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By Sandra Dallas Some years ago, while browsing through books at a Denver antiques show, I came across an 1883 diary that was held together by an elastic band. Written by a farm woman, the journal was a simple one. It made no mention of national or local political events. There was no record of murder or scandal. The writer did not even put down her name or town. All I knew was that she had lived somewhere in the West and that she probably was close to 70 years of age, because she mentioned celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary. The tiny volume was remarkable only because it recorded the never-ending drudgery of everyday life, notable because it was typical of the lives of Victorian farm women. At the time, I was not much interested in quilts, but I remembered how the anonymous journal keeper pieced her bedding as she went about her other chores. So when I set out to write a book on quilting in Colorado and neighboring states, "The Quilt That Walked to Golden," I went back to the journal and the writer's comments for 1883: "We worked on quilt….Laura [probably her daughter] had sick head-ache." (Feb. 15.) "Working on quilt….Laura is some better but miserable yet." (Feb. 16.) "Laura a little better. We worked on the bedquilt all day." (Feb. 18.) "We finished up our patch work….The Dr. came to night." (March 6.) And finally, on May 8, "Our darling Laura has gone. Her spirit took its flight at half past eight this evening." For this broken-hearted mother, quilting was both a part of life's work and a death watch. Today we consider quilting to be women's art. Beginning with America's Bicentennial (and Colorado's Centennial), quilting has come to be viewed as a unique American art form, and quilts are prized as much for their artistry as their usefulness. But for thousands of 19th-century Colorado women, like the unknown keeper of the 1883 diary, quilting was a household chore as pleasurable or as onerous as cooking and cleaning and child-rearing. Women might be proud of their quilts, but they considered them so unimportant that they rarely signed or even dated them. When I set out to write "The Quilt That Walked to Golden" nearly four years ago, I found that researching Colorado quilts was more difficult than I'd imagined. Early Colorado women wrote a great deal about cooking but little about sewing, let alone quilting. There is virtually no information filed under "quilt" in historical archives, and until the last few years, the word "quilt" didn't appear in indexes, even in books about women. That meant paging through scores of journals and first-hand accounts looking for sewing references. The work was tedious but rewarding. Women prepared for the trip west by raising flax for linen or sheep for wool to be spun into thread, then woven into cloth that was made into clothing. Women, including Augusta Tabor, wife of H.A.W. Tabor, Colorado's future silver king, made tents by hand. One prospector who preceded his wife to the gold fields wrote home: "Quilts don't answer very well on the road. They get torn too easy." Guidebooks suggested early gold seekers take 10 pairs of blankets each, but women weren't about to leave behind their precious quilts, especially if they were friendship quilts. Each block of a friendship quilt, often made in Churn Dash or Chimney Sweep patterns, was pieced by a different friend, signed in ink or embroidered with a name and sentiment, assembled and quilted in secret, then presented to the woman as a parting gift. When "I get lonesome all by myself, I read the names on the pink and white 'Irish Chain' quilt the school children pieced for me," wrote Orpha Baldwin McNitt, a school teacher who moved to Evans, Colorado, in 1870. The first major sewing project in Colorado was probably completed by
Katrina Murat, who ran the squat log Eldorado Hotel in Denver with her
husband Henri. In 1860, Katrina tore up her red petticoat and used it
to make an American flag, which was flown from a pole on top of the hostelry.
The first documented quilt top, or possibly a collection of quilt blocks,
was brought to Colorado in 1859 by Susan Adair. Susan called the quilt
a "Jennie Linn," but quilters today refer to it as Coxcomb. |
Susan was typical of Colorado quilters. She brought her quilt patterns with her. Colorado women didn't have time to design quilts. Their first bedcovers were serviceable ones, made quickly in simple patterns such as string star or log cabin. By the time women had the leisure to meet for sewing bees, they had access to magazines such Gody's Lady's Book and copied fashionable quilt designs rather than making up their own. So Colorado produced no unique quilt designs. The only quilt produced in this part of the country that comes close to being unique is the sugan, a narrow, crudely-made quilt of huge rough squares used by cowboys. It's similar to the hired man's quilt in Kansas and other rural areas. As they acquired more leisure time, women gathered for quilting bees. On the eastern plains of Colorado, the Keota quilters are now famous for the quality of the quilts they made from about 1900 to 1940. Those quilts are an encyclopedia of pop designs-Colonial Lady and Dresden Plate, for instance. Quilting groups were a source of support during the Great Depression. When my father lost his job in 1933, my newly married parents moved to my grandparents' farm at Harveyville, Kansas, where Mom was welcomed into her mother-in-law's quilting circle. Mom died just after I began "The Quilt That Walked To Golden," and I discovered a diary she kept during the early years of her marriage. She recorded how proud she was of the Double Wedding Ring quilt she pieced that summer, the only quilt she ever made. It's anybody's guess whether the ladies at Hamill House or any of the other historic Georgetown houses held quilting bees, but certainly Georgetown women sewed. So did children. Girls between the ages of five and 12 at the First Presbyterian Church of Georgetown formed the Little Willing Workers Society, probably in the 19th century, and made quilt patches to earn money to buy stained glass windows for the church. Years later, three Georgetown women, Eva Mackintosh, Geraldine Merrill, and Betsy Gottschalk, were instrumental in designing a Colorado Centennial tapestry honoring women. Called Women's Gold, for the yellow roses that grow wild in Georgetown and other Colorado mountain towns, the embroidered tapestry helped revive interest in women's needle arts. It now hangs in the Colorado capitol in Denver. Another Georgetown resident, Marge Hedges, played a part in Colorado's quilt revival. She and three friends opened Quilts In The Attic, a quilt shop in Denver in 1975. They expected the quilt craze to last a couple of years. The shop is still going strong. Hedges estimates that today's quilter has fabric worth $5,000 stashed away in her workroom.
That's a far cry from the quilters of 140 years ago who made their way across the plains in covered wagons. One of them was Mary Jane Burgess. Mary Jane's husband, Thomas, had come to Colorado seeking gold, but he found prospecting hard work and decided an easier way to get rich was land development. So he went back home to Ohio, where he and his brother filled their covered wagons with hammers and nails, lumber, glass, and supplies to erect a business block in Golden. There was room left over only for foodstuffs and other essentials. The two men told their wives they could take along only the garments they could put on their backs. Not willing to be to leave behind their clothes, the wives donned everything they owned and walked beside the wagons to Golden, wearing their entire wardrobes. Later, as her clothes wore out, Mary Jane cut them up and made a quilt out of them. The family dubbed the finished coverlet "The Quilt That Walked To Golden." HGI board member Sandra Dallas is the author of "The Quilt
That Walked to Golden," a project of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum,
Golden, Colorado. |
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