Yankee Diary 6: Heart and Hand

Block # 6

Heart & Hand

by Becky Brown

From Carrie's diary, August, 1863.

"Canandaigua sent Dr. W. Fitch Cheney to Gettysburg with supplies for the sick and wounded and he took seven assistants with him. Home bounty was brought to the tents and put into the hands of the wounded soldiers. A blessed work."

Frederick Gutekunst photo of a field hospital at 

Gettysburg July, 1863.

The photographer sold these images to benefit soldiers' aid.

Carrie's society and the older women's aid group were busy filling barrels and boxes with medical and comfort supplies for wounded soldiers in the summer of 1863. A month after the Battle of Gettysburg eight men from town headed for the battlefield under the auspices of the Sanitary Commission, the national Union organization dedicated to aiding soldiers.

A nurse at Gettysburg after the battle mentioned Dr. Cheney's group in a letter published in The United States Sanitary Commission: A Sketch of its Purposes and its Work. She described:

 "a 'delegation' of just the right kind from Canandaigua, N.Y. with surgeon's dressers and attendants, bringing  a first-rate supply of necessities and comforts for the wounded....Canandaigua sent cologne with its other supplies, which went right to the noses and hearts of men." 

She scented makeshift handkerchiefs with the donated perfume and handed them out as an antidote to the horrible odors in the field hospitals.

Sanitary Commission headquarters at Gettysburg

Women also raised funds to purchase hospital supplies, primarily through fairs, which grew increasingly larger in 1864. Grandmother Beals's nephew David Dudley Field and wife Harriet were leaders in managing New York City's Metropolitan Fair.

The Metropolitan Fair, March and April, 1864 

The large Fairs were a combination needlework bazaar, museum and commercial exposition. 

In January, 1864 the New York Times asked for contributions:

"for temporary loan and exhibition. Connected with the Fair will be a Museum of Paintings. Statuary, Ancient Furniture, Autographs, Articles of Vertu, and Curiosities of every class. They will be on exhibition during the Fair and fully protected against injury."

Fair secretary Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood remembered the response to their request for "Articles of Vertu.":

"One of the most curious epidemics was that of an unbounded generosity. Everybody would give away his or her most treasured possession to be sold for the soldiers. I have always been afraid that many rare editions of books, taken from libraries and committed to these fairs, and many an autograph, were sacrificed. Old silver, too, was given with reckless freedom, to be sadly missed afterwards. And none of them brought what they were worth."

Grandfather Beals was among the generous:

"April 1 1864. Grandfather had decided to go to New York to attend the fair given by the Sanitary Commission,- and he is taking two immense books, which are more than one hundred years old, to present to the Commission, for the benefit of the war fund."

His patriotic gesture ended in disaster. Something terrible happened to 80-year-old Thomas Beals while he was in New York City---a fall or an epidemic.

Thomas Beals

"April 18.—Grandfather returned home to-day, unexpectedly to us. I knew he was sick when I met him at the door. He had traveled all night alone from New York, although he said that a stranger... on the train noticed that he was suffering and was very kind to him. He said he fell in his room at Gramercy Park Hotel in the night, and his knee was very painful. We sent for old Dr. Cheney and he said the hurt was a serious one and needed most careful attention... 

 "April 19.—Grandfather is much worse. He was delirious all night. 

"May 16.—I have not written in my diary for a month and it has been the saddest month of my life. Dear, dear Grandfather is dead. He was buried May 2, just two weeks from the day that he returned from New York."

Carrie and Anna and their brothers "felt that we were losing our best friend."

We can remember their much-loved grandparents with this heart and hand.

  

Heart and Hand Block

  

Block 6

by Barbara Brackman

9" x 15" Finished size

Variations on the heart and hand are an American applique classic. The inspiration is a block in a mid-19th-century sampler from the Flack collection.

Cut a background rectangle 9-1/2" x 15-1/2".

Press it in quarters and find the center.

Cut the templates from the pattern and add seams.
Prepare the shapes for applique.
Place on the folded lines in the rectangle as shown in the colored picture.

To Print:

Create a word file or a new empty JPG file.
Click on the image above.
Right click on it and save it to your file.
Check to be sure the size is correct and that the dotted line is 7 inches long.
Print that file.
Add seam allowances when you cut the fabric.

With Block 6 we are half-way finished.

Another family loss in spring, 1864:

While Grandfather lay ill Grandmother's niece Harriet Davidson Field also caught a fever and died in New York City on April 22nd. The New York City socialite had been a zealous committee woman at the Metropolitan Fair.

The Fair earned a reputation as fatal in the days when women were considered too frail to work or even volunteer. Fair secretary Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood wrote in her memoirs: 

"A great many earnest women killed themselves by overwork. A most gifted and rare woman, one of our first humorists, Mrs. C. P. Kirkland, fell dead in the fair building one crowded evening; and Mrs. David Dudley Field died at her own house, just after leaving the fair."

Caroline Matilda Kirkland, age 64, actually died at her own home on April 5th, the morning after a shift greeting visitors in the Arms and Trophies room. From her obituary:

"Mrs. Kirkland retired from the fair last evening perfectly well, was well this morning when she rose, but about nine o’clock was seized with apoplexy, and before medical aid could arrive, was dead."

It might be that Harriet Field and her Uncle Thomas Beals contracted a serious disease spread through the crowds at the Fair.
(Don't even think about the porta-potties at such a gathering.)

Potholder Quilt: Any Holder but a Slave Holder

"Good Bye Dixie"

A few years ago a California blogger wrote a post about a family hand-me-down: A crazy quilt from Beloit (Wisconsin?)

It's a typical crazy quilt from about 1880-1900, but

she thought the picture of the freed slaves saying "Good Bye Dixie"

indicated it was from the Civil War era, twenty years earlier.

The embroidered image might have been stitched in the 1860s, saved in the later quilt. The image is of a dancing African-American couple seen from the rear. It looks like Berlin work, what we'd call needlepoint, done with wool over a canvas.

The image of a dancing couple was familiar in the 19th century. They were stitched in front view and rear in potholders with a pun. "Any holder but A Slave holder"

St Croix Wisconsin Historical Society Collection.

Shown on Patricia L. Cummings's webpage.

http://www.quiltersmuse.com/Any-holder-but-a-slave-holder-potholders.html

Chicago Historical Society

The image is seen as an offensive stereotype today, but in the mid-19th century the "humor" of the pun and the figures indicated an antislavery sympathy.

The two in the Chicago museum were accompanied with the history that they were sold at one of Chicago's Northwestern Sanitary Fairs (1863 & 1865). Scholars Beverly Gordon and Beverly Lemire agree that these punning potholders originated with the fund-raising fairs during the Civil War. This is just the kind of  quick needlework with a message that children and women did to support the Union cause.

The Smithsonian owns one that shows how the work

was done, counted stitches over a coarsely woven fabric.

The background was not filled in on this example.

A child named Lena sent a cross-stitched piece to Frederick Douglass in 1882. The embroidery and his thank-you letter are preserved at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at the New-York Historical Society. Lena's caption "Any Holder but a Slave Holder" seems to be a relic of slavery days fifteen years earlier. The piece might have been made in the 1880s or have been an older souvenir.

http://historydetectives.nyhistory.org/2013/02/blast-from-the-past-letters-of-appreciation/

The dancing couple continued after the Civil War with celebrations of freedom:

Cross-stitch on a coarse background from an auction.

Was it a potholder once the pun was gone?

It looks like a potholder.

The "We's Free" variation seems to have been sold as a commercial

embroidery project.

"We's Free"

Cross Stitch on perforated paper

Collection: Museum of East Tennessee History

Perhaps one bought this with the image already embroidered. The buyer filled in the background.

Front and rear of one from an online auction.

This paper pattern has a date of January 15th, 1865,

which may allude to the 13th Amendment:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude..., shall exist within the United States..."

The amendment was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865.  The piece is probably commemorative, made later.

It's interesting that these punched paper pieces

have no embroidery in the backgrounds.

Back to the quilt at the top of the post:

I haven't seen another embroidery with the motto "Good Bye Dixie." I'd guess it was a late-19th century piece, probably done about the same time as the crazy quilt. Could it allude to the Exoduster migration about 1880 when thousands of former slaves left the South for lands in the Great Plains?

See the quilt at

http://daughterofthegoldenwest.blogspot.com/2010/01/another-hand-me-down.html

Flags & Baskets & Flags

Danice has finished Block #5

The Union Basket

And Vrooman's Quilts is on her way.

A few more flags from mid-19th-century albums.

Fitting a flag into a square, nicely done in

Mary Nevius Potter's album at the Newark Museum

Geometry based on five.

Not always easy.

Susan B. Rogers's quilt at the Smithsonian.

Wish I could see what is in the corers of this one from

a pre-war Rockland County, New York sampler.

Tassels?

Next Wednesday, June 28th, Block 6.

Quilts Buried With the Silver #3

Quilt in the collection of the Ohio Historical Society.

#H5607

This is not an Ohio quilt. At first glance the cut-out chintz applique

looks to be a Southern quilt. The caption confirms that regional origin.

"Quilt made of cotton chintz dates from 1815-1840 and was possibly made in North Carolina."

When the donor gave this quilt in 1979 she told this story.

"Nathan Farmin, a Union soldier, found the quilt during a foraging expedition in North Carolina in 1861 and sent it north. He found it in a chest that had been buried."

Burying the quilt did not keep it safe. But the tale gives us more confirmation that quilts were indeed buried in trunks. And this one survived rather well.

No reports of silver.

See more posts about the topic:

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2017/02/quilts-buried-with-silver-1.html

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2017/03/quilts-buried-with-silver-2-north-south.html

And see the quilt at the Ohio History Connection here:
http://catalog.ohiohistory.org/Presto/content/Detail.aspx?q=SCA1NjA3&ctID=N2IxOTczM2EtNmQ5Yy00MDc3LTljYmItZjcwZTI3N2ZlYmNl&rID=NzExMDc=&qcf=&ph=VHJ1ZQ==&bckToL=VHJ1ZQ==&

Thistle Quilters' Westering Women

The Thistle Quilt Guild in Nova Scotia, Canada, just had their quilt show. This display is all Westering Women samplers.

Sheila's model

Sheila, the program director, organized the guild's block-of-the-month last year.

The thirty or so members followed the monthly blog here and Sheila added a few more blocks to make the quilt larger.

They all used the traditional set. It's a small guild but obviously they are enthusiastic stitchers.

Sheila gave them 20 blocks instead of 12.

I Photoshopped her model to give you

a wrinkly picture of all 20.

I am always pleased to have guilds use my BOM's for their monthly programs. The Westering Women pattern began as a BOM for my own guild several years ago.  It's not too late to start Yankee Diary with your guild.

Antislavery Fair Crib Quilt by Mary Lincoln Cabot

Quilt by Mary Hersey Lincoln Cabot (1817-1897), about 1840

35-1/2" square

The Hingham Massachusetts Historical Society has in its

collection this anti-slavery crib quilt in excellent condition.

It's pieced of two polished cottons or cotton sateens.

 An Anti-Slavery sentiment is inked in the center of each block.

The block is a square in a square that

forms a checkerboard when the color is controlled.

The paper label stitched to the front:

"This quilt was made by Mary Hersey Lincoln of Hingham for one of the Anti-Slavery fairs held in Boston about 1840. Miss Lincoln was the first preceptress of Derby Academy.
Presented by her daughter Miss Theodora Cabot"

Theodora might have been wrong about her mother being first Preceptress of the Derby Academy as it was founded in 1784 and Mary was born in 1817 (The school still exists.)
UPDATE: Kathy tells us in the comments:
Mary Hersey (Lincoln) Cabot was the daughter of Nathan and Martha (Fearing) Lincoln. Her uncle Abner Lincoln was the first Preceptor of Derby Academy. 

Mary was an interesting person, an antislavery suffragist. She married Frederick Samuel Cabot whom she met at Brook Farm, a utopian community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Both were residents in 1844. After Mary left, friend Marianne Dwight described her in a letter in September, 1845:

"I miss Mary Lincoln much. The strange child! No one can accuse her of being a civilizee, for she is one of the least civilized beings I have ever met with. I can't help liking her, I believe her aims are high, ---but perhaps she is so independent as not to consult sufficiently other people's happiness and convenience---she is very childish----a mere baby in some of her ways; and to this I now attribute many of her odd actions. With much purity, she has, it seems to me, very little delicacy for a woman."

Brook Farm's main building during the Civil War.

The experiment in communal living lasted from 1840 to 1847.

Perhaps living in a communal situation was too much for Mary's independent nature.

Fred Cabot in his early twenties already had a reputation as an abolitionist leader in connection with the Latimer Case. In 1842 Rebecca and George Latimer escaped from slavery, leaving Norfolk, Virginia, for Boston. Latimer was recognized and arrested to be returned to Virginia. Fred led a protest, one of the first actions to demand that a formerly enslaved person in a free state was legally free.

He and two others founded the Latimer Journal & North Star, a short-lived abolitionist newspaper.

Mary Lincoln and Fred Cabot married in 1847 and had six children, two of whom died in childhood. They lived in Hingham, Massachusetts. After the Civil War Fred founded the Mill Owners' Mutual Fire Protection Company. He died in 1888 and Mary in 1897. Both are buried in Hingham.

See Mary Lincoln Cabot's quilt here at the Quilt Index:
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1D-FC-FE

Read more about the Latimer case and the Latimer family here:

http://patrickmurfin.blogspot.com/2015/02/lewis-latimerlike-light-of-sun-it.html

Digital Train Wreck

My digital pattern business has been a virtual train wreck this past few weeks.

At least for patterns 5-8 of Yankee Diary.

And it's all my fault. I went on vacation.

First I tried to get everything organized in a mad rush before I went to Spain for two weeks. So I mis-numbered the blocks.

If you ordered a PDF or paper pattern for Blocks 5-8 you may notice that the patterns go:
5
6
7
9

9 is really 8. So just cross out that 9 and write 8. Easy enough to fix.

I tired to fix it in the pattern file when I got back but I was so jet-lagged I have not been able to think straight for a week.
So I uploaded the wrong file. I think I have finally fixed that and everybody who wanted a PDF got the right file...
In which the patterns are numbered 5-8.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/530963363/yankee-diary-bom-civil-war-quilts?ref=shop_home_active_2

If I were you I'd ignore me for another week.