Alabama Quilts: Wilderness through World War II, 1682-1950

Chapter One

BEFORE THERE WAS AN ALABAMA

Treasures of Time, Pre-1819

I never stood on the banks of the southern rivers without being reminded of Daniell’s Views in India and Ceylon; the water level, shadowy and still, and the thickets actually springing out of it, with dark-green recesses … As for the softness of the evening light on the water, it is indescribable. It is as if the atmosphere were purified from all mortal breathings, it is so bright, and yet not dazzling; there is such a profusion of verdure.¹

The oldest quilts in our state are those that were brought in with the first Anglo settlers, when Alabama was part of the Mississippi Territory that was created in 1798. As lands ceded by the Choctaws in 1805 gained more of the Tombigbee/Alabama River area in south Alabama, and cessions by the Chickasaws and Cherokees in 1805 and 1806 opened up the area around Huntsville and the Tennessee River valley, a great movement of people began into the area known then as the Southwest. This relocation only accelerated after the end of the War of 1812, when, as Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton puts it, a folk migration which would not be exceeded until the Forty-Niners stampeded to California, populated what would become the state.² Alabama Fever was a term coined to describe the frenzied efforts of buyers to establish land claims so they could raise cotton in the area that had once been known as West Florida or East Mississippi but was declared the territory of Alabama in 1817. It is not clear who originally came up with the phrase, but historians quickly adapted it to describe the temper of the times. Most of the people gripped by the Alabama Fever of 1814–19 were farmers from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. Cotton was the leading agricultural money-maker, and thousands wanted to plant and raise as much of it as possible in order to further their fortunes.³ Some in the grips of Alabama Fever came with the means to purchase large plantations like those they had owned back home, plantations they would work with enslaved labor; many others were plain farmers who looked forward to purchasing a few acres they could work by themselves or with minimum help.

As the settlers moved in, most of them went for the most desirable areas along rivers and streams, particularly flat river bottoms that could most easily be cultivated for cotton. John Hunt settled around the big spring of Huntsville in 1805, and soon afterward land sales began, with big plantation owners from Georgia and small farmers from Tennessee alike buying as much property as they could afford.⁴ But even at the height of Alabama Fever, some areas were slow to be settled. Prices for land in the Hill Country, descending southeast from the northeast corner of the state in Jackson County, could be had for as little as $1.25 an acre, while property in the fertile Black Belt and the Tennessee River valley was snapped up by rich settlers who could afford to spend $50 to $100 an acre.

Surprisingly, some people actually preferred the hill country. It reminded them of home, provided sweeter air than the swampy lowlands, and the sandy soil could be worked with one man behind a plow to provide a living for a family, as opposed to the enslaved labor required to run a plantation. This type of farmer counted corn as his main crop, not cotton.⁵ As time went by, many settlers on this type of land and of that in the Wiregrass, proved to be somewhat transient, pulling up stakes at a moment’s notice and heading out in search of more promising opportunities. The tendency toward instability lasted well into the 1860s and will be addressed more fully in chapter 2.

NO ONE SPARED FROM BACK-BREAKING WORK

In the rough-and-tumble pioneer phase of our history, the day-to-day demands of mere survival prohibited any quality time with needle and thread, precluding the making of quilts. The work inside and out of the crude double-pen log cabins in which nearly everyone lived, including the first governor of Alabama Territory and then the state, William Wyatt Bibb, was never-ending.⁶

Some of the chores of plain womenfolk, those families of small farmers, were cooking on an open hearth, washing clothes in an open cast-iron washpot, candle making, soap making, sewing and mending garments, tending and harvesting a garden, preserving food, and keeping chickens and other small livestock. This was in addition to mothering children in a time when cloth diapers were a luxury and medicines would have been homemade. Nonetheless, many women were pleased with the unspoiled nature of the rich and fertile land and the abundance of game and fish. Some historians think the pioneer women viewed the frontier as a garden to be cultivated.⁷

The wives of the wealthy planters had, in addition to many of the duties listed above, the care and tending of any slaves they owned, which included seeing to their medical care. And if the husband traveled away from the plantation, it fell to the mistress to run it during his absence. Although plain womenfolk nurtured the notion that the plantation mistress’s life was much easier than theirs, that was not the case. And those fabled mansions centered in acres and acres of cotton were not yet to be found in territorial Alabama—everyone lived in rough log houses.

NO EVIDENCE OF EARLY NATIVE AMERICAN QUILTING

The examples above refer, of course, to the frontier experience of Anglo-Americans (and their African American slaves) as they moved into Alabama, ousting and replacing the native population, who tried valiantly to hold on to their way of life and their lands in the onslaught of invaders. The textile record of native Alabamians is scanty, and that of possible prehistoric Native American bedcoverings practically nonexistent, but we do know that eight thousand years ago, Paleo-Indians left impressions of woven materials in the clay floor surfaces of Dust Cave in Lauderdale County, proving there was, at that early date, an understanding of fabric construction. The Woodland-era (300 BC–1000 CE) Indians wove mats that became shoes, clothing, and sleeping pallets, possibly the first evidence of any sort of manufactured bedding. Five hundred years ago, having learned to harvest fiber from native plants such as hemp, Mississippian Indians (the mound builders) left behind textile artifacts that included garments, bags, footwear, and blankets. Eventually (just before final removal in 1830s), some native Alabamians were beginning to assemble factories to gin, spin, and weave the cotton they were growing.⁸

ALABAMA’S EARLIEST QUILTS CAME FROM ELSEWHERE

As we have no record of Native Alabamian quilts, nor any idea that such a thing existed, we begin our story with those quilts made, or containing significant elements that were made, elsewhere, before Alabama became a state in 1819. Some were brought in before 1819, and others, not until later, but each has something to say about its owners and their journey and about its place in the evolution of Alabama’s quilt history as a whole. Many of these quilts were historical pieces even before they traveled to Alabama, and we present them according to their age—the oldest first, the next oldest second, and so on. One quilt among the eight presented here was not brought into the state, but actually made here around 1825, causing it to be, to the best of our reckoning, the oldest made in Alabama. It incorporates a piece of fabric manufactured in Pennsylvania around 1800. (See figure 1.7.)

A brief review of the status of quilting during the earliest days of what would become the United States will be helpful in recognizing the historicity of these very early pieces. We know that quilts were being made in England and other European countries long before the American colonies were established on the Atlantic seacoast and that a heritage of needlework was shared by the first women arriving in America. In addition to bringing a knowledge of needlework, it is very likely that those women immigrating to America brought actual pieces with them.

The Virginia Consortium of Quilts recorded a quilt in the collection of the George Washington Birthplace National Monument thought to have been made around 1640 by President George Washington’s great-great-grandmother, Amphyllis Twigdon Washington, at Sulgrave Manor in Essex, England. It is of white linen and is decorated with 140 embroidered designs, mostly in a floral theme, that are placed at regular intervals across the surface. Records accompanying the quilt indicate that it was acquired by the National Monument from Sulgrave Manor. The museum displays a modern reproduction of the quilt, along with a similarly embroidered bed canopy, on a bed made for President Washington’s nephew in 1779. Originally known as Pope’s Creek Plantation, the George Washington Birthplace National Monument was the continuous home of five generations of Washingtons.⁹

Handwritten records in the Hall of Records in Annapolis reveal three references to quilts as early as 1637–38; at this time, quilts were rare, and they were the most valuable item of bedding, found in the houses of well-to-do people such as merchant importers. Quilts in America from before 1650 were almost certainly imported, rather than homemade. Those that were not of chintz or calico were of silk or wool and were primarily of the wholecloth style.¹⁰

1682 QUILT—THE OLDEST MADE IN AMERICA

Because seventeenth-century quilts are so rare as to be almost unheard of, the AQBP members could not believe our good fortune when we were able to document in Greensboro a portion of a quilt made in 1682 in Boston, Massachusetts. The quilt fragment was among the holdings of the Croom family who built Magnolia Grove, the house museum that is most widely known as the boyhood home of Richard Pearson Hobson, Spanish American War hero (1898) and United States Congressman (1907–1915). His father was James Marcellus Hobson, and his mother was Sarah Croom Pearson, through whom Magnolia Grove descended to the Hobsons.

This is the oldest quilt or part thereof actually made in the United States, as far as is known at this time. As the curator of Old Sturbridge Village, Lynne Bassett, wrote in 1998, "A quilt that once belonged to Catherine Colepepper … of Virginia is perhaps the only surviving example [of a whole-cloth quilt] known to have been owned in seventeenth-century America…. No documented seventeenth-century bed quilt survives from New England, but there are scattered references to quilts as household possessions in the wills and estate inventories of the wealthy. The Colepepper quilt is an elaborately embroidered import from Bengal, India, dated 1600–30, now in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum at Colonial Williamsburg.¹¹ Various other quilts that have been put forward as being the oldest" date from the early 1700s.

The case for 1682 being the actual date of the Alabama quilt fragment is made through the written documentation accompanying it. In a note dated August 11, 1727 (the year she died), Sarah Kemble Knight described the quilt, which she referred to as my own work, and said she had made it 45 years ago. (She was born in Boston in 1666, so she would have been about sixteen when she stitched the quilt.) She wrote the note to accompany the quilt as she presented it to her relative and namesake Sarah Prout Christophers. The tradition was thus established that the quilt would go to a descendent in each generation named Sarah, according to another note dated May 13, 1850, by descendent Sarah Pearson Croom of Magnolia Grove in Greensboro, Alabama, where this portion of the quilt and a copy of its written documentation are housed today. Sarah Croom refers to the first note: "The piece of work alluded to in the above manuscript was a green silk quilt now in my possession, which was left me by my great-grandmother, born Sarah Christophers, and which I will transmit to one of my namesake nieces [writer’s emphasis] hereafter to be designated. Apparently, at some point, there were several Sarahs" in one generation: one of them, Sarah Hale, cut the quilt into eight pieces. Later family correspondence alludes to fragments of the quilt, each of which had copies of these documents attached to it. Only two original copies remain of Sarah Croom’s letter, the one at Magnolia Grove and one at the New London (Connecticut) Historical Society.¹²

Figure 1.1 Wholecloth quilt fragment, by Sarah Kemble Knight in Boston, Massachusetts,1682 45 inches by 16.5 inches. Silk quilted to wool; no batting. Collection of Magnolia Grove in Greensboro, a property of the Alabama Historical Commission. Photograph by Rus Baxley.

Sarah Kemble Knight was an independent and resilient woman, according to research on her life that accompanies the quilt fragment at Magnolia Grove. Married in 1689 to a sea captain considerably older than she was, Sarah busied herself during his long periods away from home by quilting and by teaching writing to children in her Boston neighborhood (reputedly including Benjamin Franklin and some of the famous Cotton Mather family). She put her skills as a writer to further public work, writing letters for people, copying court records or drafting legal documents, and eventually become known as somewhat of a legal expert. At one point in late 1704, a personal business matter required attention in New York City, and rather than leave its administration in the hands of a male relative, she traveled alone from Boston to New York and back again, an almost unthinkable feat for a woman of that time. She went on horseback, trading mounts as she went along; one horse actually dropped dead beneath her on the way home. At times she was able to hire a guide; at other times, she followed various mail coaches to her next destination. In spite of the discomforts of the trip, she determinedly kept a daily journal of what she saw and who she met along the way during the four-month journey that provides a unique perspective on a very young United States and on a very determined young (thirty-eight-year-old) gentlewoman of the early colonial period. The journal stayed with Sarah Kemble Knight’s estate, the executor of which was the same Sarah Christophers to whom Sarah Kemble Knight had given her green silk quilt. Like the quilt, the journal passed to succeeding generations.¹³

A FRENCH HUGUENOT QUILT

During the settlement of the eastern seacoast of America by European immigrants, stories arose devoted to the notion that many came here to escape religious persecution. Although financial motivations may have in actuality been stronger than religious ones, some groups did indeed seek haven from harassment by government and religious authorities because of their faith. Chief among these refugees in the southeastern colonies were French Huguenots, Protestants who were driven out of Catholic France. In 1685, Protestantism was declared illegal in France, and some 250,000 Protestants chose to leave rather than convert to Catholicism. Many prominent Huguenot families went to the Charleston area within the next twelve or so years and, after obtaining permission to own land from the British Crown, became prosperous plantation owners along the famous rivers around Charleston. Other Huguenots settled in Virginia in what is now Powhatan County on land granted by the Crown around 1700. Over time many Huguenots intermarried their English neighbors, and gradually their descendants migrated westward.¹⁴

Family history accompanying the quilt shown in figure 1.2 records that it was brought to Charleston in the 1690s from Rouen, France, by Abraham Dupont, a Huguenot moving to the New World in hope of a better life. He became a planter and one of the founders of the first French Huguenot Church in Charleston, which, now in its third building on the site, is still actively holding services. The quilt is said to contain scraps of fabric found in the mourning dresses worn by the women as they were forced out of their home country. Research has shown that some of the cotton prints in the quilt are similar to the type being produced in the Rouen area in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.¹⁵ The figure in the center of the quilt has been identified as a Huguenot cross, a symbol that has many variations.¹⁶

This quilt, made only eighteen years after Sarah Kemble Knight’s of 1682, is the second oldest to have come into Alabama to be documented by the AQBP. It was brought into the state, to Buyck (pronounced Buck) in Elmore County, via covered wagon, in late 1843 or early 1844 by the attributed maker’s granddaughter, Eliza Ann Buyck Spigener.¹⁷ Mrs. Spigener traveled with her widowed mother, Ann Dupont Buyck, who was the daughter of the attributed maker and, at that time, the owner of the quilt. Eliza Ann Spigener became the caretaker of the Huguenot quilt upon her mother’s death. She was also a skilled quilter in her own right, and one of her quilts, a Tree of Life she made around 1845, is figure 4.1 in this book.

EARLY SETTLEMENT OF MOBILE

Simultaneous to the settlement of the American colonies along the Atlantic seacoast, the area of the Gulf of Mexico that was to become Alabama was being explored by French interests. In 1682 (during the same time Sarah Kemble Knight was making her wholecloth quilt, and just eight years before Abraham Dupont reached Charleston) the French Canadian explorer Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, was floating down the Mississippi River, claiming and naming all he saw in honor of the Sun King, Louis XIV. As he explored the outer boundaries of the new Louisiana, de La Salle made his way across the Gulf of Mexico to Mobile Bay. He sailed up Mobile Bay to the Tensaw delta but could see no way inland through the islands and marshes at the mouth of the Mobile River. Twenty years later, another intrepid French Canadian explorer, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne d’Bienville, finally threaded his way up the river to establish Fort Louis de la Louisiane at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff, near present-day Mount Vernon, as the capitol of the French colony of Louisiana.

Figure 1.2 DuPont Huguenot Cross, possibly by Anne Faucheraud Dupont, c. 1700, brought to Buyck in present-day Elmore County in late 1843–or early 1844. Cottons and cotton chintzes, 83.5 inches long by 89 inches wide. Collection of Miriam Mc-Nair Parker, seven-times-great-granddaughter of the attributed maker. Photograph by Dave Martin.

Two years after that, Cavalier’s nephew, Nicholas de La Salle, in Bienville’s service, arrived at Mobilia, the village behind the fort, to take a census of Alabama’s first white settlement. The 1704 census (taken the same year as Sarah Knight’s trip from Boston to New York) included 180 men, 27 families with 10 children, and 11 Indian boys and girls held as slaves. There were 81 one-story wooden houses, a guardhouse, a forge, a gunsmith shop, and a kiln to make bricks.¹⁸

In 1704, the same year as the first Mobile census, a contingent of 23 virtuous maidens arrived from Paris with their chaperones, consisting of two gray nuns. These girls had been recruited as brides for the 180 single men in Mobilia; they were followed by other groups of young and well-bred ladies of virtuous raising. Some of them became known as cassette girls because of the small trunks, or cassettes they brought with them to contain their possessions. This practice of importing young ladies to the French colony continued after Mobile was moved in 1712 from Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff to its present location; there are records of a group arrival in 1728.¹⁹ No doubt several of the cassettes had a quilt or two tucked inside—if not a full quilt, at least a couple of quilted petticoats, which were the style at that time. In fact, mid-eighteenth-century inventories described petticoats as quilts, and covers for beds specifically as bed quilts.²⁰

Figure 1.3 Appliqué and Reverse Appliqué Tree of Life Medallion from the duMont family, Mobile, c. 1800–1820. 101 inches by 86 inches; cotton front, linen back. Thin cotton batting. Collection of the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont. Museum purchase, accession # 1952-609, acquired from Florence Peto.

Whether its progenitor was a petticoat or bed quilt, the third oldest quilt, from mid- to late eighteenth-century Mobile, is definitely a stylistic descendant of early French needlework. Done in a central medallion style, this quilt contains in the center square a bouquet of fanciful appliquéd flowers sprouting from a vase. A dark blue indigo print, typical of French fabrics of the early-to-mid-eighteenth century, is used for vase, leaves, and feathered plumes in an inner border. Two matching borders, positioned at top and bottom, display paired appliquéd plumes, and an outer border contains a serpentine vine of dark blue with branches of single flowers. Much of the work is done in reverse appliqué, not necessarily a French technique, but one not commonly used as prolifically as in this quilt, perhaps because it requires such a skilled hand.

This remarkable textile is now owned by the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, a result of quilt historian, teacher, and quilter Florence Peto’s Show Me Your Quilt effort undertaken in the 1940s and early 1950s. As Mrs. Peto traveled around the country lecturing and teaching, she used her free time to knock on the front doors of random houses and ask to be shown the household’s quilts, which she carefully documented. She also made it a point to visit antique shops in her quest for quilts; it was from a dealer in Mobile that she acquired this piece.²¹ Mrs. Peto sometimes guided these quilts into the holdings of various eastern museums. Her most enduring association was with the Shelburne in Vermont; she was close friends with the museum’s founder, Electra Havermeyer Webb, who shared Mrs. Peto’s interest in quilts. Mrs. Peto sold the Mobile quilt to the Shelburne in 1952; her original documentation includes only the city in which she acquired it and the name of the family, duMont, to which the dealer attributed the quilt. DuMont is one of the earliest names in Mobile and New Orleans, and ongoing efforts to place this quilt with a particular family of duMonts have been unsuccessful.

ANOTHER MID-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY QUILT SETTLED IN THE BLACK BELT

The northern and central portions of the area that would become Alabama were settled by people who arrived overland on the rudimentary roads that accessed the areas that would become Huntsville and Montgomery. One of those roads, the Montgomery and Talladega Stage Road, entered Alabama from Georgia at what is now Cleburne County,²² and would have been the most direct route from Wake Forest, North Carolina, to central Alabama. It was probably the road over which a quilt made around 1760 entered the state. Made of fabrics of linen and cotton woven by enslaved people on Eliza Macklin’s plantation in Wake Forest, North Carolina, it was also stitched by slaves, according to family history. It came to the state in 1834 with Eliza Macklin’s granddaughter, Caroline Charles Nichols, to Newbern, a town in Alabama’s Black Belt, named after New Bern, North Carolina. Newbern was a plantation town located in the center of vast acres of cotton owned and worked by immigrants from eastern coastal states. As extensive farming of cotton in the Carolinas and Virginia depleted the soils there, many families from those areas moved in the 1830s to Alabama to re-establish their plantations on fresh, fertile soil. (Today Newbern is the home of Auburn University’s famed Rural Studio, in which architecture students explore innovative ways to improve living conditions in rural areas.)

Figure 1.4a Wholecloth quilt by Eliza Macklin or her enslaved people in Wake Forest, North Carolina, c. 1760. Cotton and linen, 94.5 inches by 75 inches, not including fringe. Collection of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, gift of Mrs. Frances C. Higgin, great-great-granddaughter of Eliza Macklin. Accession # 86.3594.1. Photograph by Dave Martin.

Figure 1.4b The back of the quilt shows the tiny stitching and detailing that forms the raised pattern of the front.

The all-white quilt, more beautiful than the camera can capture because of its fragile condition, is worked in a delicate and restrained design. Tiny stitches form the channels through which cotton or thread was stuffed with a knitting needle, according to the great-great-granddaughter of Eliza Macklin.²³ This technique, known as cording, was used to form the stalks of the meandering, fruit-bearing grapevines that form the center of the piece. (Alternatively, a blunt needle threaded with yarn or heavy thread can be pulled through the stitched channel.) Double rows of clamshell quilting stitches border three sides, and raised motifs of leaves and flowers fill in background areas. There is no filling other than that used to fill the vines and stuff the grapes and flowers to give them dimension.

THE WIREGRASS: UNIQUELY DIFFERENT TERRAIN

Among the last areas in the state to be settled was the Wiregrass, the name for the southeastern corner of the state, below the fertile Black Belt. At this time in the state’s history, the Wiregrass was covered with large stands of majestic longleaf pine, which rose from a floor of the namesake plant of the area. Wiregrass, a plumey sort of bright green grassy plant that grows in individual fountains, not forming a solid carpet, flourished, like the pines, in the sandy soil typical of the coastal plain. The pine forests were generally unoccupied, even by Native Americans, who preferred hardwood creek bottoms. Whitetail deer were abundant, as they fed on the wiregrass, but the Indians had hunted them nearly to extinction even before 1819.

Figure 1.5 Prince’s Feather, anonymous, South Carolina, c. 1820–1830, brought to Monticello (Pike County) in the 1820s by the Passmoore family. Cotton, 77 inches by 76 inches. Collection of the Pioneer Museum of Alabama. Photograph by Mac R. Holmes.

The very earliest white residents realized the tremendous value of the free food the wiregrass furnished grazing animals, so their main purpose in settling the area was to raise cattle, which could roam freely through the forests. Farming came to the area only after the longleaf pines had been harvested by timber companies, destroying the wiregrass and changing completely the topography of the land.²⁴

A Prince’s Feather quilt made in South Carolina early in the second decade of the nineteenth century was brought into the Wiregrass in the 1820s, just after Alabama was granted statehood, by the grandmother of Mrs. Sam Passmore. It is in the central medallion style, with a large motif dominating the center of the quilt, sewed in place with very fine, close blanket stitches. Understated borders, one of a simple leaf motif, another of appliquéd eight-pointed, double-pink stars, and a third of blue striped fabric in the Pumpkin Seed design enlarge the quilt. The central motif is embellished with a little pink flower pot in two opposite corners and the Flyfoot motif in the other two. Later versions of this design often show it in a repeat-block configuration, with as few as nine or as many as twelve Prince’s Feathers arranged on the surface of the quilt. The design was thought to have been inspired by the plumes of the Prince of Wales’s battle helmet, thus the name. Inevitably, southern pronunciation elided the apostrophe, and the word became princess. Since the Princess Feather is a familiar cultivar in Alabama gardens, the name was adopted for the quilt design, even though it only vaguely resembles the flower.

A tale passed down through generations of Passmores, and recorded by curators at the Pioneer Museum of Alabama, told of the original settlers watching from their front porch as Native Americans filed past their house during their eviction from the area in the 1830s, during that sad final migration eventually known as the Trail of Tears that emptied Alabama of as many as one hundred thousand Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees and the many subfamilies of those major groups.

EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY QUILT MADE IT TO BEULAH LAND

A most unusual and very fine bedcovering was brought in 1821 into Limestone County, on the northern border of the state, to Beulah Land, near the current town of Athens. The purported maker was the wife of John Hobbs Lucas, a planter who traveled to the Tennessee River valley from Virginia in 1818 to buy prime cotton land as soon as it went on sale. Three years later, Lucas went back to Virginia to get his family and household possessions, including the bedcovering. He may have already begun construction on his mansion, which came to be considered one of the finest brick houses ever to be built in the area. According to Lakin Boyd of the Limestone County Historical Society, the house was torn down by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s or 1940s. Mr. Boyd also revealed that, in addition to prospering as a cotton planter, Lucas also owned and operated the Lucas Ferry, which crossed the Tennessee River from Beulah Land Bay to Courtland in Lawrence County on the south side of the river. Courtland was, in the 1820s, the social center of that area.²⁵

Figure 1.6 Tree of Life Central Medallion possibly by Martha Hobbs Lucas, Beulah Land (Limestone County), c. 1790–1800. English cotton chintzes, stripes, copperplate-printed fabrics, 94 inches by 94 inches. Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. William J. Hagen III in memory of Louise Warten Hagen, William James Hagen Jr., and William James Hagen III. Accession # 1980.278. Photograph by Sean Pathasema.

The bedcovering is not literally a quilt because it has no filler and is not quilted. It is completely finished, however, with the edges of the backing and the top turned under and invisibly slip-stitched together to form a clean, sharp edge. It clearly was constructed to display the various fabrics used in its composition and not to provide warmth. It could have been intended as a summer spread.

The fabrics and techniques of the top of the piece are intriguing. Incredibly tiny buttonhole stitches fasten dozens of individual leaves, flowers, and birds to the white background in an appliqué method known as broderie perse. The design, Tree of Life, was very popular with early quilters, perhaps because of the association of the name with the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. Various chintzes have been incorporated into this maker’s version of the Tree of Life, built around a rather oversized parrot perched on a limb in the top of the tree. There is a very distinct trunk to the tree, and it springs from a bowl. Grape clusters, formed of embroidery, are paired with long-beaked birds with appliquéd heads and wings. Four additional birds, cut as whole motifs, fly about in the background of the center square. Each corner of the central medallion is filled in with a different composition of flowers and leaves, all minutely buttonhole-stitched in place. An appliquéd border of flowers and leaves is placed between one single-striped border and one double-striped border. The outermost border is done in reverse appliqué and is finished with a final frame of four stripes. All the needlework shows a high degree of skill.

Perhaps the most fascinating of the fabrics in the design are the two ovals of copperplate-printed fabric that nestle in the bowl at the base of the tree, almost like eggs. Each is a scene in which the major figures are outlined with a stem stitch. Printing in the left-hand oval reads, Whittingden at Holloway hearing bowbells ring, and Turn down Whittingdon, Lord Mayor of Great London. The right-hand oval reads, Whittingdon presents his cat at V—, and Whittingdon brought Poor Puss and delivered her to the captain with tears in his eyes.

The ovals are cut from fabric featuring scenes from a well-known English folk tale, first written down in 1605, Dick Whittingdon and His Cat. The story has often been presented as a theater piece and repeatedly published over the years as small inexpensive paperback books. It tells the story of a poor boy who rises to become a wealthy fabric merchant and, eventually, Lord Mayor of London, all due to the superior abilities of his cat to catch and dispatch