americanlegacy

Quilts tell many stories. Although it is an ancient art, quilting always has had special significance for American women. Recently, social historians have studied quilts just as they do diaries and letters, to learn about life among the pioneer families of early America and the western frontier.

Quilts were made to celebrate marriages, to welcome new babies, and to honor friends. Album quilts and "friendship quilts" were embroidered with names. To chronicle their lives, Afro-American quilters created narrative quilts using intricate applique. Quilting parties are still important events, and a quilt may be a record of community history or a symbol of personal rememberance.

For generations, quilts have been often mentioned in American conversation, fiction, essays and poems. In the paragraphs that follow, quilts unfold as eloquent metaphors for many of the things that we have in common and hold most dear.

What with rearin' a family, and tendin' to a home, and all my chores - that quilt was a long time in the frame. The story of my life is pieced into it. All my joys and all my sorrows.
Lincoln County, West Virginia, Quilter. The Mountain Artisans Quilting Book

The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep, washed and carded by hand. The quilts had been made by her old mother, and given to her for a marriage portion...one was the popular "log cabin" pattern, another the "laurel-leaf", the third the "blazing star". This quilt Mahailey thought too good for use, and she had told Mrs. Wheeler that she was saving it "to give Mr. Claude when he got married".
Willa Cathier, One of Ours

This was a piece of my wedding dress, Love and laughter and tenderness...
And this sprigged muslin
Color of corn, I wore right after our John was born......
Molly Newman and Barbara Damashek, "Jenny", in Quilters

It is fall in Wisconsin; red maple leaves brighten the lawn like stitches in a quilt ....
My uncles, I want to ask, as you harvest the fruit to dry, to sweeten in the sun, do you remember my mother who sang you to sleep under the quilts?
Tel me a story I have forgotten.
Kyoko Mori, "Uncles"

But how many passages of my life seem to be epitomized in this patchwork quilt.... here is a piece of that radiant cotton gingham dress which was purchased to wear to dancing school..... By this fragment I remember the gown in which I supposed myself ... to look truly angelic. Here is a piece of the first dress which was ever earned by my own exertions! What a feeling of exultation, of self-dependence, of self-reliance was created by this effort!
Anonymous Mill Worker, Lowell, Massachsetts, ca 1840-1845 "The Lowell Offering"

Indigenous as Vermont maple sugar, picturesque as a split-rail fence in Appalachia, dignified as a New England sea captain's mansion, romantic as the white-pillared plantation houses of the deep South, patchwork is uniquely interwoven with the story of America.
Lenice Ingram Bacon, American Patchwork Quilts

.....a quilt was often the family's diary. Many patterns that are still used today, such as the wagon wheel, star over Texas, log cabin, and cactus flower, originated from wagon train living.
Eleanor Coerr, The Josefina Story Quilt

"We will make a quilt to help us always remember home," Anna's mother said. "It will be like having the family in back-home Russia dance around us at night".
Patricia Polacco, The Keeping Quilt

The simple pleasures of the every-day life of the colonists and their close touch with nature are reflected in their quilt-patch names. Great grandmother had no movies, no automobiles, no airplanes, no radios; is it any wonder she wove her pleasure into patchwork quilts?
Carrie A. Hall and Rose G Kretsinger, "The romance of the Patchwork Quilt"

Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.
Eliza Calvert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky

A little girl's mother made the quilt to keep her warm when the snow came down.... She stitched the quilt by a yellow flame, humming all the time. She stitched the tails of falling stars.
Tony Johnston, The Quilt Story

Of all the things a woman's hands have made, The quilt so lightly thrown across her bed -
The quilt that keeps her loved ones warm - Is woven of her love and dreams and thread.
Carrie A Hall. The Patchwork Quilt

Star quilt, sewn from dawn light by fingers of flint, take away those touches meant for noisier skins,
anoint us with grass and twilight air, so we may embrace, two bitter roots pushing back into the dust.
Roberta Hill Whiteman "Star Quilt"

....such demand for cotton and such graceful rolling of spools across the "rising sun" could only be witnessed in a New England quilting frolic.
Ann S. Stephens. "The Quilting Party"

America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt - many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson

.... Just as the pieces of the quilt are sewn together with interlocking stitches, all people are linked together in the fabric of our world. In a way, the patchwork quilt represents all the different people of the world. We are individual in our attitudes, life-styles, and backgrounds, yet we share so much of what it means to be human.
Teresa Gustafson "Love is a Blanket"

And what is life?
A crazy quilt;
Sorrow and joy, and grace and guilt,
With here and there a square of blue
For some old happiness we knew ------
Douglas Malloch "A Crazy Quilt"

Many customs and beliefs grew up.... If a young girl slept under a new quilt, she would dream of the boy she was going to marry.
Eliot Wigginton, The Foxfire Book

It was the custom to place a cat in the center of a new quilt. The unmarried girls and boys held the edges of the quilt and tossed the cat into the air. The person closest to the spot where the cat landed would be the next to be married.
Patsy and Myron Orlofsky Quilts in America

At your quilting, maids, don't tarry.
Quilt quick if you would marry.
A maid who is quiltless at twenty-one,
Never shall greet her bridal sun.
Traditional Verse

Did great grandma Glenda know when she stitched all those pieces together that someday her great-granddaughter would lie awake under the quilt, tossing and turning and worrying? When she sewed it, she probably didn't think twice about her own children, let alone about her great-grandchildren. Probably she was thinking about her new husband and what they'd do under the quilt.
Jocelyn Riley "Merle", in Crazy Quilt

Haying and threshing and clover-seed hulling and roadwork day belonged to the men. But Quilting Day belonged to the women. It was all right for a man to deliver his wife at a quilting, but he had to get away as fast as he could. If he went to the house and sat down with the women folks and tried to be sociable, they'd have run him out with brooms.
Homer Croy, Country Cured

The quilt pattern was gloriously drawn in oak-leaves, done in indigo, and soon all the company, young and old, were passing busy fingers over it and conversation went on briskly.... Thus the day was spent in friendly gossip as they quilted and rolled and talked and laughed .....
Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Minister's Wooing

I like assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth, for they were scraps of gowns I had seen worn, and they reminded me of the persons who wore them..... One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me. It was a delicate pink and brown sea-moss pattern, on a white ground, a piece of a dress belonging to my married sister, who was to me bride and angel in one.
Lucy Larcom, Lowell Mill Worker (1824-1893) A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory