Sarah Thomas Bacon's Civil War

I've spent a lot of time lately looking closely at these fancy, 

embroidered crazy quilts from the 1880-1900 period. This one was

recorded by the Kent County, Maryland project.

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=58-172-130

I am especially interested in those with passementerie-style edges (military braids, cords & tassels, etc.) Most I've found seem to have been made in the bluegrass region of Kentucky: near Louisville & Lexington.

Or in Missouri

Rachel Ewing Bacon and her sisters are credited with the quilt. She was said to have been born in Maryland and died in Chesterville in eastern Missouri near St. Louis. The quilt was probably made in St. Joseph, Missouri, taken to Maryland by a family member.  

Rachel Bacon, 11 years old here, was recorded in the 1870 census in St. Joseph on the western side of the state. Her sisters Anna and S.E. (probably Sarah Ewing Bacon) are also shown. If the quilt was made during the high-style years of the embroidered silk crazies, Rachel would have been about 20; Anna 22 and Sarah about 26. Their mother was another Sarah, Sarah Elizabeth Thomas Bacon (1828-1905) who married Enos Ewing Bacon in 1844. 

St. Joseph about the time the Civil War began

Mother Sarah  may have had a hand in the quilt too. Her Civil War experiences as a young mother with several children give us a picture of the war in Missouri. Sarah, born in Maryland, married Enos, the local school teacher who came from New Jersey to Kent County. After several years in Chestertown "the western fever smote them," according to an obituary of Enos and they moved to St. Joseph just before the war in 1860.

St. Joe was a jumping off place for overland travelers to the west coast.

This 1859 Albert Bierstadt photo shows a party waiting for

a ferry to cross the Missouri River.

St. Joseph was thriving in 1860, selling draft animals, equipment and supplies to thousands of travelers every spring. Enos opened a store with Sarah's brother E.C. Thomas II, which they operated through the war. On the second story of the building "Mrs. Bacon opened a boarding & lodging house," known as the Bacon House. In 1879 they built a larger hotel on the spot.

The Bacon House (1879-1896) at 3rd & Jule Streets (now Jules)

Like most of Missouri St. Joseph had divided loyalties during the war. About two thousand local soldiers fought on the Union side; the same amount on the Confederate. The town see-sawed between Union and Confederate control in the first year. Tensions had been apparent before the war, due to the proximity of Kansas and it's free-state/slave-state struggle. By early1861 Northern-born travelers were avoiding St. Joe, supplying their wagons in Council Bluffs, Iowa, as explained by Mr. Wardell in a letter published a few weeks before Fort Sumter.

In December, he reported "several big men" threatened to "turn out any time, to mob any Northern man who came through Missouri in the spring....Slayback, Jackson, Jeff Thompson, Montgomery" and several others.

Meriwether Jeff Thompson (1826-1876)

Virginia-born Jeff Thompson was the city's pre-war mayor. In 1905 Robert C. Bradshaw recalled a local incident that made national news in 1861.

"Lowering the flag to a mob..." from J.M. Bassett's 1864

book Union Men and Their Sufferings in North-Western Missouri

"I saw M. Jeff Thompson and others tearing into shreds the United States flag which had just been torn from the flag staff of the Post-Office building... a few minutes fully five hundred men had assembled. When the cry was raised, 'Now for the dirty rag on Turner Hall.' Hearing this, I hastened to Turner Hall...When forty feet from the Hall [the mob] they were halted by M. Jeff Thompson. Then Alonzo W. Slayback and Thomas Thourghman (both well-known to me) came forward, and in the name of peace...asked me to take the flag down, saying that Jeff Thompson was drunk and no one could tell what a 'mob' under a drunken leader would do. I declined to comply with their request."

Collection State Historical Society of Missouri

The Paw-Paw Militia headed by Odon Guitar was a Union militia,

here drilling with broomsticks on the streets of St. Joseph in 1863.

At the end of the year St. Joseph was placed under Union martial law for the rest of the war. Son Charles Francis Bacon (1856-1936), told a newspaper reporter years later that the Bacons were:

 " 'Southern sympathizers' and Southerners found the climate pretty warm in St. Joseph at times during the hostilities [but] they never had any very serious clashes with the few Union forces...nor with the 'bushwhackers,' more numerous and infinitely more bothersome."

Alexander Bacon enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops in 1863

The Bacons traveled to St. Joseph with family members and enslaved people, among them Alexander, born about 1845 in Maryland and about 15 when he was taken to Missouri.

During the war Enos apparently enlisted in a militia unit (Union or Confederate?) despite his "frail constitution." One night during a storm when he was assigned to guard a store of gunpowder, he decided the weather was more than he could brave so he walked home up Jule Street. He was court martialed but acquitted on account of the weather (!)

Post-war St. Joseph

The crazy quilt, stitched abut 20 years after the war, was made by the girls while living at the Bacon House. The hotel thrived and they were probably affluent enough to buy machine-embroidered swatches to attach among all their hand-worked stitches.

Why the corded edge so typical of Kentucky? Perhaps one or more of the girls went to school in Kentucky, a likely passage for Missouri's upper-class Southern-born girls. Or a Kentuckian might have come to St. Joseph to teach needlework in that elegant style.

After father Enos died in 1895 Sarah and son Charles ran the hotel. She apparently had always had a hand in the management (and law suits.)

Here in 1896 she's had a boarder in a neighboring hotel arrested

for disturbing her customers with his barking dogs.

But the Bacon House was soon bankrupt (the 1890s a hard time for businesses.)

The girls

From Enos's 1895 obituary

Sarah Ewing Bacon became Sallie G. Hickock who lived in Portland, Oregon. Anna was Mary Anna Bacon who remained unmarried in St. Joseph and Rachel the youngest became Rachel Baker of  Alberta, Canada.

The elder Sarah Bacon died in 1905 at 77. By then she was living in Portland with daughter Sarah Bacon Hickock.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/40928239/sarah-eliza-bacon

Mary Custis Lee

 

Quilt in collection of Arlington House, National Park Service Museum

Collection: Virginia Historical Society

Sketch of Arlington House, 1862

Robert Knox Sneden diary

Visitors to Mary Custis Lee's Arlington House at Arlington National Cemetery may notice quilts in the bedrooms of the main house and the slave housing.

Contemporary strip quilt in the slave housing

Like many house museums Arlington House uses reproduction quilts to approximate the living quarters for the historical residents. Their focus is the pre-Civil War years before the Union Army confiscated
the house that Robert E. Lee's wife Mary Custis inherited.

The museum has a collection of quilts from various eras with little information about them. Perhaps I could figure some things out. I thought I'd start with the newer quilts; the red and white quilt below photographed in a bedroom looks 20th century. Would any Arlington women be making quilts in the 20th century?

The red and white color scheme, the quilting design and the patchwork all

look "Early 20th century."

Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee (1807 - 1873)

Auguste Hervieu portrait of Mary

 before her 1838 wedding to Robert E. Lee

Mary Custis Lee (the elder) seems to have made quilts despite a terrible case of rheumatoid arthritis but this one would have been made a generation or two after her death.

Virginia Museum of History & Culture

Mary with Robert E Lee II, About 1845

Mary and Robert had four daughters, none of whom ever married---their father was opposed and their ill mother needed them. Although we know nothing about the quilts at Arlington, we might guess the daughters had a hand in them. This "Hearts & Gizzards" as Ruth Finley called it in 1929, would have to be credited to either Mildred who died in 1905 or Mary who died in 1919. Their sisters died young.

I doubt either Mary or Mildred made the quilt; it looks like the kind of thing that someone thought nice enough for a museum and the curator accepted it years ago before a quilt's history was important.

But it gives us an opportunity to look at the lives of The Girls, as the family called them. The eldest Mary Custis Lee was in her mid-20s when the Civil War began, living at Arlington House. Her father's defection to the Confederate Army resulted in the Union take-over of the family home and Mary and the children scattered to relatives' homes and other family estates.

Heritage Auction

Drawing given to J.E.B. Stuart by Mary C. Lee, 

done in 1854

Despite the itinerant life of an Army officer's daughter Mary received a good education for her time before the war and was apparently talented in art. She and Jeb Stuart were friends until his death. She and all three of her sisters spent time at the Powell Female Seminary in Winchester, Virginia owned by Selina Lloyd Powell and her husband.

Selina Lloyd Powell (1807-1871)

Her school closed when the war began

Selina had long been a friend of the Lee girls' mother (and only because the world is such a small place we find Selena was also actress Katherine Hepburn's great-grandmother.)

The Lee family spent the last years of the war in Richmond living in this house during the fall of the Confederate Capitol and then moving to a donated cottage in the country. The house still stands.

Derwent 50 miles from Richmond

According to family accounts it was NOT "Little Women Confederate Style." Mildred, the youngest did not speak to Mary, the eldest, and Mary's feelings for the rest of her family were apparently similar.

Mildred

The eldest & youngest sisters lived the longest, not speaking into

the 20th century.

Mildred may have put her finger on the problem, describing her sister in a letter: Mary "is always absorbed in self, first and foremost.”

Mary, described as “strong, but somewhat eccentric character"

After the war Mary put oceans between herself and her sisters, traveling throughout Europe with only occasional trips back to the U.S. On one of those visits in 1902 when she was in her late sixties, Mary was arrested for civil disobedience, sitting with her African-American servant in a train car reserved for Black passengers. She, having lived in Europe where such bigotry was not common, may have done so in ignorance but she refused to move and was arrested and bailed out for $5. She jumped bail.

Gotta hand it to her. But I don't think she had anything to do with the later quilts at the family home. Hearts & Gizzards indeed.

Similar quilt from the 1950s or '60s.

Further Reading: Mary Coulling. The Lee Girls. Winston-Salem: John F. Blair Publisher, 1987.

Herbarium #3: A Starry Wreath for Emily Dickinson

Becky Brown, Herbarium #3 Starry Wreath for Emily Dickinson

Amherst College Collection

Poet Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) when she was about 16

Many women posed with a favored book, often a Bible.

But Emily was not known for her religiosity. Note the flower

in her hand. Was the book her bound herbarium?

Emily entered a local school, the Amherst Academy, at age 9 in 1840 and graduated in 1847. The Dickinsons were strong educational supporters and Emily was proud of her education:

"[Sister] Viny and I both go to school this term. We have a very fine school. There are 63 scholars. I have four studies. They are Mental Philosophy, Geology, Latin, and Botany. How large they sound, don’t they? I don’t believe you have such big studies.” Emily, 1845 to friend Abiah Root.

Her 66-page Herbarium bound in green is at the Houghton Library.

https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:4184689$1i

Starry Wreath by Becky Collis

While at the Academy Emily kept a Herbarium, dated by Harvard's Houghton Library as having been assembled during her school years. Was the daguerreotype portrait above made as a celebration of the end of her schooling with the book a tangible souvenir?

Harvard's Houghton Library Collection

Emily about 9, painted by A.O. Bullard

Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps (1793-1884)

One botany text book at the Academy was Almira Lincoln Phelps's Familiar Lectures on Botany with instructions for teachers as well as students. Phelps's book, originally published in 1829, went through
about 40 editions. She was educator Emma Hart Willard's sister.

The 1854 edition

Starry Wreath by Denniele Bohannon

I've looked at hers and other botany textbooks hoping to find illustrations relating to the quilt blocks in the eight similar quilts but no luck so far. Our unknown teacher probably drew her own.

The Block

Edge of sampler made by an unknown quiltmaker, published in 

Border to Border: Quilts and Quiltmakers of Montana

Reconstructed wreath from the edge of the 1850

Goodrich Family Quilt.

Anemone undulata from the Dickinson Herbarium

Pattern for the full Starry Wreath

This wreath with five-lobed starry flowers is set as a half a wreath

 in several of the eight mid-19th-century Herbarium quilts.

Variations in the edge blocks that fill out the on-point set

The quilt above from an unknown source includes wreaths cut in half lining the edges---most with the 5-lobed floral. The Starry Wreath is reconstructed above in our pattern as a full wreath and below as  the half wreath.

The OFFICIAL Set

Our set for 13 on-point blocks includes 8 half-blocks. 19th-century quiltmakers were quite inclined to make a full block and cut it in half when they needed a half-block. This seems unwise as you are losing fabric in the seam allowances along the cut. Better to plan ahead and make 8 half-blocks. Use the starry floral for the 4 corners.

Further Reading

See a facsimile of  Emily Dickinson's Herbarium. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Or view it digitally. The library also has some unbound, unlabeled pages.

https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:4184689$30i

Read more about Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps:

https://nyamcenterforhistory.org/tag/almira-lincoln-phelps/