t fade much,
and it hid dirt well. It is also not unusual to find that the backs of the quilts
are pieced from a variety of locally woven fabrics of wool, wool with cotton, or
wool with linen, thereby providing important documentation for the plain,
everyday fabrics worn by early New Englanders. On top, these quilts display a wonderful array of colors, with dark blue
being the most popular. Other
colors include brilliant
pink, red, green, dark brown (called “butternut” or
“London” brown), yellow, and eggplant
purple .
Fortunately for
the researcher, many of these early wool quilts have a moth hole or two through
which to examine the batting, which can be wool or cotton.
Occasionally, one finds that a wool batting has been dyed to reduce the
effect of bearding on the quilt surface. Cotton,
though generally white, might also be brown.
It is unlikely that New England quiltmakers used cotton battings inside
their whole cloth quilts until the Industrial Revolution made cotton a
cost-effective alternative to locally grown wool in the early nineteenth
century. By the 1830s,
Massachusetts merchants could advertise that cotton batting cost only three
cents a pound and was available by the bale.” [iii] The appearance of cotton batting in a New England quilt, therefore,
probably dates it to the nineteenth century.
The stitches that
both decorate New England wool quilts and hold their layers together are almost
always made with a hand-spun, plied worsted thread. Even as late as 1837, when factory-made cotton thread was
readily available, Pamela Brown of Plymouth, Vermont, noted in her diary that
"Mrs. Wilder spun me some worsted to quilt with."” [iv] Most frequently, the color of the thread was chosen to blend with the
fabric on the quilt's face, but sometimes women used thread in a contrasting
color, perhaps in a conscious effort to make their quilting designs stand out
more clearly.
Although lacking
the multi-colored, graphic appeal of pieced calico quilts, New England’s early
whole cloth wool quilts frequently display beautiful and imaginative quilting
designs. The artistic quality of
these stitched patterns is easily overlooked, for after two hundred years the
originally smooth and glossy fabrics are often dulled by repeated washings,
faded from light exposure, and marred by the voracious attacks of moth larvae. Sometimes the most decimated and ignored quilt possesses the most
interesting design!
The Rococo
fashion for curved lines and stylized natural motifs permeated the decorative
and fine arts in the eighteenth century. A
quiltmaker in this period could see Rococo elements in the furniture, wallpaper,
teapots and silver spoons in her home, and even in the gravestones of her
community’s burying ground. Thus,
these same curvaceous lines, stylized flowers, and shell-like motifs appear in
early New England quilts. This type
of design was possibly the earliest in New England quilting to break away from
the traditional, often non-representational, framed center medallion designs
typically seen in the imported bed quilts. Most typical of this quilting fashion are stylized floral
designs (often bearing little or no resemblance to actual flora) cascading from
several undulating stems. The
curling vines and abstract flowers stitched on these bed quilts also sometimes
appear as the “Tree of Life” design, defined by a central “trunk,”
generally growing out of a vase or a heart.
Such imaginative
floral designs were woven or embroidered into a variety of textiles, with
decoratively stitched bed
rugs, crewel
embroidery, and embroidered whitework bed
covers showing a particularly close relationship to the designs of the quilts. Fortunately, surviving bed rugs (heavy, wool covers worked with either
looped or flat, yarn-sewn designs on a plain-woven background) are often dated,
and from them we can see that such fantastic flowering vines were popular motifs
for bed covers from about the 1760s to the 1820s. Whole cloth quilts stitched with similar patterns appear to have been
made in New England for an even longer period, as examples with quilted dates or
family histories have been found extending into the 1850s. By the nineteenth century, these curved lines and floral abstractions
were no longer part of high-style fashion, but New England women apparently
considered the stylized Rococo motifs to be traditional for bed covers and
continued to stitch many adaptations of the designs.
The new fashion
at the turn of the nineteenth century was the Neoclassical, derived from ancient
Greek and Roman architecture and art. Lines
and patterns became simplified, straight, geometric, and uncluttered.
Quilt designs followed suit, with motifs such as hearts, flowers,
pinwheels, and quatrefoils organized within a grid set on point.
These trellis-like designs are frequently bordered by feather
patterns.
Designs were
often drawn, if not by the quilter herself, then by a talented neighbor or local
artisan. Elizabeth Foote of
Colchester, Connecticut, noted in her diary in 1775 that she “…drew a Quilt
Border…” (probably for a quilted
petticoat) for a neighbor. [v] Similarly, Sarah Snell Bryant of Cummington, Massachusetts, wrote in an
1822 diary entry, “…went to Mr. Briggses to draw a feather on a bed
quilt.”[vi] John Brown Copp, a deaf stonemason in Stonington, Connecticut, was often
called upon to draw embroidery and, undoubtedly, quilting patterns.[vii] Many designs were drawn freehand directly on the quilt’s surface using
chalk or pencil, for there is seldom evidence of the regularity and symmetry of
a repeated prepared pattern before the grid designs of the Neoclassical period.
Beginning as
expensive, elegant examples of genteel needlework, whole cloth wool quilts
gradually came to be traditional products of rural New England. Later examples show simplified, larger, and more widely dispersed
quilting patterns, often stitched into locally-produced wool fabrics that are
coarse and dull compared to the glossy calamancoes of the eighteenth century. Elegant or homely, though, these historic quilts demonstrate their
makers' workmanship and fertile imaginations.
(This
exhibit included
wool quilts from the Bidwell House Museum collection)
[i] Ellen H. Rollins, New
England Bygones (Philadelphia: J.
B. Lippincott & Co., 1883), 237.
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Massachusetts
Spy (Worcester), 1 January 1834, 1.
[iv] Blanche Brown Bryant and
Gertrude Elaine Baker, eds., The Diaries of Sally and Pamela Brown, 1832-1838, and Hyde Leslie, 1887,
Plymouth Notch, Vermont (Springfield, Vt. William L. Bryant Foundation, 1970), 84.
[v] Elizabeth Foote diary, 8
October 1775. Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn.
[vi] Sarah Snell Bryant diary,
13 December 1822. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
[vii] Rita J. Adrosko,
"The Copp Family," in Grace Rogers Cooper, The
Copp Family Textiles (Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), 2.
The New Pathways into Quilt History
Copyright for this article belongs to Lynne Z.
Bassett and to the Vermont Quilt Festival 2003 program. All Rights Reserved.
New Pathways into Quilt History
Copyright 2004 by Kimberly Wulfert, PhD for this rendition of the article, All Rights Reserved www.antiquequiltdating.com
Lynne
Zacek Bassett is an independent scholar specializing in New England's
historic costume and textiles. From
1990-1994 she was the curator of collections at Historic Northampton in
Northampton, MA, and from 1995-2000 she was the curator of textiles and
fine arts at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, MA.
Since going independent, Lynne has undertaken a number of large
projects, including organizing and cataloguing the costume collection of
The Connecticut Historical Society.
In 2002, she was the guest curator of the exhibit, "Telltale
Textiles: Quilts from the Historic Deerfield Collection" in
Deerfield, MA. Her exhibit,
"Modesty Died When Clothes Were Born:
Costume in the Life and Literature of Mark Twain," was on
view last summer and fall at The Mark Twain House and Museum in
Hartford, CT. In addition to her exhibition publications, Lynne has been a
frequent contributor to PieceWork
magazine and has also written for The
Magazine Antiques and White
House History. She
is currently editor of a five-volume series on American costume history
for Greenwood Publishing Group, and is writing the volume on the
antebellum period herself. Her
lectures for institutions including Colonial Williamsburg, the
Smithsonian Institution, Historic Deerfield, the Peabody Essex Museum,
and the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society of Connecticut have covered a
range of topics in the field of early costume, quilts and other bed
covers.
Read more about Lynne's background and motivation in her textile
historian
interview and Richard's
"Quilt Bureaucrat" historian
interview. See also: Whole-Cloth
Quilts: Subtle Beauty in Texture found at the Womenfolk.com
site.
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