Ida Minerva Tarbell's Civil War: Sewing Scraps

 

Scraps of madder style cottons

Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857-1944)

An eminent journalist

Ida spent her childhood and the Civil War in the oil field country of

western Pennsylvania. Her father manufactured wooden oil containers

and made good money along with the many other small entrepreneurs in

this first oil boom.

1867 photo by Jon Mather of Titusville, Pennsylvania

Until John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company destroyed the small businesses.

Ida is famous for getting her revenge decades later; here she is caricatured 

smoking out Rockefeller's business practices. 

But that is another story.

This story is about her memories of the seamstresses who came

to spend the day in western Pennsylvania when she was a girl.

A professional sewing machine operator?

Born in 1857, Ida was only 3 or 4 when the Civil War began but she remembered vividly her days of collecting buttons for a charm string and sorting the leftover sewing scraps--- probably in the 1860s in Rouseville, where sister Sarah was born during the war.

Rouseville when Ida lived there in the late 1860s

Three versions of her story are in her manuscripts collection at alma mater Allegheny College.

The serious business of sorting leftover scraps.

Ida took great pride in the accuracy of her many magazine articles, but here she seems to have been recalling her own memories rather inaccurately, perhaps confusing the sixties with the eighties.. 

"The little scraps went into Mother's piece bag to be used on the crazy quilt she always had under way."

Crazy quilts were not the fashion in Ida's childhood, but later in the early 1880s when she was in her twenties.

She may have been recalling these scrappy, organized quilts made of small pieces that look more likely to date from the 1860s or '70s before she went off to college.

The "Tarbles" in 1880 with Ida away at school.

Another Tarble lives next door, a milliner.

Collection: Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Quilt dated 1862, Catherine Fisher of Ohio

Collection of the International Quilt Museum

Holstein Collection

After the Civil War the family moved to this impressive

Titusville, Pennsylvania house, salvaged from a defunct hotel

in an oil boomtown turned ghost town

The house has been restored after a fire. The recent

hexagon quilt in the cupola room is more of an

anachronism than Ida's 1860's memories of crazy quilts.

Ida left home after college to write and manage magazines, living in Paris, New York and at the end of her life in Connecticut but she often returned home to the Titusville house where sister Sarah maintained a home for her parents and brother into the 20th century. Seamstresses undoubtedly continued to visit as the crazy quilt fad predominated in the 1880s through the teens.

Ida has outlined the hierarchy of the scraps in her home:

Piece box for repairing clothing
Piece bag for making quilts

Rag bag for dusting, etc. and eventually burning

I recently read Kathleen Brady's biography Ida Tarbell: Portait of a Muckraker.