A LIncoln Drape Border?

 

The National Museum of American History has this quilt

in their collection donated in 1949, one of two quilts by

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Lisle Randall (1836- about 1920)

https://www.si.edu/object/1865-1875-lizzie-lisles-fold-and-cut-appliqued-quilt%3Anmah_556352

The caption dates it to about 1870. Perhaps it's a little later into the 1890s, which would go with the quilting style, the Turkey red & white color scheme and the border with a plain strip and a swag and tassel.

.

The caption

I had never heard of a Lincoln Drape border (or Cadiz, Iowa---that should read Cadiz, Ohio, I think.)

I found some interesting decorative arts allusions.

The term "Lincoln Drape" usually refers to a pressed glass pattern, goblets, footed bowls and assorted pieces like syrup pitchers.

And Aladdin lamp bases, which look the most 

like the quilt border with swag and tassel.

A reference on glass ware tells us the "pressed glass pieces, probably manufactured by the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company of Massachusetts or McKee & Bros. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ...supposedly represents the black crepe that adorned Lincoln's casket and hearse, but this cannot be proven."

Here's a photo of Lincoln's casket in 1865.

Plenty of ornament but not this combination.

Caskets are only one part of a funeral ceremony on the scale of Lincoln's. Here's another 1865 photo showing the coffin atop a whole pyramid of ceremonial imagery. The catafalque, the box that supports the coffin (I think the actual coffin is inside another box) has several swag motifs.

A drape and shield design 

Certainly, the image of mourning drapery for the assassinated President is not far-fetched. A shocked Union lowered their celebratory flags to half-mast and draped their homes and businesses with mourning swags.

The Lincoln home in Springfield, Illinois after the assassination.

Ford's Theater where Lincoln was shot.

But finding a reference to a Lincoln Drape in any decorative arts in the 1865-1880 period has been futile.

Pressed glass history from 1965

Newspapers.com and Google Books yielded no 19th-century

references to "Lincoln Drape" as a style. The glass pattern of

a classical drape may go back to the 1860s but the name doesn't

seem to.

And Women's Day in 1949 is probably no more reliable about the

border pattern name.

Plenty of mid-19th-century quilts have a swag and tassel border

but I found no other quilt reference to the term "Lincoln Drape."

The swag and tassel was a classic image going back centuries

and a staple of interior decoration.

All that said: Lizzie's border is very interesting.

So here's a pattern for a swag about 13" based on hers.

And one more informational tidbit that is probably TRUE.

Lincoln's wooden catafalque was saved from his funeral and it is kept in the

U.S. Capitol where it is used for state occasions like Justice Ruth Bader

Ginsburg's recent viewing.

I've lightened up a photo so you can see what it looks like.

This seems to be a cloth drape over the platform

Definitely the swag and tassel.