Wednesday, October 30, 2019

A Show of Hospital Sketches Quilts---2022

My Hospital Sketches top is done. Here it is with the scrappy border
and an extra Dot. It's on its way to quilter Lori Kukuk who will make
it look really good.

I have two and a half years to get it bound as a museum curator has asked if we'd like to have a show of our quilts in the summer of 2022. I said, "Yes, indeed."

Seven Sisters Quilting from Instagram

Space will be limited so we will have a juried exhibit. I'll keep you posted over the next 2-1/2 years.You know how good our collective memory is. Two and a half years!!!

Wendy Caton Reed's doing hers potholder style, quilting
& binding each block.
She'll be done soon.

Why don't you write me a note at MaterialCult@gmail.com now and tell me you want to be reminded in about 18 months that you'd like us to consider your quilt for the show. I'll keep a list and remind you.

Diana Quinn

I'll also post about it here in a year or two ---- Stay tuned.

Karrin Capps Hurd

Lisa Wagner

Most pictures from our Facebook page. I think it would be smart to keep this page for next year's applique too.


Saturday, October 26, 2019

Calico Lining in a Confederate Hat

Here's a cool item. A Confederate cap, called a Kepi.
Wool on the outside


With a calico lining.

One could probably have a nice collection of hand-made kepi, but this one sold for about $8,000.

Here's what the seller said:

"Kepi...manufactured in the Richmond Virginia Depot. Similar examples can be found a museums across the world including the ...American Civil War Museum which has a similar example. ...constructed from grey and red Kersey wool. During the mid-war period the largest mill in Virginia was the Crenshaw Woollen Mill in Richmond, which made "all wool goods". Another mill was the Danville Manufacturing Co. in Danville, Virginia. This firm also supplied "thousands of yards of Kersey" throughout the war. By 1863 the caps produced by the Richmond Depot had colored bands and crowns. "

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Some Design Walls


Nancy Bekofske's got all nine blocks of the Hospital Sketches quilt done.
Here's her design wall.

So has Janet Olmstead

And Jeanne Arnieri

Here's Julee Prose's design floor - her deck with her sashed blocks

Susanna Pangelinan is working on a fabulous border

Robbie Smith's border is finished!

And so is Peggy Sandfort's.

This is Maureen Franz's first applique quilt.
I think she has a talent for it.


Lin Trivisonno McQuiston bought the pattern ahead of time, so she
is completely finished. She redrafted to 10" squares.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

Lydia Dilliner's Flag Quilt


Several years ago our local newspaper featured this photo of a flag quilt owned by a woman who had inherited it from her great-grandmother. The pattern is the Peterson's Magazine Stars & Stripes Bed-Quilt printed in color in the summer of 1861.


Ad for the magazine:
"Every lady ought to have a number, so as to work one of these quilts."
Many women did.

The family story:
The quilt was "made by Lydia Frances Dilliner a teen-ager who grew up in a Union-supporting family in Point Marian, Pa., near the Mason-Dixon line. She was about 17 to 19 years old when she made the quilt. It was 1858 to 1860." ....During the Civil War, the Confederates were coming up into the vicinity. The family hid the quilt in the loft so the Confederates (wouldn't know they were) Union supporters."
Point Marion

Lydia Frances had to have made the quilt after 1861. Born in 1842, she was about 19 when the pattern inspired her. At the time she was living with her parents Ambrose and Elizabeth Dilliner in Point Marion on a farm on the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania. Western Virginia, which became the state of West Virginia in 1863, is south of Point Marion.


She had three sisters and two brothers. In 1868 she married farmer James Estep Sturgis and raised three children Leonard Ross, Carrie and Elizabeth. James lost two brothers during the Civil War. David died on May 29, 1862 in Baltimore and Phineas died four days later in Yorktown, Virginia.

James E. Sturgis "has pronounced opinions...and can well express them."

James died in 1918 and Lydia died at the age of 89 in 1931 in Point Marion.


Greene County veteran's reunion in 1895

How great that the quilt descended in their family in such good condition.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Susannah Deering Lohry's Grant Quilt: And a Few Digressions

The California Project's book Ho For California! pictured this collage showing front and back of a quilt made by Susannah Deering Lohry (about 1824-1883) in El Dorado County, perhaps in the 1870s. The back recycles a campaign banner for Union General Ulysses S. Grant.

We can't see much of the patchwork side but the pattern looks to be a variation of Birds in the Air,
a two patch of two different sized half-square triangles.

Here's a similar design from my collection,
a little older with some newer patches.

Wallace's Farmer called it  Birds of the Air in 1928

This one's more like Susannah Lohry's with 9 small triangles in each block,
again older with a chintz border.

It's hard to figure out how big the hand-painted banner on the reverse is, but it may be fairly large as it was probably designed as a parade banner during U.S. Grant's 1868 or 1872 Presidential campaigns. The quilt has preserved the banner, which is worth more than the patchwork side.

Similar campaign banner from Heritage Auctions

We might guess the Lohrys had Republican sentiments. The family kept the quilt, their bible and a good deal of information about Susan and Adam Lohry. And in the age of the internet we can find a little more.

Susannah Deering was from Kentucky, marrying German immigrant Adam Lohry in 1843. She gave birth to several children in New Franklin, Missouri, a town of Kentucky immigrants on the Missouri River north of Boonville.

Santa Fe Trail marker at Old Franklin, closer to (and often in) to
the Missouri River than New Franklin

New Franklin was an important town on the road west when the great Western migrations began after gold was discovered in California in 1849. The Lohrys joined the thousands on the overland trail, arriving in Northern California in the fall of 1853. They settled in the boom town of Uniontown on the American River in California's Gold Country. 


Uniontown was near California's first world-shaking gold discovery but Adam Lohry chose a more practical occupation than prospecting. He opened a store on the banks of the American River, selling goods to the miners, acting as a banker and prospering.

Google map aerial photo showing Uniontown (Lotus) today

The Placerville Guards march through town during the Civil War
Placerville was larger than Uniontown, although the
architecture doesn't look any more sophisticated.

When the Civil War began in 1861 California, a free state so far away from the fighting, was not affected in any great fashion. But all that gold was attractive bait for Southern partisans who tried ideas large and small. One big idea that failed: Creating a secessionist Confederate California state. 

Private in the Petaluma Guard, which put
down Confederate unrest in Healdsburg

A small idea that succeeded: A local stage robbery:

This story has a very familiar ring

In 1864 "the two coaches of the Pioneer Stage line were stopped by six men, armed with shotguns and pistols, and eight sacks of bullion taken away....They demanded the [Wells Fargo] treasure box...ordered to throw out the bullion [The driver] replied 'Come and get it.' And while two of them covered him with their guns, two others came and took the bullion."

Andy Devine and George Bancroft in the movie Stagecoach

The robbers took three sacks of bullion from the second coach. "The 'captain' of the band...handed to him the following receipt: 'This is to certify that I have received from Wells, Fargo & Co., the sum of $ --- cash, for the purpose of outfitting recruits enlisted in California for the Confederate States Army.' "

Lohry store in the 1940s.

The war may have been far away but mining camp life must have been tough. Susan's daughter Johanna (Anna) who traveled the overland trail as an infant was later described as a "lady of irrepressible determination and force of character," and we might guess her mother was too. Taking several young children across the country, living in a mining camp for the rest of her life, giving birth to ten children on the frontier and running a store after her husband's death took determination. 

Lohry store today.
 Unionville's name changed to Lotus, California

The Lohrys suffered tragedies too. In 1858 the children accidentally set the house on fire, destroying it completely. Of her ten children only four daughters survived Susan. One of the girls eloped, much to her father's anger, and one of the girls (maybe the same girl) married a man who stole the gold out of the Lohry store safe about 1880.

The American River moves fast enough in 
April to sweep one downstream quickly.

Adam threw himself into the American River soon after the theft in April, 1880. There was no prettying up a suicide in the Gold Country. In August 20, 1880 the papers reported the recovery of the body of the "well-known merchant at Uniontown who committed suicide by drowning...near Jayhawk" and Shingle Springs. The family memory is that "Susan placed an ad in the Placerville Mountain Democrat, offering a fifty-dollar reward for the recovery of Adam's body."


Susan died a few years later in Lotus/Uniontown in February, 1883.

Susan was not fortunate in her sons-in-law. At 24 Anna married Lotus Press proprietor George Washington Gallanar in 1876, moving to San Francisco and Sacramento and then in 1888 south to the pretty little coastal town of Pacific Grove near Monterey. Their son Frederick was born in 1877.

Pacific Grove in the early 20th century
"In 1889 Mr. Gallanar commenced the publication of the Pacific Grove Review and conducted the same until Mrs. Gallanar assumed control in 1890. The following year she became sole owner and editor of the Review, and now conducts its publication." 
They did like a cover-up in Pacific Grove. George Gallanar had a drinking problem and he seems to have disappeared from Anna's life in 1890, but not from the newspapers. In 1903 he shot and killed a man named Pete Garman in Redding during railroad labor troubles and served several years in San Quentin. While in prison his second wife Hannah Kuhn Gallanar visited him daily with a lunch and a smuggled bottle of whiskey. 



Hannah Kuhn Gallanar obtained a divorce in 1908 after three children. The 1920 census found George on the outside, living in Richmond near Oakland and married to Izola Gallanar. He died in Dallas, Texas in 1940.

"She hath done what she could."

But I digress. Anna Lohry Gallanar and her newspaper would be an interesting topic to follow, however,  the subject here is Civil War Quilts. 

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

2020 BOMs at Civil War Quilts

Jeanne Arnieri's beautiful blocks for Hospital Sketches
The 2019 Block of the Month
What will she think of next year?

We've been alternating pieced and appliqued quilts here for the Civil War Quilts Blocks of the Month, every other year. For 2020, however we are going to have two series, one pieced and one appliqued: Applique on the last Wednesday of the month;  pieced on the second Wednesday.

I usually focus my reading on a topic every year; last year I decided to read about South Carolina and the causes of the Civil War. Both series grew out of that reading.



The pieced BOM will be called Yankee Notions---Twelve traditional pieced blocks with monthly stories about two kinds of Yankee Notions:
  • Tangible sewing notions manufactured in the North. 
  • Philosophical and cultural notions dividing North and South.

The word notion has long meant an idea—-perhaps an idea that appears a little wild to the observer. Elite Southerners viewed New Englanders and New Yorkers with their foreign notions as threatening their aristocratic way of life. The two societies encountered each other in commercial business, for example city merchants or rural peddlers who sold small manufactured goods not made in the South before the Civil War. Somehow these small goods also became known as Yankee Notions.




The appliqued series will be Cassandra's Circle, thirteen appliqued blocks with stories about the women at the heart of Confederate power during the Civil War, viewed through Mary Boykin Chesnut's memories.
Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina

See more about the applique series at this post a few weeks ago:

Applique blocks will be 18" so you can use them with the 18" blocks from Hospital Sketches. That could be useful if you didn't have time to do all nine blocks this year. 

Yankee Notions starts Wednesday January 8; Cassandra's Circle January 29, 2020. More information about fabrics in a few weeks.

The patterns are free here every month but you'll be able to buy patterns in my Etsy store and we will have Facebook groups too. I'll keep you posted here.