Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Ellen Carver Mobley's Civil War



Name quilt in the collection of Maryland's
Washington County Historical Society attributed to 
Ellen Carver Mobley (1827-1899)




Abigail Koontz of the Washington County Historical Society tells us that Ellen's quilt has 36 blocks with names and dates from 1845 to the 1880s. She speculates that Ellen made all the blocks, collected signatures and assembled the quilt later in the century.

Overall view (photo manipulated)

This seems likely as the pattern (similar to BlockBase+ #2442)
required some piecing skills and the blocks all look to be by the
same hand.


When the Civil War began and Ellen was collecting names she was in her mid-30s. She'd been married since she was 16, and a mother 11 months later to a family of boys that eventually totaled ten, two of whom died as an children.


The 1860 census taken almost a year before war officially began shows Ellen and her family living in the county jail in Hagerstown. Husband Edward was the Sheriff (also a tailor) and the family of 7 surviving boys from Edward down to baby Lewis lived in the same building as two prisoners incarcerated for "Assault," Henry Hoffman a Turnkey and servant Elizabeth Allenchen (?)

It's not as bad as it sounds. It's more like the jail was in their house,
a stone building the county built in 1858.


Edward Mayberry Mobley recruited neighbors for a Union Infantry company (Co. A, 7th Maryland Infantry.) Ellen raised their seven surviving boys, perhaps with the help of her parents and brothers and sisters.  Eldest son Edward Carver Mobley (1844-1924) served under his father throughout the war.

Col. Edward Mayberry Mobley (1825-1906)

Ellen's husband had suffered a neck wound but recovered. By June 1865, both had returned home.
Ellen gave birth to one more son in July, 1866.

The elder Edward had been a carpenter/cabinet maker before the war, specializing when they first married in furniture and later in carriage building. Ellen's husband spent his post-war years active in politics and local government, particularly active in the fire department and the veteran's organization, the GAR. The Mobleys were the middle-class mechanics, clerks and retailers of late-19th-century Hagerstown life.


Ellen died at the age of 72 in this brick house at 525 North Locust Street, survived by 8 of her sons. Son Lewis inherited the house. Her quilt descended in son Harry's family, who wound up in Mississippi. Ellen's great-grandchildren donated the quilt to the historical society in 1980.



Ten years ago Heritage Auctions offered a collection of Edward's Civil War possessions, including a photograph album.

Ellen & Edward II?



Local historian Justin Mayhue has written a book on Colonel Edward M. Mobley, 7th Maryland Infantry.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Kentucky Classic #8: Whig Rose for Henry Clay

 

Kentucky Classic #8: Whig Rose by Elsie Ridgley

Mid-19th-century Kentucky politics were full of subtle and maybe not-so-subtle divisions, but nearly every Kentuckian---Whig or Democrat--- was proud of their favorite son Henry Clay who made a name for himself in the Congress of 1811 when he was called a War Hawk, advocating a fight with Great Britain.

Henry Clay (1777-1852)

He's remembered as the leading Whig in the years when the party opposed Democrat "King" Andrew Jackson and his successors. The name came from the Whig party of England, traditionally opposed to the British King. Henry Clay lived in Lexington, Fayette County. He was a perennial and unsuccessful presidential hopeful running and losing three times.

Fayette County was not far from Garrard. Clay probably
often made political appearances in Garrard.

The Block

Just what is a Whig Rose?

It's fairly loose category, a central layered red and green flower with a wide variety of floral designs in the corners. Our Whig Rose (with its green shapes north & south) was inspired by one seen in an online auction.

The pattern usually begins with a basic Rose of Sharon....

Pieced or appliqued. Vegetation might fill out the square.

Some pink in the outer flowers om this one has faded.

Whig Rose from Marguerite Ickes's 1959 
The Standard Book of Quilt Making


Additional designs can become quite elaborate and the use
of cockscombs is popular. Do cockscombs indicate a Democrat Rose?
 Roosters were the mid-19th-century symbol of the Whigs' rival?

American Museum of Folk Art Collection
Four Democrats and a Rooster

International Quilt Museum collection
Is it a Whig Rose or do those 4 green coxcombs symbolize the Democrats?
See more about Whig Roses at this recent post:

The Whig's signature animal was the American raccoon or opossum (differences are confusing.)

Whig candidate William Henry Harrison was elected
President in 1840 with coons or possums on the roof of the old log cabin.

Just one sheet this month.

Becky Brown's Kentucky Classic medallion (with extra stuff) is
finished.

We are done with the medallion patterns 1,3,5 & 7, so no medallion pattern
this month or next.

One more block in November for the 14"/15" side by side set.
Post with the links for the patterns so far:


Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Susan Short Harbin's Civil War

 

Collection of the Kentucky Museum at Western Kentucky University
Detail of a Cut-Out-Chintz or Broderie Perse quilt
Attributed to Susan Short Harbin (1825-1887) 
of Greenville, Muhlenberg County, Kentucky

The "Tree of Life" quilt appliqued of chintz vignettes, some of which
are conserved with a silk organza that makes them look faded.

https://westernkentuckyuniversity.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/581212DF-B10D-409D-9AD7-573653297847

We can see that the covered areas are cut from a popular English imported
pheasant print.

The 1850 census found Susan living with husband William at her parents' home. Joseph and Jane, the elder Shorts, had both been born in Virginia and had emigrated to Kentucky by the mid 1820s when Susan was born there.


Susan married William Harbin in 1848 and lived her life in Greenville in a house her brother George Short had built in anticipation of marriage. After George’s intended bride turned him down he gave the house to little sister Susan.


When the Civil War began Susan was a widow, husband William having died in 1858, preceded by son David who died at one. The 1860 census lists her at 35 as a “Domestic,” with $6,000 in property (the house?) and children Jane, George and Joseph, all under ten, living with her plus Marcella, a 20-year-old and Elizabeth, a 55 "domestic."

Like most 19th-century women Susan left little in the way of a paper trail. She did not remarry.

October 12, 1887 Hartford, Kentucky newspaper obituary



Did Susan Harbin stitch this example of one of Kentucky's few surviving chintz-style quilts?


Museums in other states have similar quilts cut from the same chintzes, some date inscribed (1803---probably too early.)

Sarah Miller's quilt  at the Shelburne and Violet Alexander's of Mecklenburg, North Carolina at the Smithsonian are both dated 1830. Susan was a child in the early 1830s when the pheasant chintzes were quite popular. By the time she was of the mature sewing age of 15 in the early 1840s the chintz tree-of-life style had faded, replaced by fashions for block-style designs and conventional applique. Susan Ann Short, born in 1825, is not a likely candidate as the quiltmaker.

See more about the style here:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2020/05/sarah-millers-quilt-how-to-make-tree-of.html

And see two recent posts on the lack of early Kentucky quilts here:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2024/10/kentuckys-earliest-quilts-2-missing.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2024/10/kentuckys-earliest-quilts.html


Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Cornelia Grinnell Willis's Civil War

 

Cornelia Grinnell Willis (1825-1904)
Massachusetts's New Bedford Whaling Museum has this poor 
photo of New Bedford-born Cornelia Willis in her old age, 
which I have tried to clear up a bit. 
Is that a quilt in her lap?

When Civil War commenced in 1861 Cornelia Willis had been married to successful newspaper publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis for about 14 years.

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1807-1867)
Willis was known as quite a dandy. He was famous at the time 
as a poet but his real success was in publishing newspapers, particularly The Home Journal, predecessor to Town & Country.

Cornelia was Willis's second wife marrying him when she was about 22. She met him in Washington where she lived with her adoptive parents U.S. Representative Joseph Grinnell (her father's brother) and Sarah Russell Grinnell (her mother's sister.) A complicated family here of double aunts and double uncles....

Cornelia became stepmother to Nathaniel's four-year-old daughter Imogen, whose mother Mary Stace Willis had died in childbirth along with her second baby, much to the sorrow of the families and Imogen's nursemaid, Harriet Jacobs.

By 1861 Cornelia had four living children of her own. Her last child was a daughter born in the fall of 1860 who died at birth. They were living in Cornwall, New York, 40 miles up the Hudson from New York City in a 14-room house they built called Idlewild.

Idlewild designed by Calvert Vaux still stands.

The Grinnells and the Willises were successful, brilliant and contentious. Nathaniel, considered the highest paid newspaper editor and writer of his time, was brother to Sarah Willis Parton, who published as Fanny Fern, lauded as the highest paid female journalist at the same time. Nathaniel refused to print Sarah's articles. Sarah published a novel Ruth Hall in which she ridiculed a man much like Nathaniel. By the time of the war brother and sister were not speaking to each other.

Is this Uncle Sam roasting Presidential candidate James Buchanan,
doughface Northerner with Southern sympathies?

Nathaniel had a reputation as a "doughface," a northerner who defended slavery. His newspaper was praised by Jefferson Davis as one of "the only Northern papers that the South can securely trust." Lydia Maria Child noted that even after war began his newspaper was not violently pro-slavery but subtly and systematically so.

Cornelia, on the other hand, was from a Quaker family with several members outspoken in support of abolition. How she and her husband handled those differences of opinion is up in the air. There were other conflicts including a public adultery trial by actor Edwin Forrest who accused Nathaniel of seducing his wife and attacked him with a whip.

The whipped seducer. Public ridicule.

As the war began the Willises were employing the nursemaid who'd cared for Imogen when she was young. Harriet Jacobs was an African-American woman, an escaped slave from North Carolina. Cornelia rehired her after the birth of her second child. 


Hattie Jacobs spent her evenings after the Willis children were abed writing her autobiography, a hard-to-believe tale of hiding in an attic for several years before she found her way to New York. She published it with Lydia Maria Child's editorial assistance just before the war under the pseudonym Linda Brent. 


Cornelia knew quite a bit of Harriet's story. After the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act gave slaveholders legal rights to reclaim escapees Harriet worried about being kidnapped. Cornelia sent Harriet and her own youngest child to her family home in New Bedford when they thought she needed to hide. 

When Harriet read that one of that family was in New York she told Cornelia, who suggested she use some of her fortune to purchase Harriet. Harriet refused to be considered a piece of merchandise, but Cornelia went ahead, raising funds from friends to pay the Norcom family $300 (over $9,000 today.)

Louisa Jacobs (1833-1927)

When war began Harriet moved to Alexandria, Virginia where she and daughter Louisa maintained a  school for freed people. Nathaniel Willis also went to Washington reporting on the war for The Home Journal, which had been neutral on the slavery issue before the war. The paper now took the Union side, losing its Southern readers and many Northerners too. Willis's 1890 biographer Henry A. Beers explained his conflict:
"He was, of course, a Union man. But he retained a secret sympathy with the South, and a liking for 'those chivalrous, polysyllabic Southerners, incapable of a short word or a mean action,' whom he had known at Saratoga years before.... the [newspaper's readers],  a large proportion of whose subscribers were in the South, had fallen off seriously."

Cornelia remained at Idlewild when war began with her children but income was tight and she rented out her mansion, returning to live with her father at New Bedford. In 1863 she reclaimed the house, turning it into a girls' school. By then Nathaniel lived in New York, refusing to visit his family and home in reduced circumstances. His health was failing (suffering from seizures among other crises.) He died on his 61st birthday in 1867 at Idlewild. 

1863
We can see Cornelia's fortunes through ads in the New York papers

1867
She leased the school.

She offered the house for sale.

The Willis women and children remained quite close to Harriet and her daughter Louisa, who was in boarding school before the Civil War. Tracing their histories one can see lives intertwined throughout the 19th century and into the 20th.

Imogen Willis Eddy (1842-1904) at Harvard
"We do all the computing connected with the meridian circle, our special work being to locate the position of certain stars…Harvard is the only college that employs women as mathematical computers." Imogen.
The Willises often provided financial gifts; the Jacobses provided homes as when Imogen lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts working at Harvard College Observatory. Imogen boarded at Harriet & Louisa's boarding house.

The house on Auburn still stands. Imogen was just one
of many brilliant Willises. The youngest boy Bailey Willis
became an eminent geologist. 

Washington Times

Cornelia had lived at his home in Washington for 8 years before her death in 1904.