Debby Cooney is guest blogging today. As a leading expert on Baltimore Album quilts she recently wrote an analysis of this 1862 Baltimore Album quilt top for the Baltimore Applique Society, summarized here. Photos are from the Richard Opfer auction site where the top sold last October. It's now in the inventory of quilt dealer Stella Rubin, who graciously allowed Debby to study and photograph details of this important Civil War artifact.
Motifs in the outer rows are made largely with red and green calico prints and solids.
Signed S Chanceaulme, probably Sarah Ann (1841-1922) one of Martin’s younger daughters, this block exhibits crossed cannons surmounted by the U.S. striped shield surrounded by an open acorn wreath; her name is embroidered in a banner beneath the cannons. This construction resembles a poster circulated in 1792 after the French Revolution proclaiming “Unite et indivisibilite de la Republique: liberte egalite fraternite ou la mort" 1792” (Unity and indivisibility of the republic: liberty, equality, fraternity, or death).
M W Sutton’s block B3 shows a striped shield flanked by a U.S. flag on each side, surmounted by a Great Seal of Maryland figure topped by a liberty cap. Embroidered flowers and war trumpets sit in the corners, with the name in a banner beneath laurel leaves. M W Sutton probably was Elizabeth Sutton’s father-in-law Pvt. Mordecai Sutton (1779-1865), a veteran of the War of 1812, who fought in the Battle of Baltimore of September 12-15,1814, a crucial point in the war. American troops stopped a land and naval assault on the city during which Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that became our national anthem. As they aged, the battle’s survivors, including Sutton, were known and honored as the “Old Defenders.”