Civil War Quilts

What To Do If Your Blocks Aren't the Same Size

2012-02-25T06:00:00.007-06:00

Honas52's blocks were probably all the same size, but I thought her set was a smart way to set sampler blocks or blocks made by a group, which are never the same size.

She added corners to the 8" blocks,

rotating the sampler blocks so they are on point.

She used scrappy pieced corners all in this pattern.

You could also use a plain triangle.

The good thing about the math is that if you make the corners a bit large you can then trim the new blocks to a consistent size. No one (not even YOU) will notice that some sampler blocks are a little bit larger than others.

Getting out my blue card, my Fons and Porter's Quilters Need to Know Card (indispensible). I see that the 8" finished blocks will now have a finished line 11-3/8" across the middle. I figured out a pattern with a little to spare in EQ.

I'd cut squares 6-3/4" and slice in half for the triangles.

That will give you a finished square 11-3/4" (12-1/4" with seams). Then you can trim to a conisistent size, which would probably be 11-3/4". Make the triangles bigger if you want a finished 12" square.

Now adding that piecework pattern to the corners is a different thing. Too much for my math skills.

But didn't Terry do a lovely job?

Here's her photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/55917145@N08/6722699045/in/photostream/

Patchie's Tiny Blocks

2012-02-18T06:00:00.004-06:00

"Patchie" in France did the blocks at 2" by hand.

It was fun each week to see her block next to her thimble for scale.

She made tiny quilts (about 5" x 9") of 8 blocks each.

She showed us the back so we could see how she did it---with stitching lines in pencil

See her Flickr photostream here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/58287794@N07/5946045685/in/photostream/

It's not only her sewing that's admirable. Her fabric choices are very clever.

Pinterest Board on Civil War Quilts

2012-02-11T06:00:00.001-06:00

Sampler by Dorothea Klein Lemley,

Sheboygan, Wisconsin, blocks 1861-1865,

possibly assembled later,

from my book Civil War Women.

Over the past year I've been collecting photos of quilts actually made during the Civil War by Union and Confederate quiltmakers. I've also got a file of commemoratives made after the War.

Mary Rockhold Teter's quilt

from a pattern in Peterson's Magazine in 1861

---now in the Smithsonian collection

When I discovered the online bulletin board Pinterest I thought a board might be a good way to display these. Each picture is linked to the website where I found it.

Click here:
http://pinterest.com/materialculture/quilt-civil-war/

I'll add to it as I find more pictures.

Medallions

2012-02-04T06:00:00.005-06:00

This is MagpieMemories's 2nd quilt from the block series.

TeaCat had trouble taking the photo so she had to stand on a ladder. I did a little digital cropping to her snapshot.

Check the Flickr discussion group here for finished tops
http://www.flickr.com/groups/civilwarquilts2011/discuss/72157628470947195/

Here's Sunday Bee's.

Individualizing the Tops

2012-01-28T06:00:00.006-06:00

SpeedyClaudia lives up to her name---the top is done.

I enjoy seeing how people have individualized these.

She put fabric with sheet music in three of the corners.

Coleen used blue and gray sashing.

Sheila set hers with a paisley print and a star formed in the corners

A detail....

What a paisley and a nice miter.

SJGilbert made a medallion-like set with the stripe from Civil War Reunion for the border.

Another nice miter.

Covered By Glory: Civil War Commemorative Quilts

2012-01-26T06:00:00.003-06:00

Detail Barbara Fritchie Star

Machine Applique by Jean Pearson Stanclift

This weekend is the opening of a quilt show at the Grout Museums in Waterloo, Iowa.

Covered By Glory: Civil War Commemorative Quilts, curated by Robin Venter, features reproduction quilts and a few antique quilts thought to be war related. The opening night is Friday January 27, 2012 and the show will be up until September 1.

Barbara Fritchie Star

I am loaning this reproduction quilt, made over ten years ago, a group effort by the Sunflower Pattern Cooperative, designed by me, stitched by Shirlene Wedd and Jean Stanclift and hand quilted by Anne Thomas. I drew the border from a quilt dated 1863 and have since found another example of the eagle in the border.

Mimi Dietrich is loaning her Stars and Stripes Miniquilt

made from the Peterson's Magazine Pattern

A related exhibit is

Yours Ever, Your Own: Tales of Love from the Civil War

Original letters, photographs, artifacts and dioramas will enhance the exhibit helping visitors learn about the day to day life of the Civil War soldier and the women and children left behind on the Iowa prairie.
See more about the shows and the Grout Museum District by clicking here:

http://www.groutmuseumdistrict.org/

And here's a newspaper article with more information

http://wcfcourier.com/lifestyles/covered-in-glory-commemorative-antique-civil-war-quilts-featured-in/article_ab9c48cf-54f5-5342-a1db-9cf9c3776762.html

You can still buy a pattern for our Barbara Fritchie Star from Quilters Warehouse

http://www.quilterswarehouse.com/p-17061-barbara-fritchie-star-by-sunflower-co-op.aspx

Little Quilts Embroidered Top

2012-01-21T06:00:00.001-06:00

Did you notice LittleQuilts's finished top on our Flickr page?

She did all the blocks by hand and hand embroidered the Gettysburg Address in alternate blocks!

She says:
I wanted to make this a true historical memorial quilt commemorating the Civil War. It has been hand-pieced and hand embroidered. It will be hand-quilted. The borders have not been added. It is 95 X 95 inches now without a border. It will be a big quilt. For those of you from other countries, the words are the Gettysburg Address given by Abraham Lincoln to dedicate and consecrate the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1863.

The fourth row down and second from the right is a block that was made in 1863 [the actual block not a copy]. That block reads Joshua T. Day cancer cured by Mrs. Wells January 1863 at West Boxford Ma (Massachusetts).

The last three embroidered squares honor three men who were in my family that fought in the CW. All three came home. One was discharged with a disability. Two were brothers of my great grandmother and one was a first cousin. I had to add 12 more blocks...I also added some antique fabric from inside a china head doll's head."

This project has been good therapy for Dianne who is dealing with an aging parent. Thanks to her for sending a picture.
She's been doing a little research on Joshua Day from West Boxford too.

Blocks Together North and South

2012-01-14T06:00:00.006-06:00

Australia Sue took her top out in the yard and photographed it a few weeks ago.

Green grass and green leaves in December? We shivering in the other hemisphere can only sigh.....

Here's a closeup of her setting strips,

which have a triangle on the end

to make a subtle pinwheel star.

Quite nice and I am pleased to see she used a lot of fabric from the Civil War Reunion collection I did for Moda. I love those bright blues with the red.

And on the other end of the earth

Autumnsbama posted this finished top. (S)he seems to be living in the Northern Hemisphere.

She used a strong paisley to pull her color scheme together and printed her own label block at top left. It looks great in the snow!

Becky has added a sticky note to the Flickr page for finished tops---

Click here

http://www.flickr.com/groups/civilwarquilts2011/discuss/72157628470947195/

And post your tops here. I'll continue to post them here on Saturdays too. I don't want you to be lonesome on Saturdays.

A Label for the Quilt

2012-01-07T06:00:00.001-06:00

Someone suggested I make a label that you can print out for the back of your quilt.

Here are two featuring Miss Liberty. The top one is in color; the bottom could be printed in black & white or color.

They are rather large jpg files, each 4 1/2 to 5". Click on them and print them any size you like onto treated fabric. Fill in your name, etc. with a permanent pen.

53 Union Shield

2011-12-31T06:00:00.010-06:00

Union Shield

by Becky Brown

Becky used striped fabric.

Because there are 53 Saturdays in 2011 we have 53 blocks. You might want to repeat this one for the corners. It's an original design I drew because I noticed how popular appliqued shields were during the 1860s and '70s, but found no pieced versions.

Shield from a sampler than looks to be

from the late in the 19th century

See a blog post about appliqued shields here on my main blog:
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2011/03/northern-lily-southern-rose-block-1.html

Union Shield

By Rosemary Youngs

Rosemary made her own stripes.

Union canteen

The image was popular during the War to represent the Union.

I think these were called earbobs at the time.

Parcheesi board about 1880

Shields remain popular as a symbol of the country.

Cutting an 8'' Finished Block

Here's a link to a PDF with the templates:
https://acrobat.com/app.html#d=jYEHIcLvbLo1HIF2UrXcXw

A Cut a background square 2 7/8'' x 2 7/8'' . Cut in half diagonally, creating 2 triangles.

B Cut a starry blue rectangle 8 1/2'' x 3 1/4''. Trim using template B.

C Cut a background rectangle 4 3/4'' x 6 1/4''. Cut into two triangles from corner to corner with one cut. This is also on the template page.

D Cut a striped red fabric into a rectangle 9'' x 5 7/8''. The stripes should run parallel to the short sides. Use template D to trim into a rectangle.

Repeated blocks make a patriotic miniquilt.

Alternated with the pieced star in week #41.

The shield goes right to the edge of the block so

sashing provides a little visual space around it.

Here's a mockup without sashing I made from photos of Becky's blocks.

This is the last of the blocks, but not the last of the posts. I'll keep you updated with pictures of finished quilts and news on the book and new Civil War reproduction fabric lines. Subscribe through email (see top left) and you'll get a note when there's a new post.

The shield just seems perfect the way it is but there were other drafts.

Here's an idea that was rejected.

Happy New Year.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

2011-12-25T06:00:00.001-06:00

Circle of Friends

Somehow you all know about this surprise quilt made for me from blocks sent in by subscribers to this blog.

"This quilt was made for Barbara Brackman in appreciation for her Civil War Block of the Week...."

Dustin and Becky and others of you coordinated 49 [Becky says 56 not 49!!!] blocks from around the world.

Becky set it and asked Deb Jacobs to machine quilt it.

Both did a lovely job.

Becky bordered it with a stripe from the Civil War Reunion collection.

That's a heck of a miter.

Becky used the sashing and cornerstones set for a 7 x 7 grid.

It's already off to the publisher for official photography for the book.

Here's what the label says:

Then it has all your names.

> This quilt was made for Barbara Brackman in appreciation of her Civil
> War Block of the Week featuring a weekly history lesson and quilt
> pattern December 2011 Quilters became a circle of friends as they
> enjoyed the history, stitched their blocks and shared them on Flickr
> The blocks for this quilt came from Australia, Canada, France,
> Germany, Malaysia, Netherlands, Portugal and the United States of America.
> Assembled by Becky Brown, Quilting by Deb Jacobs.

Thank you each and everyone.

Christmas 1862 by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly

52 Christmas Star

2011-12-24T06:00:00.007-06:00

Christmas Star by Becky Brown

This modified nine-patch block with a wreath in the center can remind us of the first Christmas of the War. You'll find out why Becky put parrots in it below.

Christmas Eve by Thomas Nast for Harper's Weekly

The Davises with daughter and grandchildren in 1885

In 1896 Varina Davis, first lady of the Confederacy, wrote a memoir about Christmas in the Confederate White House. She told of her children repairing broken toys for the neighborhood orphans in Richmond during the War's last winter.

Girl with a doll, about 1900

"While looking over the advertisements of the toys and everything else intended to make the children joyful in the columns of the city papers, I have been impressed with the contrast between the present time and the... Southern country thirty-one years ago....

"For as Christmas season was ushered in under the darkest clouds, everyone felt the cataclysm which impended, but the rosy, expectant faces of our little children were a constant reminder that self-sacrifice must be the personal offering of each member of the family. How to satisfy the children when nothing better could be done than the little makeshift attainable in the Confederacy was the problem of the older members of each household.

The Davis children early in the War.

"The ladies dispersed in anxious squads of toy-hunters, and each one turned over the store of her children's treasures for a contribution to the orphans' tree, my little ones rushed over the great house looking up their treasure: eyeless dolls, three-legged horses, tops with the upper peg broken off, rubber tops, monkeys with all the squeak gone silent and all the ruck of children's toys that gather in a nursery closet.

"Some small feathered chickens and parrots which nodded their heads in obedience to a weight beneath them were furnished with new tail feathers, lambs minus much of their wool were supplied with a cotton wool substitute, rag dolls were plumped out and recovered with clean cloth, and the young ladies painted their fat faces in bright colors and furnished them with beads for eyes."

Boy with a toy dog, about 1865

Read more of Varina Davis's story about their make-shift Christmas by clicking here:

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/on-the-homefront/culture/christmas.html

Boy with a toy boat, about 1880

The name Christmas Star was given to this block by the Oklahoma Farmer Stockman periodical, which had a quilt column in the late 1920s and '30s. The pattern (BlockBase #1806c) has other names and different shadings, among the names: Wedding Ring, Crown of Thorns and Memory Wreath. I modified it a bit so the grid based on 5 fit an 8" square better.

Same block, different shading from a 1940s quilt

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 4 light green, 2 red, 4 dark green and 6 background squares 2-3/8". Cut each in half with a single diagonal cut.

You need 8 light green, 4 red, 8 dark green and 12 background triangles.

B - Cut 4 dark green and 4 background rectangles 2" x 2-1/2".

C - Cut 1 light green square 2-1/2".

A block from about 1900---be careful how you turn your triangles.

This block was one of the most popular in the early 20th century.

Stitchers who are ahead of you...

2011-12-21T09:47:00.000-06:00

Karen Dever has her top set together.

She wanted to show it to her class last Saturday so I sent her the last two blocks.

She made some progress in using up her reproduction stash.

She used the set I suggested based on this late 19th century design. It looks like a medallion but it's just blocks set on point. See the pattern here:

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-setting-ideas.html

And I noticed on the Flickr page that ATypicalQuilter has hers set.

She's consistently used solids and batiks

so her results are very contemporary looking.

Two more Saturdays....

51 New York

2011-12-17T06:00:00.051-06:00

New York

This week's block can recall the ladies' fairs that raised funds for soldiers' aid.

"In the Parlor: At the Fair"

By Thomas Nast

150 years ago December brought preparations for the annual ladies' fairs, the ancestors of our Christmas crafts bazaars. During the Civil War these charity events benefitted soldiers North and South.

The largest of them all was the Great Metropolitan Fair, which took place in New York City in 1864.

The fair to benefit the Sanitary Commission was held at Union Square (actually named because it was at the union of Broadway and the old Bowery Road, but an appropriate location, nevertheless.)

Fairs often sold needlework and crafts made by women, but this fair also was like an industrial exposition with states and cities showing off their manufacturing. It was resembled an antique show too with paintings, furniture and curiosities for sale.

Women organized it and "manned" the booths.

Here's a photo of the booth for the city of Hartford, Connecticut.

A blow-up of those items hanging next to a soldier's uniform indicate that one is an embroidered banner and the other possibly a four-patch strip quilt. Quilts were definitely part of the fairs.

The Fairs raised a good deal of money, although French visitor Ernest DuVergier seems to have begrudged the donations he made to the Philadelphia Fair ...

"Nothing is more ingenious than the way they get money from visitors. They have discovered an infinite number of different temptations and traps. I pay to get in, I pay to get out, I pay to see a museum where well-varnished examples of run-of-the-mill native painting shine by gaslight; I will pay if I want to take part in the vote which will award a silver vase to the most popular politicians...."

Hey, Ernest, it was all for a good cause.

The block named New York was published in Hearth and Home magazine about 1910. The pattern featured a pieced star in the corner. This week's block is adapted for an 8" pattern with a star print in the field area.

Last year at Quilt Market Cindy Rennels showed off her patriotic quilt that alternates a version of the New York block with a larger star.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - From a star print cut a square 4-1/2", focusing on a star if you like.

B - Cut 2 white and 1 red rectangles 1-7/8" x 4-1/2"

C - Cut 1 white and 2 red rectangles 1-7/8" x 8-1/2"

This easy block might make extras for the corners of your quilt. We're getting down to the end of the 53 blocks here and you are going to need 56. I'll give you another corner option at the end of the month.

Many of the Sanitary Commission fairs published newspapers every day they were open.

See The Canteen, the publication of the Albany fair by clicking here at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA8&dq=canteen+albany+sanitary+commission&id=H2hUAAAAYAAJ#v=onepage&q=canteen%20albany%20sanitary%20commission&f=false

And The Drum Beat from the Brooklyn Fair by clicking here:

http://books.google.com/books?pg=PT23&dq=drum+beat+brooklyn&ei=9TMvTtSTCrC30AHWgv2tAQ&ct=result&id=qKk-AAAAYAAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Embroidered silk pillow top with a history

that it was purchased at the Metropolitan Fair

A Finished Quilt For the Book

2011-12-13T06:00:00.002-06:00

Civil War Saturday Surprise, 90 x 100",

by Rosemary Youngs, machine quilted by Tammy Finkler, 2011

Rosemary has posted about her finished quilt with all the blocks.
Click here to read it:
http://rosemaryyoungs.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/a-years-worth-of-civil-war-blocks-thank-you-barbara-brackman/

I sent her the final blocks a few weeks early so she could get it quilted and ship it to C&T Publishing as we are planning to do a book on the blog and this will be one of the finished samples.

I love the way she makes each block an individual composition. Each has a personality but they go together well. It's a talent that has helped make her Civil War Love Letter and Civil War Diary books so popular.

My deadline for the finished manuscript for the book is January 3rd 2012---so you can see we are in a bit of a rush to get quilts finished. The book will be out in about a year. (Seems like a very long time from now.)

I am so grateful to her for finishing this for the book, despite the fact that she is working on books of her own.

I'll keep this blog up for at least half of next year so when you get your quilts finished send me pictures or post them on the Flickr page and I'll post them here.

She's very nice on her post in thanking me for all this work---but it really isn't work to me. I love to tell the stories and it gives me an excuse to read more---plus you guys did all the sewing.

50 Grapes of Wrath

2011-12-10T06:00:00.039-06:00

Grapes of Wrath is a modification of a traditional pattern called Grape Basket. The block can remind us of a new version of the "John Brown Song," written in late fall, 1861.

Julia Ward Howe's biography tells the story of how she came to write the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" on a visit to Washington City.

"Returning from a review of troops ..., her carriage was surrounded and delayed by the marching regiments: she and her companions sang, to beguile the tedium of the way, the war songs which everyone was singing in those days; among them – 'John Brown's body lies a-moulding in the grave. His soul is marching on!'

The soldiers liked this, cried, 'Good for you!' and took up the chorus with its rhythmic swing. 'Mrs. Howe,' said [a friend] 'Why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune?'
'I have often wished to do so!' she replied.
Waking in the gray of the next morning, as she lay waiting for the dawn, the word came to her.

'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord – '

She lay perfectly still. Line by line, stanza by stanza, the words came sweeping on with the rhythm of marching feet, pauseless, resistless. She saw the long lines swinging into place before her eyes, heard the voice of the nation speaking through her lips. She waited till the voice was silent, till the last line was ended; then sprang from bed, and groping for pen and paper, scrawled in the gray twilight the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.'

The first draft, pictured in her biography.

She was used to writing thus; verses often came to her at night, and must be scribbled in the dark for fear of waking the baby; she crept back to bed, and as she fell asleep she said to herself, 'I like this better than most things I have written.' In the morning, while recalling the incident, she found she had forgotten the words.

The poem was published in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1862. 'It was somewhat praised,.... I knew and was content to know, that the poem soon found its way to the camps, as I heard from time to time of its being sung in chorus by the soldiers.'

Julia Ward Howe in 1861

She did not, however, realize how rapidly the hymn made its way, nor how strong a hold it took upon the people. It was 'sung, chanted, recited, and used in exhortation and prayer on the eve of battle.' It was printed in newspapers, in army hymn-books, on broadsides; it was the word of the hour, and the Union armies marched to its swing.

Her song still has a strong hold upon Americans.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

Her poetic phrases, many drawn from her knowledge of the Bible, have become icons in the American language. The Grapes of Wrath (borrowed by John Steinbeck for his book about the Great Depression) comes from a description in the Book of Revelations of fruit pressed into "the great winepress of the wrath of God."

The Ladies' Art Company pattern business sold this design as Grape Basket (BlockBase #712) beginning in the late 19th century. Similar patterns date back to the time of the Civil War. This week's block has a similar look with fewer pieces.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 1 background square 2-1/2".

B - Cut 1 background square 5-1/4". Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts. You need 2 triangles.

C - Cut 2 background rectangles 2-1/2" x 4-1/2".

D - Cut 1 gold square and 1 background square 4-7/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with a diagonal cut. You need 1 triangle of each.

E - Cut 3 light purple and 2 dark purple and 1 gold squares 2-7/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with a diagonal cut. You need 5 light purple, 3 dark purple and 2 gold triangles.

Hear a version of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" by a chorus on YouTube by clicking here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5mmFPyDK_8

You can compare it to "John Brown's Body" by clicking here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g74t-eNWEro&feature=related

Read a bioigraphy of Julia Ward Howe:

Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 by Laura E. Richards & Maud Howe Elliott. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915. It's online at this University of Pennsylvania website:

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/richards/howe/howe-I.html#VIII

49 Yankee Puzzle

2011-12-03T06:00:00.057-06:00

Yankee Puzzle by Becky Brown

Yankee Puzzle can recall the basic problem in Lincoln's war philosophy. Liberty and Union. Was it possible to have both?

President Lincoln from the Library of Congress collection

On December 3, 1861 Lincoln gave his first State of the Union address to Congress. He discussed a variety of administrative details but danced around a major policy decision---how to end slavery.

"Under and by virtue of the act of Congress entitled 'An act to confiscate

property used for insurrectionary purposes,' approved August 6, 1861, the

legal claims of certain persons to the labor and service of certain other

persons have become forfeited, and numbers of the latter thus liberated are

already dependent on the United States and must be provided for in some

way."

Freed people working in a Union camp in Yorktown, Virginia, 1862

Photo by James Gibson. Library of Congress.

In other words: General Butler's policy of declaring slaves as contraband of war was now law. What of the thousands of Contraband camping on the edges of the free/slave map that was being rewritten every day? How to care for them? Where to care for them?

Harper's Weekly, December 21, 1861.

This sketch of the refugee community in Beaufort, South Carolina, is full of stereotyped imagery,

particularly in that it is titled "Work's Over." You may notice this detail shows the women still working.

Nothing new. Is that a quilt or bedspread they are washing?

Lincoln's tentative solution in 1861: colonization---

" at some place or places in a climate congenial to them. It might be well to consider, too, whether the free colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals may desire, be included in such colonization."

The federal government might budget funds to acquire a new territory:

"If it be said that the only legitimate object of acquiring territory is to furnish homes for white men, this measure effects that object, for the emigration of colored men leaves additional room for white men remaining or coming [to the new territory]."

This speech with its idea of a separate home for free blacks and freed blacks was just one small step in a solving a confounding puzzle: How to untangle the complex knot of slavery and save the Union at the same time.

Block from about 1900

Recall the State of the Union in 1861 with an old block called Yankee Puzzle by Ruth Finley in her 1929 quilt book. Other names for the design are Big Dipper, Electric Fan, Hour Glass and Pork and Beans.

(BlockBase #1195b)

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

There's only one piece, triangle A.

A - Cut 1 square 5-1/4" each of light pink, dark pink, tan and brown Cut each into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal lines.

Patchwork as Quilting Designs

2011-11-30T09:11:00.000-06:00

Top by Thelma, Quilting by Judi

Judi at Green Fairy Quilts posted photos of a quilt she is finishing for Thelma.

She used the Order Number 11 design between the stars and then she did the various blocks of the week in the background.

See more by clicking here:

http://greenfairyquilts.blogspot.com/2011/11/no-shortage-of-photos-here.html

A wonderful idea.

48 West Virginia

2011-11-26T06:00:00.062-06:00

West Virginia by Becky Brown

West Virginia can recall the state created when part of one state seceded from the Confederacy. In 1861 Virginia was a larger state than it is today. After Virginia joined the Confederacy, many in the mountainous northwestern part of the Old Dominion believed their interests lay with the Union.

The illustration above highlights differences between Virginia life on either side of the mountains. The captions: "Life in Eastern Virginia: The Home of the Planter" and "Life in Western Virginia: The Home of the Mountaineer."

An illustration in the New York Herald

showing the proposed state of New Virginia

with the Kanawha River running west of Charleston

Union loyalists met in Wheeling in October, 1861 and proposed a new state of Kanawha named after the river that flows into the Ohio River. Kanawha was rejected as a name (We Kansans are glad, as a good deal of our mail would have wound up in West Virginia .) Other ideas included Allegheny, Columbia and New Virginia, but the majority of the delegates favored the name of West Virginia.

A sketch of the Wheeling Convention at the Custom House in

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, 1861.

The Custom House remains a West Virginia historical site.

The new state of West Virginia became the 35th star. The flag contained 35 stars for two years between July 4, 1863 and July 4, 1865 when Nevada became the 36th star.

The hills of West Virginia continued to be a battleground between north and south as various armies occupied territory and retreated throughout the war. Sixteen-year-old Serene Bunten wrote about Southern soldiers who came to dinner and tried to persuade her to abandon her Unionist views. The family managed to keep their cow but lost some bedding in that 1864 encounter.

"There was eleven rebels ate supper here last night. There was one Lieut. here and he kept his men straight....That Lieut. tried very hard to make Harry and I rebels but he had to give it up. They camped down at E. G. Burr's last night. Late. There was about six hundred rebels passed here today, they were driving cattle and I just expected they would take ours (cow) but they did not. They took Chet's but the girls got them back. It was a curious body of soldiers, they were dressed in all colors. They robbed the stores and houses all along the road. They took one blanket from us."

West Virginia (BlockBase #3798) is a variation of a block published about 1915 by Hearth & Home magazine, given that name when the editors were asking for a block for every state. The complicated design makes an even more complicated design when set side by side.

All very nice---but not at 8". This block this week uses the essential parts---a square that forms a diamond star when set side by side.

This square is BlockBase #2605, which was published in the Ohio Farmer as Star & Square in 1894.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 4 red and 4 blue rectangles 5-1/4" x 1-7/8". You will cut 4 parallelograms of each color by trimming a 45 degree angle off each end as shown. All the reds go one way and all the blues are reversed. Remember these are NOT diamonds with four equal sides but are longer on two sides.

B - Cut 1 background square 5-1/4". Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts.

C- Cut 1 background square 4-1/2".

A Quilting Party in Western Virginia, 1854

See Bertha Stenge's 20th century patchwork interpretation of this illustration at the Illinois State Museum.
http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/art/collections/daisy/qparty.html

Read excerpts from Serene Bunten's diary here:

http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh48-1.html

And more about the creation of West Virginia here:

http://www.wvculture.org/history/statehood/statehood01.html

More Setting Ideas

2011-11-23T06:00:00.010-06:00

I noticed on our Flickr page that Thalia has mocked up an diagonal chain in alternate blocks, which looks good. A nice way to unify some very different blocks.

And Magpie Memories is going to use the same set she used in her "Sylvia's Bridal Quilt."

I thought about a medallion kind of format. Sorta like this. All 53 blocks fit. The quilt is a little bit more than 95" square and it's easier than it looks because it's really just an alternate block set with the blocks on point.

I was inspired by this quilt that Terry Thompson and I did years ago for one of our Moda Civil War repro lines.

The pieced blocks are white squares in this mockup. The quilt is a grid of 7 x 7 blocks on point.

The border finishes to 8" with four pieced blocks in the corners.

This is the alternate block (A) finishing to 8".

Cut squares 8-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles.

Piece into squares.

You need 24 alternate blocks like Block A---

16 shaded in palette 1 for the outer ring and

8 shaded in a palette 2 for the middle ring.

To get the medallion shading you need a second alternate block (B) to turn the corners.

You need 12 alternate blocks B---

4 shaded in palette 1 for the outer ring,

4 shaded in a palette 2 for the middle ring and

4 shaded in palette 3 for the center ring.

Piece them as they are shaded above but you have to rotate these to get the medallion illusion.

Cut Block B

Cut the large triangles by cutting squares 8-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles.

Cut the small triangles by cutting squares 9-1/4". Cut each into 4 triangles with 2 cuts.

You also need edge triangles to finish out the sides.

You need 24 larger triangles for the edge. Cut 6 squares 12-5/8 ". Cut each into 4 triangles with 2 cuts.

And 4 smaller triangles for the corners. Cut 2 squares 6-5/8". Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles.

For the border

Cut 4 strips 8-1/2" x 79-7/8". (2 1/2 yards of a border print would be plenty.)

Now do remember we have no technical editor here but St. Thomas over on the left so check my math before you cut.

47 Dixie Tea

2011-11-19T06:00:00.024-06:00

Tea Leaf by Becky Brown

The Tea Leaf block can remind us of Dixie and Confederate coffee substitutes during the blockade.

Sassafras Leaf

Mary Mapes Dodge in an 1888 story Two Little Confederates painted a picture of the limited treats her two main characters enjoyed during the war:

"There was no sugar nor coffee nor tea. These luxuries had been given up long before. An attempt was made to manufacture sugar out of the sorghum, or sugar-cane, which was now being cultivated as an experiment; but it proved unsuccessful, and molasses made from the cane was the only sweetening.... Sassafras-tea was tried as a substitute for tea, and a drink made out of parched corn and wheat, of burnt sweet-potato and other things, in the place of coffee; but none of them were fit to drink — at least so the boys thought."

Sassafras tea made from roots and bark has long been a home-brewed beverage. It's the traditional flavor in root beer, and so much a Southern staple that a reference to "cinnamon seed" or sassafras tea is found in older versions of the song "Dixie", the unofficial Confederate anthem.

Dan Emmett from Ohio published

many tunes such as "Turkey in the Straw."

"Dixie's" tune and lyrics were probably a folk tune sung for decades before it was actually published before the war in 1859 as a commercial minstrel tune. The lively melody became popular in the North and was a favorite of Lincoln. While "John Brown's Body" became a Union anthem, "Dixie" became a Southern marching song.

The chorus is generally sung as:

Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten,

Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land.

An earlier version substitutes a reference to sassafras tea and catfish fishing in the second line

Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Cinnamon seed and sandy bottom,
Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land.

Soldiers on both sides invented numerous versions and as the word Dixie increasingly became a nickname for the South, patriotic versions were published, such as this 1861 “Dixie War Song.”

Southrons, hear your country call you,

Up, lest worse than death befall you!

To arms! To arms! To arms, in Dixie!

This week's block is #1735 in BlockBase, one of many variations on this nine patch. Pattern designers saw it as a tea leaf, a poplar leaf, a magnolia leaf and an a maple leaf, among other flora and fauna.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A- Cut a strip 1" x 5". You'll trim this later.

B- Cut 1 background square 3". Cut into 2 triangles with a single diagonal cut.

C -Cut 3 dark and 1 background squares 3-1/8"

D- Cut 2 dark and 2 background squares 3-1/2". Cut each into 2 triangles with a single diagonal cut. You need 4 dark and 4 background triangles.

A tea leaf quilt from about 1880-1910

at the Red and White Quilt Show in

New York last spring.

Hear a 1916 version of the minstrel song "Dixie" by the Metropolitan Mixed Chorus on YouTube by clicking here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJhnWgs5Okc&feature=related

"A preparation consisting of sassafras root, magnesia and iron.

Pleasant to the Taste."

Root beer in the guise of patent medicine.

46 Apple Tree

2011-11-12T06:00:00.005-06:00

Apple Tree by Becky Brown

Apple Tree can remind us of a Union marching song about Jefferson Davis.

One hundred and fifty years ago this week Jefferson Davis was formally elected President of the Confederate States of America for a six-year term. The candidate ran unopposed. And who could oppose him? He personified the Confederacy and it's principles, whether one considered him hero or villain.

Union musician from the Liljenquist Family Collection

of Civil War Portraits

at the Library of Congress.

Union soldiers who'd been marching to the tune John Brown's Body added lyrics to reflect their hatred of Davis with references to the President and a sour apple tree. Sour apples might cause "the diah-ree" (diarrhea), which rhymed nicely with tree. Or the branches could provide a scaffold for an on-the-spot execution if a Union soldier happened across the very recognizable Davis.

We’ll hang Jeff. Davis on a sour apple tree!
We’ll hang Jeff. Davis on a sour apple tree!
We’ll hang Jeff. Davis on a sour apple tree!
As we go marching on!

After the peace at Appomattox, a version of The Sour Apple Tree was published with an illustration of Davis's fictional escape in women's clothing.

Jefferson Davis in retirement in 1885

Jeff Davis was not hanged. After the War he was released from federal prison in 1867 after serving two years.

This week's apple tree block with red squares hanging in the green leaves was inspired by a block that Carrie Hall showed in her 1935 book The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America. The complex block is BlockBase #836. Hall called it Tree of Temptation, a version of the Biblical apple tree that tempted Eve.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut squares 2-1/2" You need 2 red, 4 dark green and 6 light. Becky had some apple fabric for her lights.

B Cut 1 background square 2-7/8". Cut into 2 triangles with one diagonal cut. You need 2 triangles.

C Cut a dark rectangle 3-3/8" x 6-3/4".

Trim the edges of this rectangle at right angles as shown

To read more about Jefferson Davis's wife see the First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil War by Joan Cashin. On December 8, 2011 author Joan E. Cashin will discuss Varina Davis's struggle to reconcile her societal duties and expected allegiance to the South with her personal beliefs at the McConnell Center at the University of Lousiville. Information here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=209220675800349

It's a wonderful biography.

Setting Ideas

2011-11-09T06:00:00.002-06:00

We are coming close to the end of the year and the end of the 53 blocks (there are 53 Saturdays in 2011.) I am so impressed with how many of you have kept up with the block a week.

It's time to think about setting. You could just put them side by side the way DorsetSpinner has them laid out on her floor above. I've gone through our Flickr group and found some setting ideas.

I'd suggested plain sashing strips between them the way 1000Scraps has them mocked up here.

Rosemary has hers put together already using sashing with cornerstones.

The same idea that Here's Lucy is contemplating on her design floor.

Dustin and Becky are using a triple sash with a cornerstone nine-patch.

Becky who tested all the blocks has hers set,

quilted and bound, thank you very much.

ImaquilterWis has finished her top, sashing the blocks

and using an alternate plain square.

Atelier Arte Pink is grouping hers into fours

Ribbonwiz is also finished with a chain block alternating.

The same set that Elleninfil is using.

Lois is going to frame each block ---probably a good idea since some of them

are bound to be 7 7/8" and others 8 -1/4".

With a frame you can squares things up nicely at the end.

And QuiltingGammy plans a sash with a star in the corners.

Keep those good ideas coming!

45 Port and Starboard

2011-11-05T06:00:00.005-05:00

Port and Starboard by Becky Brown

Here's a block with a seafaring name to remember the first impressive Union victory of the Civil War. In the early November, 1861, the Union Navy and Army cooperated to capture Port Royal Sound in the sea islands area of South Carolina south of Charleston.

From Harper's Weekly

November, 1861

The Union Navy hands Jeff Davis an incendiary cocktail.

Samuel Francis Du Pont

1862

Admiral Samuel Francis DuPont was credited with the naval victory.

The Wabash, Du Pont's ship

Notice that the wooden ship combines steam and sail. There's a smoke stack on the deck.

Map of Port Royal Harbor from the late 18th century

showing St. Helena Island and Port Royal Island

with Beaufort (the black star) on the southeast shore.

Letters to his wife Sophie and others describe the maneuvers of his fleet of fifty boats and the first days of Union-occupied South Carolina. The city of Beaufort was the largest town in the area of swampy island plantations owned by the Rhetts, Barnwells, Pinckneys and Colcocks and worked by thousands of slaves.

"You can form no idea of the terror we have spread in the whole Southern country. Beaufort is deserted...the enemy flew in panic leaving public and private property, letters...clothes, arms, etc. The contrabands [freed slaves] are wild and sacking Beaufort, in return for being shot down because they would not leave with their masters. One called out in a broad grin ...'They thought you could not do it.' "

Sketch from Harper's Weekly shows the streets of

Beaufort in December, deserted after weeks of civil unrest.

The Rhett House Inn in Beaufort

Once home of the Rhett family

Ruins of a plantation on Ladies's Island,

Photograph from about 1933

Library of Congress

The sacking of the town and the plantation buildings continued. Frank Du Pont wrote his wife a week later:

"A sadder picture of desolation from the desertion of the population cannot be imagined; and the inhabitants fled not from fear of us but from the dread of their own Negroes; a few household servants followed their masters, but the field hands they dare not attempt to control, and the overseers had run with their masters. There are fifteen slaves to one white in this part; the [planters] threatened to shoot if they did not follow them into the interior, but I believe dare not attempt to execute this threat. The Negroes, anxious to show everything, said...'Massa, they more afraid [of] us, than you'---this was often repeated...The beautiful oleanders and chrysanthemums smiled on this scene of robbery and confusion."

Port & Starboard is a block can be shaded in many ways for different effects. See Block #1 and Block #26 for different arrangements of 32 half-square triangles. This particular shading was given the name by the Nancy Cabot columnist for the Chicago Tribune in 1937. It's BlockBase #1176d.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut squares 2-7/8". Cut 8 light, 4 medium and 4 dark. Cut each into 2 triangles with one diagonal cut.

You need 16 light triangles and 8 medium and dark triangles.

The Admiral's Wife

Sophie Du Pont Du Pont by Matthew Brady. The fashions look about 1840.

Sophie Madeleine du Pont (1810 - 1888) married her cousin Samuel Francis du Pont. There is a lovely book called Sophie Du Pont: A Young Lady in America: Sketches, Diaries, and Letters, 1823-1833 by Betty-Bright Low and Jacqueline Hinsley that is a nice window into the 1820s.

It's out of print, but not hard to find on line.

44 Union

2011-10-29T06:00:00.007-05:00

Union by Becky Brown

This block, which dates back to the late 19th century, may have been known as Union or Union Square back then, a commorative Civil War design. We can use it to recall an important change in the Union Army 150 years ago. General Winfield Scott resigned as general in chief during the last week of October, 1861.

Scott's last meeting with the Cabinet

from Harper's Weekly, 1861

His replacement was General George B. McClellan, who had served under Scott in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. After the Union's Bull Run disaster was blamed on rookie soldiers, McClellan had earned a reputation creating an army with discipline. He won some minor battles throughout the summer.

November 3, 1861

Alfred Waud's drawing of a torch light parade in front of McClellan's house to celebrate his promotion to General in charge of the Union Armies. Torchlight parades were popular political events, as were "illuminations" in which householders put a light in each window facing the street. The fireworks display includes an eagle, flags and a portrait of the General.

On the morning of November 3rd McClellan wrote his wife a letter:

"I have already been up once this morning—that was at four o'clock to escort Gen. Scott to the depot. It was pitchdark and a pouring rain ; but with most of my staff and a squadron of cavalry I saw the old man off. He was very polite to me; sent various kind messages to you and the baby; so we parted. The old man said that his sensations were very peculiar in leaving Washington and active life. I can easily understand them; and it may be that at some distant day I, too, shall totter away from Washington, a worn-out soldier, with naught to do but make my peace with God. The sight of this morning was a lesson to me which I hope not soon to forget. I saw there the end of a long, active, and ambitious life, the end of the career of the first soldier of his nation; and it was a feeble old man scarce able to walk; hardly any one there to see him off but his successor. Should I ever become vainglorious and ambitious, remind me of that spectacle."

For a while McClellan was the man but his arrogance and cautious leadership caused Lincoln to fire him months later.

September 17, 1862

Lincoln visiting McClellan in camp

From the Library of Congress

One of my favorite Civil War pictures shows the woven coverlet McClellan slept under in his tent. McClellan and Lincoln held each other in contempt. McCellan ran for President against Lincoln in the 1864 election, promising peace negotiations with the Confederacy. Lincoln won.

Union (BlockBase #2056) was given that name by the Ladies' Art Company in the late 19th century. Other names are Union Square and Four Crowns.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 4 background squares 1-7/8"

B Cut 4 background and 8 dark squares 2-1/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with one diagonal cut. You need 8 background and 16 dark triangles.

C Cut 1 background and 1 medium square 3-7/8". Cut each into 4 triangles with two diagonal cuts. You need 4 of each.

D Cut 2 medium dark squares 3-1/2". Cut each into 2 triangles with one diagonal cut. You need 4 triangles.

E Cut 1 dark square 3-1/8".

Campaign art from the 1864 Presidential election

Union Square by Pam Mayfield

Pam Mayfield loves this block.

She's made several---with more squares inside of squares in the center.

Union Square top by Pam Mayfield

43 Right Hand of Friendship

2011-10-22T06:00:00.053-05:00

Right Hand of Friendship

By Becky Brown

Right Hand of Friendship can remind us of the networks of help that continued to form an "Underground Railroad" throughout the Civil War.

While slavery's foundations began to crumble in 1861, the system continued in most places until the War was over in 1865. Near St. Louis, Missouri, a border state that never joined the Confederacy, Archer Alexander and his family lived in slavery through much of the War.

His slave-holding neighbors helped the Confederate cause in small ways by burning bridges to confound Federal patrols. When he heard of a planned bridge attack, Archer impulsively ran to a Union neighbor's home with information. Realizing the consequences his spying would earn him, he kept running---into the city of St. Louis where he was fortunate to meet the family of William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister with abolitionist sympathies. Eliot agreed to hire him and offered to buy his freedom and that of his wife Louisa, left at home with no idea of what had happened to Archer.

William Greenleaf Eliot,

a friend to many slaves.

Louisa received a welcome letter assuring her of her husband's safety and the generous offer of freedom, but had to dictate a sad reply:

"MY DEAR HUSBAND,--I received your letter yesterday, and lost no time in asking Mr. Jim if he would sell me, and what he would take for me. He flew at me, and said I would never get free only at the point of the Baynot, and there was no use in my ever speaking to him any more about it. I don't see how I can ever get away except you get soldiers to take me from the house, as he is watching me night and day. If I can get away I will, but the people here are all afraid to take me away. He is always abusing Lincoln, and calls him a old Rascoll. He is the greatest rebel under heaven. It is a sin to have him loose. He says if he had hold of Lincoln he would chop him up into mincemeat. I had good courage all along until now, but now I am almost heart-broken. Answer this letter as soon as possible. I am your affectionate wife, LOUISA ALEXANDER"

Archer, the Eliots and the Louisa's neighbors formed new plans. The Eliots offered to shelter Louisa and daughter Nellie. A neighbor agreed to carry them in his oxcart to the city for payment of $20. Clad only in day dresses without bonnets or shawls so as not to raise suspicion they were planning to travel, Louisa and Nellie sauntered to the road near their cabin where they'd agreed to rendezvous. The farmer hid them under the cornshucks in the wagon and casually walked along, leading his oxen to the city as farmers did every day. Despite questioning by suspicious locals, the escape was a success.

Letters sent by the U.S. Post Office during the War looked much like ours today

with envelopes, 3 cent cancelled stamps and a date cancellation.

Louisa and Archer could not read or write, yet they managed to carry out a complex plan by mail. We often think of illiterate people as being deprived of any written communication (a possible reason for all the stories about secret visual codes in tales of slavery) but we should realize many social systems were in place to assist those who needed help. In Louisa's case sympathetic neighbors took dictation and carried their correspondence, acting as an informal and illegal post office.

Archer Alexander so impressed William Eliot that the minister wrote his story as a legacy for the Eliot grandchildren, hoping to keep the story of slavery alive for future generations. Eliot eventually published the account in the 1880s. William Eliot's school, the Eliot Seminary, became Washington University. One of the grandchildren for whom he wrote the Alexanders' story grew up to be T. S. Eliot, the modernist poet.

Archer, a handsome man into his old age, became the model for sculptor Thomas Ball who had a commission from former slaves to create a statue of Lincoln the Emancipator. Freedom's Memorial, a portrait of Lincoln and a kneeling slave, can be seen in Lincoln Park in Washington D.C. In the sculpture Archer Alexander assumed the pose of the shackled, kneeling slave---the image that had represented the antislavery movement for over a century.

Today that image rankles. Archer seems to symbolize passivity, a man waiting to be rescued. But it is important to recall that the kneeling slave had great meaning for blacks and whites during his life time. The man in shackles signified both a sympathy for the slaves' plight and a willingness to act.

The quilt block Right Hand of Friendship was published by Hearth and Home magazine in the early 20th century. It is BlockBase #2831.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 4 background squares 3-1/8".

B Cut 1 background, 1 dark and 1 medium square 3-7/8". Cut each into 4 triangles with two diagonal cuts. You need 4 of each.

C Cut 1 dark and 1 medium square 3-1/2". Cut each into 2 triangles with one diagonal cut. You need 2 of each.

Read William Greenleaf Eliot's book: The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom at the Documents of the American South webpage.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/eliot/menu.html

42 H is for Hospital

2011-10-15T06:00:00.006-05:00

Log Fence by Becky Brown

The H signifies a field hospital.

A faded Civil War hospital flag

from Gettysburg National Military Park Collection.

The background color was probably a stronger yellow 150 years ago.

Flags were used to communicate on the battle field. We're all familiar with the white flag as a signal of surrender. Yellow flags meant the no-fire zone of a hospital for either side. Confederate nurse Kate Cumming explained their use in her first day of nursing in Corinth, Mississippi.

We are at the Tishomingo Hotel, which, like every other large building, has been taken for a hospital. The yellow flag is flying from the top of each. Mrs. Ogden tried to prepare me for the scenes which I should witness upon entering the wards. But alas! nothing that I had ever heard or read had given me the faintest idea of the horrors witnessed here. I do not think that words are in our vocabulary expressive enough to present to the mind the realities of that sad scene. Certainly, none of the glories of the war were presented here."

Hand-colored photo of a field hospital

after the Battle of Savage's Station, Virginia.

Late in the War the Union Army adopted a clearer signal, a yellow flag with a green H. The graphic design alerted friend and foe that patients were sheltered in that camp.

Above the Michigan State Relief Association nursing at a field hospital in Virginia.

Is that a quilt airing out on the tent?

The quilt block is drawn from a child's quilt that is pictured in my book Civil War Women, made by a member of the Burkhart family in Illinois about the time of the Civil War. Terry Thompson and I called it Log Fence for that book. The H's just jumped out at me recently.

I want to emphasize: I am NOT saying this mid-century quilt was intended to represent the H or a hospital. We can, however, use the block to symbolize the brave doctors and nurses who worked in the field hospitals.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

Use a background that captures the faded yellow in the Gettysburg flag above or a brighter yellow to indicate the flag as it once was.

A Cut 1 green square 1-5/8"

B Cut 2 background yellow prints into rectangles 3-7/8" x 1-5/8"

C Cut 2 green and 2 background yellow prints into strips 8-1/2" x 1-5/8"

D Cut 2 slightly darker yellow strips 8-1/2" x 2" (This will give you extra to center and trim the block when done.)

See more about nurses on this post from April.
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2011/04/17-comfort-quilt.html

Read Kate Cumming's 1866 book
A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee

http://books.google.com/books?id=jXwKAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9&dq=journal+of+hospital+life&source=bl&ots=IVggqdzGVP&sig=Ck227H-si_hGK1C_P93R8jvIJTQ&hl=en&ei=pgQrTt7MHJDVgAfJ4PWaCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

It's also available in a newer print edition as Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse.

Here's a version of Log Fence by

Francine Pons of San Antonio, Texas.

Below three photos of nurses at Union Hospitals in Washington D.C. from the Library of Congress

41 Red, White & Blue Quilt

2011-10-08T06:00:00.010-05:00

Red, White & Blue by Becky Brown

Every Civil War sampler needs a pieced star block. This week's pattern was published as Red, White and Blue quilt in the agricultural magazine The Orange Judd Farmer in 1898. (An odd name for a magazine but Orange Judd was the publisher's name---also an odd name for a man.)

Several patriotic quilts with pieced and appliqued stars survive from the 1861-1865 years.

Quilt by Cornelia Dow and others, Portland, Maine, 1864

This quilt (the stars are appliqued) was first published in the groundbreaking book about women's history called Hearts and Hands by Pat Ferrero, Elaine Hedges and Julie Silber. The star blocks are covered with inked sentiments about the Union cause, many patriotic, many amusing. The book pictured a block with the pun: "While our fingers guide the needle, Our thoughts are intense (tents)."

Maria Cornelia Durant Maynard Dow
About 1830

A collage made of a badly scanned portrait
in her husband's autobiography

The authors attributed the quilt's organization to Cornelia Dow (1808-1883), wife of a Union General who had been released from Libby Prison in 1864. Her husband Neal Dow wrote an autobiography in which he described his wife.

"When not quite twenty-six years of age, having secured sufficient means to justify the establishment of a home for myself, I married Maria Cornelia Durant Maynard, on the 20th of January, 1830. My wife's father, John Maynard, was born in Framingham, Mass....went to St. Croix when a youth, and there met, and in 1789 married, her mother, Mary Durant, born in the island of St. Croix in 1771....Returning to this country with his wife and several children, Mr. Maynard, who had in the meantime accumulated a fortune, took up his residence in Bulfinch street, Boston, where his youngest child, Maria Cornelia Durant, was born June 18, 1808.....My wife's father, having met with financial reverses, was obliged to break up his home in Boston, and came with his family to reside on a farm...in Scarboro, Me. Maria Cornelia went to live with an aunt, for whom she was named, and [at sixteen] to Portland to pursue her studies in a private school for young women...."

The Neal Dow Memorial on Congress Street in Portland

In 1829 Neal Dow had this house built in anticipation of his marriage.Today it's the home of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, a monument to Dow and his temperance work. (He was mentioned as originator of the Maine Law on Ken Burn's documentary Prohibition on PBS this week.)

Maria Cornelia was 56

when the quilt was made.

Undated photo from her husband's autobiography

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

The block this week is BlockBase #3677. It requires template piecing.
See the templates in the PDF by clicking here:
https://acrobat.com/app.html#d=UmrlEGwbeyz5kyW2Q*mSmA
Or click on this picture and print it so it measures 8" along the top line.

Becky, an excellent seamstress, shows us how she put this together. EQ draws patterns like this with a separate pattern piece for each shape. Because she is so good she fussy cut each piece and then lined up the stripes and the flowers. "I loved the challenge of piecing this block, " she writes. This is a challenge you do not need to tackle---unless you want to. Small over-all floral calicoes would be easier to work with.

Becky: "At first glance it may appear that all 5 star points use the same template, but there are 3 templates for the star. I cut all the pieces and lightly marked the pattern letter on the back of the star pieces."

She stitched the star together first and then added the set-in pieces one by one.

"You will notice I basted a white thread in F, (to mark it as the top) and added the pieces clockwise. F to H, H to J, etc. "

You can always applique it.

Two other Maine Civil War quilts were on display this summer.

This flag quilt was made by the Ladies Aid Society of the First Church in Belfast, Maine in 1864 and sent to the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., where it was displayed for sick and wounded soldiers. In 2011 the quilt was donated to the Belfast Historical Society and Museum.

This Civil War patriotic quilt was made by the Ladies Aid Society of Portland about 1864

Collection of the Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine.

Among the verses inked on it:

Ye have fought our battles for us, Showing how the brave can die.
We are waiting to receive you, When ye lay your armor by.

We’ll stitch with the needle. And fight with the tongue
‘Till every old rebel Is conquered or hung.

Read more about this quilt, which was on display at the New England Quilt Museum during the summer
http://www.brickstoremuseum.org/Feature64_CivilWarQuilt.shtml

We have 12 weeks to go (there are 53 Saturdays in 2011) but don't think the patterns are going to get progressively more difficult. There are still some four-patches on the horizon.

40 Order Number Eleven

2011-10-01T06:00:00.008-05:00

Order Number Eleven
By Becky Brown

Order Number Eleven was named for a Union order forcing Southern sympathizers to leave their homes.

The quilt design Order Number 11 was published in the Kansas City Star in 1929 by Ruby Short McKim, a pattern designer from Independence, Missouri. She told the story of Fannie Kreeger Haller who as a ten-year-old, "saw her mother's choice new quilt snatched from their bed by marauders back in 18[63]when Order No. 11 was the issue. She carried the treasured design in her mind and years after reproduced the quilt, christening it 'Order No. 11'."

Detail of George Caleb Bingham's painting Martial Law or Order #11.

Is that a quilt being stolen on the balcony?

This dramatic painting by Mattie Bingham's husband is one reason the story of Order #11 lives on. See Mattie's story in Block#19.

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2011/05/19-missouri-star.html

Even sixty-five years later, McKim's readers would have been quite familiar with the issue of Order Number 11. In 1863 Missouri Bushwhackers under the control of William Quantrill burned the pro-Union town of Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the Jayhawkers. Quantrill's raiders murdered every man and boy they could find, killing nearly 200. Four days later the Federal Army issued the order evacuating four counties in western Missouri in what could be seen as either a wise precaution or a vicious act of revenge.

Union soldiers and guerillas terrorized families into leaving by burning their homes and stealing their possessions. Unionist Missourians were permitted to move to designated military outposts or to Kansas. Those without certificates of loyalty had to leave. The roads south of Kansas City were filled with frightened and angry refugees, among them Bursheba Younger. (See her story in Block #30: http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2011/07/28-next-door-neighbor.html)

Fannie's mother's quilt, which was jayhawked right off the bed, was of the design also known as Hickory Leaf or the Reel, a pattern that dates back to the 1840s.

The early versions were sometimes pieced but most are applique.

Nancy Harris McCorkle and Charity McCorkle Kerr

Sisters-in-law Nannie and Charity were Confederate sympathizers who aided Missouri guerilla Bushwhackers and were imprisoned in Kansas City. The jail fell down killing Charity and three other women, one in a series of heartbreaking events that led to Order Number 11.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

Cut a square 8-1/2" of background fabric.
See the templates here: https://acrobat.com/#d=dGRUH6p5yJW6uM7Rne8YHw
Use the templates in the PDF file to cut the applique pieces. Add a scant 1/4" seam allowance to the pieces.

You need 1 of the large piece A and 4 of the crescent B.

Prepare and applique in your favorite manner.

Remember if the PDF prints out the wrong size you can adjust the size when you are giving your printer instructions. If it's too big--- try printing it at 50% and see how it looks in the preview. Adjust the percentage until the block fits within the margins of an 8-1/2 x 11" piece of paper. It should then fit fine in your 8" block.

Another way to do this pattern is to applique the whole figure as one piece. See Jo Morton's popular pattern "Rachel's Reel" for a similar design with a single applique patch that fits into an 8" square.

The Reel design is one of the classic patchwork patterns from before the Civil War.

Here it's been modified with a white signature strip across each block. The quilt (probably about 1850) was advertised as a New Jersey quilt in an online auction.

In 1904 Caroline Abbot Stanley wrote a novel called Order Number Eleven: A Tale of the Border, as partisan and romantic as Bingham's painting. Read it here at Google Books

http://books.google.com/books?id=r2QpAQAAIAAJ&dq=order+caroline+stanley&source=gbs_navlinks_s

39 Hovering Hawks

2011-09-24T06:00:00.006-05:00

Hovering Hawks

by Becky Brown

Hovering Hawks can symbolize foraging soldiers on both sides. Hawks are predators that keep a hawk-eye out for a breakfast of smaller birds and rodents, so one can see how their name was appropriated for predatory scavengers during the Civil War.

Red-tailed hawk

Best known are the Jayhawks or Jayhawkers who swooped in during the pre-war days of the Kansas Troubles. In Kansas lore Jayhawker is an Irish term, brought by an immigrant (one mythical Pat Devlin) who explained:

"In old Ireland we have a bird we call the jayhawk that when it catches another bird it takes delight in bullyraging the life out of it like a cat does a mouse...You call it 'foraging off the enemy,' by, begobs I'll call it jayhawking."

Senator James H. Lane on the cover of

Harper's Weekly in November, 1861

Once the Civil War began, jayhawking took place under cover of war strategy. In September, 1861 Kansas troops under U.S. Senator James Lane sacked the town of Osceola, Missouri. Captain Edgar Poe Trego wrote his wife that the Kansans returned,

"having had a brush with the enemy, scattered them, took the town, obtained all the horses, mules, wagons and [Negros]; loaded the wagons with valuables from the numerous well-supplied stores and then set fire to the infernal town."

Many Southerners blamed Jayhawkers for any and all raids, down into the deep South. Roxanna Cole in North Carolina complained about a Colonel Lee and his Jayhawkers for local depredations:

" 'subsisting on the enemy' they call it. But they don't tell that they take the bread from women and children (for men are long since gone) while they also take the only means to make more---the horses, stock, and negroes. They, as usual, took our scanty supply of food and make us cook it, Christmas day thought it was. They came and demanded quilts and comforts. I told them that I had none that I could spare. They answered insolently that 'It makes no difference about that, Go and get two. I almost cried that I had to give up my nice comforts to such swine and I had none but nice ones."

Hawk seems to have meant a thief of any kind. In 1861 Anne S. Frobel in Northern Virginia instructed her slaves to bury the silver, a common precaution, exclaiming in her diary,

"What spoonhawks these Yankees are!"

Hovering Hawks is BlockBase #1323, given that name by Ruth Finley in 1929.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 2 dark and 4 blue squares 2-1/2".

B - Cut 1 dark, 3 light, 2 orange (or brick red) and 4 blue squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally. You need 2 dark, 6 light, 4 orange and 8 blue triangles (20 in all).

See a lovely applique quilt that was probably jayhawked from a Southern family. It eventually wound up in the Kansas State Historical Society. Click here:

http://www.kshs.org/p/cool-things-civil-war-quilt/15368

What quilthawks those Yankees were!

38 Ohio Star

2011-09-17T06:00:00.009-05:00

Ohio Star reminds us of the town of Oberlin

and Mary Leary Langston

During the first year of the War, Union troops began marching to a tune that remains an American tradition. It begins, "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, " repeated three times, and then "His soul is marching on!" The chorus:

"Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His soul is marching on!"

Hear a 2004 performance of the song on YouTube by clicking here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuucLP3KrM4

John Brown was hung in Virginia in 1859 for attempting to take over a Federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry. His antislavery obsession made him a hero and the song increased his renown. Arguments continue today as to whether he was a martyr or a terrorist, but few remember the others who died in his holy war.

Oberlin in the 1870s

Brown recruited two antislavery soldiers in Oberlin, Ohio. The town was an oasis of free thinking, founded in the 1830s by reformers who opened a college to women and African-Americans, a radical admissions policy at the time. Oberlin attracted fugitive slaves and free-born black families seeking educational opportunities. The Pattersons, the Learys and the Langstons were among the free blacks who moved there from the South to take advantage of the college and its preparatory school. Brown knew many Oberlin men had a commitment to the antislavery cause.

Lewis Sheridan Leary

Mary Patterson's first husband

Charles Langston, one of the town's leading black men, refused to accompany Brown, realizing they needed many more men to carry out their audacious scheme. Ignoring his wisdom, two young men agreed to rendezvous for the attack on Harper's Ferry. One was Lewis Sheridan Leary who left wife Mary Patterson Leary at home with a new baby, telling her he was traveling on business.

Brown chose the town of Harper's Ferry on the Shenandoah River

in western Virginia for the event he believed

would start a slave revolution.

Charles Langston was right. The U.S. Army easily defeated Brown's tiny band within hours of their assault on the arsenal.

The arsenal where Army weapons

were stored is now a federal park.

With bullets flying around him Sheridan Leary jumped into the Shenandoah River but took several shots. Nineteenth-century historians John Warner Barber and Henry Howe told of his death:

"A wretch, mortally wounded, was dragged from the river by citizens, and laid upon the bank shivering with cold and loss of blood. He begged to be taken to a fire, promising to confess everything. The bystanders carried him to an old cooper's shop hardby, where a hasty blaze was kindled…He entreated someone to write to [his family] and inform them of the manner of his death…After lingering in great agony for 12 hours he died."

Mary later told her grandson that a few weeks after she heard of her husband's death his bullet-torn shawl returned to her. That grandson, poet Langston Hughes, remembered sleeping under the tan plaid shawl as a boy and treasuring it all his life. (It's now in the collection of the Ohio Historical Society.)

Mary's grandson Langston Hughes,

son of Caroline, her daughter with Charles Langston

Mary spent the war years living with her parents in Oberlin, working as a milliner, and raising Louisa Sheridan Leary. After the war she married Charles Langston and moved to Kansas where a son and a daughter were born.

Charles Langston had been wealthy in the years before the Civil War but spent his slaveholding family's legacy on the abolition movement. At his death he left Mary with little. Grandson Langston pictured Mary as a poor, proud woman---too proud to ask Charles's rich relatives for help. She might have sought assistance from the graying abolitionists who revered the memories of Sheridan Leary and Charles Langston but she made do in one of the few occupations open to a widow. She took in boarders.

Langston remembered Mary sitting in her rocker, holding him in her lap and telling him tales in which, "life moved heroically toward an end …Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying."

The reproduction quilt above was the design for a kit done a year or two ago for my Civil War Homefront collection from Moda. The inspiration was an antique from the International Quilt Study Center and Museum. We really don't know what quilters called this design during the Civil War years.

Today we tend to call it Ohio Star (BlockBase #1631). Other published names include Variable Star, Eastern Star and Western Star. Carrie Hall gave it several names in her 1935 index to patterns, The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt, among them Texas Star and Ohio Star.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 5 dark squares 3-1/8".

B - Cut 1 dark, 1 medium and 2 light square 3-7/8". Cut each into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts.

You need 4 dark, 4 medium and 8 light triangles.

See pictures of Mary as an older woman and read more about her life with her grandson Langston in Kansas in Katie Armitage's Langston Hughes's Lawrence at this website:

http://www.continuinged.ku.edu/hughes/pp/armitage.html

Mary should be remembered for far more than her grandson's art.

37 Confederate Rose

2011-09-10T06:00:00.013-05:00

Confederate Rose

By Becky Brown

Nancy Cabot, quilt columnist at the Chicago Tribune in the 1930s, named several of the Civil War commemorative patterns in this series, most of which she designed herself. She gave us the Confederate Rose below, a complicated pieced design, which I have simplified here, giving the pattern for the center square. You may want to make it in shades of white, pink and rose, the colors of the Confederate Rose plant.

The original Cabot block is BlockBase #2651

if you want to make it just like Nancy's.

The Confederate Rose is a variety of hibiscus, unusual in that it puts out multicolored flowers. At the end of the 19th century people thought it might be a rose which began the morning with white flowers that turned red at night. Horticulturalists discussed it in their journals after a news story was published in 1884.

"The 'Confederate rose' is the name of a new flower which is white in the morning and red at night. Four of them have been planted around the grave of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnson in the State cemetery at Austin."

Confederate General

Albert Sidney Johnson was killed at Shiloh in 1862.

A skeptical editor at the Gardeners' Monthly and Horticulturist wrote:

"We do not know of any rose under this name. There are flowers which open white, and become pinkish when they fade, but we do not know of any rose which does this. It is barely possible that this is an exaggeration of some such fact, though still more possible that it is one of those silly paragraphs of a 'smart' reporter, which do no credit to the newspaper press."

Ten years later a botanist identified it in Garden & Forest

"Hibiscus mutabilis, Cotton Rose, or Confederate Rose, is a small tree of rather open habit. I first noticed it in the gardens of New Orleans, and later at Mobile, Pensacola and Jacksonville. It is a fine plant when in bloom, bearing at the same time white and red flowers, and thus presenting a very striking appearance. The showy double flowers are white in the morning, changing to pink at noon, and to deep red at night. As the flowers last almost to the middle of the next day, the contrast of the white and red blossoms is very impressive. This plant is also known as the Mexican Rose; it is, however, a native of China and India, and thrives well on high Pine-land, but grows to perfection in rich hummock soil."

General Johnson's grave is a Victorian showpiece at the Texas State Cemetery.

He was originally buried in New Orleans; reburied in Austin in 1867.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A- Cut 2 dark squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally. You need 4 dark triangles.

B - Cut 4 light strips 6-7/8" x 1-7/8". Trim the corners at 45 degree angles or use the templates in the PDF file.

C- See the templates in the PDF file to cut 4 medium.
Click here: https://acrobat.com/app.html#d=ctFEwQNkH7bAhwqzvfhtKg

D- Cut 1 dark square 3-1/2"

Read more about the Confederate Rose, a once-popular hibiscus at this site:
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/southerngarden/hibiscus.html

UPDATE MONDAY 9-12-11 for those having trouble printing the templates:

WARNING: Reading below this line may cause eyes to glaze over.
Here is a JPG with the template. Click on it. Print it so it comes out 8-1/2 x 11. We'll see if this works

Later--I tried it and it did not print out the right size. Piece B should have printed out so the top dark line measured 2-7/8" (to match the long side of triangle A) but it printed out 2-1/8".

I need to enlarge it as it prints. By how much?

Well I have a tool, a proportion wheel, that I used to use in the old days of cut and paste layout. It tells me that if I have a line that is 2-1/8" and I want it to be 2-7/8" I have to enlarge my print by 135%.

There has to be a digital proportion wheel. So I did a websearch for those words and found one

http://www.knightprinting.com/help/tools.php

I typed in the numbers-

first the current number 2.125.

Below that what I want it to be 2.875.

And then had it calculate. It says 133%. Close enough.

I then printed the JPG above by going to PRINT PREVIEW. At the top it says SHRINK TO FIT. I pulled down the menu to CUSTOM and typed in 133%. I see I cropped out some pattern pieces so I messed around on the sheet by going to full page view and adjusting the margins (little arrows) till I got it right in the frame. And I printed it. It's close.

It's probably easier to photocopy it at 133%

In any case, you might want to cut these shapes a little larger. Work out from the center and trim, is all I can say.

And I wonder why I never get any sewing done anymore. Computers are now my hobby. To put a happy face on it we can say we are learning math skills and printing skills. I'm bookmarking that digital proportion tool. It could be useful.

36 Kentucky Crossroads

2011-09-03T06:00:00.006-05:00

Kentucky Crossroads

By Becky Brown

Kentucky Crossroads can remind us of the importance of the rivers to winning the War. Western Kentucky, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi, was an important crossroads of waterways. Many of the skirmishes in late summer, 1861, were fought by gunboats in the area.

Kentucky (in orange in the middle of this map)

was a border state

that remained in the Union

Kentucky began the War as officially neutral but it was a slave state with split loyalties. Neutrality was often impossible to maintain. As Union sympathizers gained political strength during the summer of 1861, Confederate troops went in to secure the Mississippi River for the South, taking over the town of Columbus and the river below that. On September 6, 1861 General Ulysses S. Grant's Union Army occupied the town of Paducah at the junction of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, ensuring that the North controlled the Ohio River.

Western Kentucky

Paducah remained under Union occupation for the duration and Kentucky remained a Union state, although the Confederacy held on to Columbus and the lower Mississippi for several years.

Mr. F. Beard sketched the town for Harper's Weekly six weeks after Grant's takeover. He described occupied Paducah as a

"beautiful little city, full of respectable and often elegant residences. It now wears, however, a deserted and melancholy appearance. Whole streets of tenantless buildings stretch from the landing to the intrenchments; and the few inhabitants who remain, although entirely unmolested and secure, look guilty and sullen. Some of our boys left the steamer Sunday, and, wandering about the town, took possession of the deserted choir of a secesh church, and one of our number being a good organist, and most of us having assisted before on such occasions, we did our best to convince those within hearing that, although belonging to the 'Northern rabble,' we were not altogether heathen and benighted."

The pattern Kentucky Crossroads was given the name in an early 20th century magazine. My source is just a clipping in a scrapbook; it may have been Comfort or Hearth & Home magazine. We know the pattern best as an album block. (BlockBase #2881).

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 4 light strips 2-3/8" x 5-1/2". You'll trim these at the end.

B - Cut 1 dark square 6-5/8". Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts. You need 4 triangles.

C - Cut 1 medium square 2-3/8"

Sew the corner strips to the center strips.

Trim the corners.

This album block (or Kentucky Crossroads) is an authentic pre-Civil-War pattern.

The detail below contains blocks dated 1847.

Album by Bettina Havig and Friends

Columbia, Missouri

2009

Album by Mary Wilk Madden

and Barbara Brackman

1996

35 Star of the West

2011-08-27T06:00:00.007-05:00

Star of the West

By Becky Brown

Star of the West can symbolize the Frémonts. Jessie and John C. Frémont were a mid-19th century power couple.

Jessie Benton Frémont

Their marriage was a political partnership, an idea ahead of its time. Jessie's father was an important Senator, so she had many influential friends and relatives. John was known for his western explorations, for his Presidential run as the first Republican candidate in 1856 and for his arrogance in the face of authority.

Frémont was a western explorer and

a founder of the state of California

During the summer of 1861 General Frémont became commander of the Union Army in Missouri, a difficult job in a state torn by conflicting loyalties. On August 30th he declared martial law, describing Missouri as disorganized and infested by murderers and marauders under a helpless civil authority, He stated that armed rebels would be court-martialed, shot and their property confiscated. Furthermore, their slaves "are hereby declared freemen."

Most Missouri slaves like Winnie, whose portrait was recorded

during the WPA projects, remained in slavery throughout the war.

Frémont 's Missouri emancipation proclamation displeased President Lincoln. The Commander-in-Chief sent a letter by special messenger on September 2nd, warning Frémont that "liberating slaves of traitorous owners will alarm our Southern Union friends and turn them against us." The idea of confiscated slaves as "contraband" was one thing, confiscated slaves as free men another.

Frémont publicly refused to rescind his order. Jessie went to Washington to argue their case for emancipation with Lincoln. She later wrote of their encounter, recounting her argument that Frémont's move would win the Union international friends.

"The President said 'You are quite a female politician.' I felt the sneering tone and saw there was a foregone decision against all listening. Then the President spoke more rapidly and unrestrainedly: 'The General ought not to have done it... the General should never have dragged the negro into the war. It is a war for a great national object and the negro has nothing to do with it.' "

Lincoln recalled the testy meeting for his secretary.

“She sought an audience with me at midnight and taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarreling with her."

Jessie was remarkably out of place, a wife deputized to discuss policy with the President. The meeting went badly and so did Frémont's subsequent career. Lincoln removed him from the Missouri command in November. The War remained an official fight for the Union, not a fight against slavery....for the time being.

In this cartoon a pouting John C. Frémont holding an African-American doll sports a head wound inscribed "Lincoln." The Doctor tells a worried Mrs. Columbia that it's only "a case of Sore Head."

Star of the West (#1128 in BlockBase) is an old block with many other names, among them Clay's Choice and Harry's Star. Both names, according to Ruth Finley in her 1929 book, were tributes to Henry Clay, an earlier politician who also ran unsuccessfully for President.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 8 background squares 2-1/2".

B Cut 4 medium, 2 dark and 2 background squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally
.

You need 8 medium, 4 dark and 4 background triangles.

The Frémonts returned to California where

Jessie was photographed on her porch

at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Read more about the Frémonts and events of the summer and fall of 1861 at this blog post:
http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=714&subjectID=2

Read Jessie's letters:

The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, Pamela Herr & Mary Lee Spence (editors), University of Illinois Press, 1993.

34 Rosebud

2011-08-20T06:00:00.009-05:00

Rosebud by Becky Brown

The block can remind us of the Confederacy's famous spy

Rose Greenhow

On August 23rd, 1861 Union troops arrested 48-year-old Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Washington hostess, socialite and widow of a State Department employee. Born in Maryland, she was daughter of a planter murdered by one of his slaves when Rose was three. As young women she and sister Ellen went to live with Aunt Maria Hill who ran a polite boarding house known as the Old Brick Capitol.

Rose

The girls made good marriages. Ellen wed James Madison Cutts, nephew of Dolley Madison. Their daughter Adele grew up to marry Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Rose's husband Robert Greenhow introduced her to Washington society and taught her the value of diplomacy, observation and conversation. Well-connected and passionate about the Confederate cause, she charmed many Union politicians.

In her autobiography Rose described her July activities in Union Washington.

... the 'grand army' was in motion, and I learned from a reliable source (having received a copy of the order to M'Dowell) that the order for a forward movement had gone forth. .... Officers and orderlies on horse were seen flying from place to place; the tramp of armed men was heard on every side - martial music filled the air; in short, a mighty host was marshalling, with all the 'pomp and circumstance of glorious war.' 'On to Richmond!' was the war-cry. The heroes girded on their armour with the enthusiasm of the Crusaders of old, and vowed to flesh their maiden swords in the blood of Beauregard or Lee. And many a knight, inspired by beauty's smiles, swore to lay at the feet of her he loved best the head of Jeff Davis at least."

At midnight Rose sent a woman messenger to General Beauregard at Manassas with a note about Union plans twined into her hair. Confederate commanders were grateful for the intelligence, replying:

"Let them come: we are ready for them. We rely upon you for precise information. Be particular as to description and destination of forces, quantity of artillery, &c."

A reconstructed letter from Rose,

written on mourning stationery, using a code.

After her arrest it was assembled from bits of paper

in her grate. National Archives.

Illustration from Harper's Weekly

The Confederacy won the first battle of Manassas and many credit (or blame) Rose Greenhow. Never one to hide her Confederate loyalties, Rose was soon placed under house arrest. Although forbidden to leave her home she continued to pass information.

The Old Capitol Prison

Capitol building turned boarding house turned jail

She was then imprisoned with her youngest daughter Rose in the same building she'd spent her adolescence. The Old Capitol Boarding House was now the Old Capitol Prison. (Today the site is the Supreme Court building in Washington.)

Rose and daughter in prison by Matthew Brady

Held for almost two years without being charged or tried, she managed to spy from prison. In May, 1863 she was exiled to Richmond, where she was welcomed as a hero.

President Jefferson Davis appointed her an unofficial ambassador to Europe a few months later. There she met with England's Prime Minister and France's Emperor, hoping in vain to persuade them to recognize the Confederate States of America. She published her autobiography in London.

Portrait from her autobiography

In 1864 Rose returned to America with her publishing profits in gold coins tied around her neck. The blockade running ship carrying her into Wilmington, North Carolina ran aground in the Cape Fear River. Rose was launched in a lifeboat that capsized. Weighted down by dispatches for Jefferson Davis and her fortune, she drowned on October 1, 1864.

Rose's last moments depicted in an early 20th-century book.

Rosebud (#1273 in BlockBase) was given that name by the Ladies' Art Company about 1900.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 4 dark squares and 6 light squares 2-1/8". Cut each in half diagonally.

You need 8 dark triangles and 13 light triangles.

B Cut 2 dark squares 4-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally.

You need 4 triangles.

C Cut 2 pink or red squares 3-5/8". Cut each in half diagonally.

You need 4 triangles.

Read Rose Greenhow's memoir My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolitionist Rule at Washington by clicking here and downloading a copy from the University of North Carolina's Documents of the American South.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/greenhow/menu.html

See the National Archives records where the items confiscated at her arrest have been stored.
http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/topics/civil-war/greenhow.html

Read more about her fascinating life story here

http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc//ref/nchistory/oct2005/index.html

And see an interesting facebook page here:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=192241244133701

33 Indiana Puzzle

2011-08-13T06:00:00.006-05:00

Indiana Puzzle

By Becky Brown

Indiana Puzzle can recall the political situation in that state where a surprising number of men and women expressed oposition to the War, hatred of Lincoln and a desire to join the Secessionist states.

What to do with female traitors? asked Harper's Weekly.

"Make them wear a very unfashionable uniform as for example the above."

A few weeks ago we read about Mary Kemper Vermilion, who thought magazine subscriptions too frivolous during wartime. She took her politics just as seriously.The Vermilions were long-time abolitionists and strong believers in the Union cause.

When William first went off to fight he left her with his parents in Indiana, where she stayed for six months, rather unhappy to be living in a rather dysfunctional family, as we might say. (Her father-in-law seems to have had psychotic episodes.) She also found the neighbors' political ideas very upsetting. In January, 1863 she wrote to William,

"Indiana, they say, is on the verge of revolution. Day before yesterday they had wild times at Indianapolis. The secesh tried to get possession of the arsenal, but were prevented by the Governor who called out the militia. ...The democrats...don't propose YET to join Jeff Davis's Confederacy, but to form a Southwestern confederacy of their own."

The Copperhead Party in a political cartoon

These Democrats opposed to the war favored an immediate truce with the Confederacy. Mary and her fellow Republicans called them Copperheads, poisonous snakes in the grass. But the Copperheads took the label for a compliment, finding that copper pennies of the day featured the head of Liberty. Many wore Liberty-head copper pennies as jewelry to show their loyalty to the Peace Democrat cause.

A Liberty-head penny with a hole drilled in it.

Jewelry for a Southern sympathizer?

Mary returned to her home in Iowa hoping to encounter, "No more copperheads," but found political opposition there too. She and her father went to a Union rally and heard a Republican threaten the copperheads, warning them

"they couldn't sport their...copperhead beast pins near here....I don't know how many came up to look at your likeness in my breastpin. They said that was the kind of pin to wear, a soldier's likeness."

A gold pin with a Union soldier's portrait,

possibly a mourning pin

Here was the war fought in terms of jewelry. Mary proudly wore a portrait of her husband in uniform and the "secesh" in the Indiana, Iowa and other Northern states wore breastpins, watch fobs and necklaces of copper jewelry.

Pennies were soldered to

pin backs, fobs and loops

We tend to look back at the war as North and South, puzzled at the shadings of political position. To remember the Indiana secessionists we can stitch an Indiana Puzzle, a block given that name by pattern designer Carlie Sexton in the 1920s. It's an old design that became popular in the 1880s. Make it up in copper-colored prints and it will be particuarly appropriate, representing the copper penny worn by some to flaunt their stand against the war.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

See the templates on a PDF by clicking here:
http://www.barbarabrackman.com/33IndianaPuzzle.pdf

NEW LINK as of 9/1/2011
https://acrobat.com/#d=P931Mulp-2pEsWUpHa7GJQ

A Using the template cut 2 dark blue and 2 medium blue shapes A.
B Using the template cut 2 light copper-colored and 2 medium copper-colored quarter circles.

Indiana Puzzle is BlockBase #1450.

Read the Vermilion letters in Love Amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion, Donald C. Elder III (editor), The University of Iowa Press, 2003. See more information by clicking here:

http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2003-spring/eldlovami.htm

32 Carolina Lily

2011-08-06T06:00:00.003-05:00

Note from BB. There is something wrong with the program Blogger this summer. No matter how many times I rearrange the paragraphs in this post to make a coherent narrative the program rearranges them in random order. Sorry for the strange order. Scroll around to get the measurements you need.

Carolina Lily

By Becky Brown

Early in the War the women of the South, like the women of the North, organized Soldiers' Aid Societies. Emma Holmes of Charleston, South Carolina recalled a large meeting in late July of 1861.

"This afternoon the Ladies Charleston Volunteer Aid Society held a meeting at the S.C. Hall. 192 ladies were there and nearly $1000 collected from subscriptions and donations...12 Managers [will] cut out the work and distribute it. The ladies all seemed to enjoy seeing their friends as well as the purpose for which they came."

John P Marszalek has edited The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes 1861-1866. See more about it at LSU Press.

http://lsupress.org/books/detail/the-diary-of-miss-emma-holmes-1861-1866/

Although the picture on the cover shows an older woman, Emma was in her twenties during the war, a young and passionate Secesh.

Emma's Charleston house (the three-story building with a three-story piazza) survived the fire and the War. It was demolished about 1920. This picture from the Library of Congress was taken twenty years at the turn of the 20th century. The piazzas (stacked, covered porches) are a characteristic of Charleston's architecture.

Emma reported on the various meetings she attended. In August the Ladies Society for Clothing the Troops in Active Service reported:

"2301 flannel shirts and drawers have been completed, two or three companies going on have been supplied, and the rest sent to the quarter-master."

In October friends visited to make socks and slippers.

"Out of the eleven ladies gathered, eight were knitting stockings, & grandmother showed us a pair of slippers sent her from London just after she was married, when it was the fashion for the ladies to make their own for drawing room wear."

Emma Holmes was 23 in 1861, one of 11 children of widowed Eliza Holmes. The family lived in Charleston on the income of a leased plantation until the end of 1861 when an enormous fire burned the city. They moved to Camden where she continued her diary throughout the War.

BlockBase has several patterns named after South Carolina and Charleston with which we could recall the Ladies' Charleston Volunteer Aid Society, but today's quilters think first of the Carolina Lily, a design that would be a challenge at 8".

The pattern for this week echoes the usual triple Carolina Lily. We can think of it as one bloom in a vase.

It's a variation of BlockBase #732, published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1909 as Flower Pot. The flowers in the quilt pattern are traditionally red, pink or yellow, but it's gold here to symbolize the botanical Carolina Lily (Lilium michauxii) a wild flower that grows throughout the Carolinas.

In the west we call these spotted wildflowers Tiger Lilies.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 2 light strips 6-1/8" x 2-7/8"

B - Cut 1 light square 4-1/2". Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts. You need 2 light triangles.

C - Cut 1 light square 2-7/8".

D - Cut 1 dark and 1 light square 3-1/8". Cut each in half with a diagonal cut. You need 1 dark and 1 light triangle.

E - Cut diamonds from strips cut 2-1/4" x 5-3/8". Trim 45 degree angles. Or use the template on the PDF. Click here:

http://www.barbarabrackman.com/32CarolinaLily.pdf

The diamond is supposed to finish to 2-3/8" on all four sides.

With seam allowances the side is 3-1/8" long

You need 2 gold and 2 light green diamonds.

F - Cut 1 dark square 4-1/8". Cut in half with a diagonal cut. You need 1 dark triangle.