Ladies' Aid Album #4: Thoroughbred Horse for Emily Barnes

 

#4 Thoroughbred Horse by Denniele Bohannon

Albany, New York's state capital, was known for horse racing in the second half of the 19th century. We recall the women of Albany and their work for Union soldiers with a thoroughbred horse as no New York appliqued album is complete without a horse.

Quilt dated 1879 for Ann Elizabeth Davis,

New York project & the Quilt Index

 Albany's Army Relief Association held a well-documented fund-raising fair 

in 1864 in a specially-built building in one of the city's parks.

The Library of Congress owns an album full of photographs

taken at that fair with a focus on the women who ran the

various booths.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.58448/?st=gallery

The Albany Army Relief Bazaar opened on February 22, 1864,

Washington's Birthday. 

The Bazaar's biggest coup was a raffle for one of two autograph copies of Abraham Lincoln's  Emancipation Proclamation. 

Emily Peck Weed Barnes (1827-1889)

Emily Weed Barnes persuaded the President to donate a copy. Or she asked her

father to persuade him. 

I think this is Emily with a hand to her brow at the Bazaar.

That may be a sister to the right. They have their father's nose.

Brady Studios portrait Thurlow Weed (1797-1882)

Emily's father was Thurlow Weed, Albany newspaperman and politician, one of the founders of
the Republican party.

Republicans measuring Lincoln's shoes for an 1864 

Presidential candidate; Thurlow Weed probably to the

right of the right shoe.

Emily's husband William Barnes, Albany attorney and anti-slavery activist, was also active in founding the Republican Party in the mid-1850s. William was in charge of the raffle. Tickets cost $1. Abolitionist Gerrit Smith, who was on the committee, wound up with the document and sold it to New York State where it remains in Albany today (the only copy now because the other burned in the great Chicago fire.)

Read more about the Proclamation here:

https://www.ephemerasociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Ephemera-Journal-Vol16-Issue-1.pdf

The workers at the Autograph and Photograph

booth pose for a picture. They sold pictures like

this as fundraisers. And autographs like

Herman Melville's whose cousin was a fair organizer.

See a post on this headdress worn by many female workers.

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2018/06/patriotic-headdress.html

Local people dressed up as foreigners in exotic

costume to run the booths. (Have not been able to

find a photo of the Holland booth which had

a quilting frame set up.)

Women at the Yankee Booth. I'll take that model

of the Washington monument made out of pearl buttons, please.

All in all it was an event and raised about $83,000 for Soldier's Aid.

Emily on the left. Must be her (or one of her two sisters) on the right.

And I think I figured out why this woman, if she was Emily Weed Barnes, was looking a little weary in late winter, 1864. She gave birth to her fourth child Harriet on March 21st.

Thoroughbred Horse by Becky Brown

The Block

A few months after the peace Winslow Homer published a sketch

of fans at the Saratoga track in Harper's Weekly

New York has long been known as Horse Country. Albany is just a few miles from Saratoga Race Course, founded in 1863, one of the country's best-known thoroughbred tracks.

Thoroughbred Horse by Barbara Schaffer

Our block is based on horses found in numerous New York albums.

Horses by needleworkers of varying skills

Like the cows in Block #2, horses were much pictured in the media of the day.

1861

Horses to work, to show and to race.

One wouldn't have to look far for equine inspiration.

Horse Races 1868 Albany

The Pattern

How to print:

• Create a word file or a new empty JPG file that is 8-1/2" x 11".
• Click on the image above.
• Right click on it and save it to your file.
• Print that file out 8-1/2" x 11". Note the inch square block for reference.
• Adjust the printed page size if necessary.
• Add seams.

Thoroughbred Horse by Bettina Havig

My poor horse is more of a farm horse. I put his

mane on upside down and he's not prancing but

plodding. He is however all dotted.

Stella Rubin had this quilt for sale in 1993

Extra Reading

More about the Emancipation Proclamation manuscript:
https://friendsofalbanyhistory.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/the-albany-army-relief-bazaar-for-civil-war-aid-and-the-emancipation-proclamation-1864/

http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/ep/acquisition.htm

Currier & Ives prints often featured horses.

The Great Hanging

Quilt attributed in the family to Mary Angeline Neely Fogle,

about 1890

Collection of Polly Mello

 

Polly's Texas family also handed down the story of "The Great Hanging" and how Mary Angeline's grandfather was executed by a mob of Confederate sympathizers in Gainesville, Texas in October, 1862.

Mary Angeline Neely Fogle (1868–1950)

The quilt is pieced of plains and prints with a yellow dotted sashing.

Quilting is typical Southern fans design.

Detail "Rebel Outrages in Texas” 

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly February 20, 1864

Mary Angeline, born after the Civil War, undoubtedly heard the terrible story of how her mother (Elizabeth Ann Burch Neely 1842-1896) and grandmother (Mary McConnel Burch) brought Barnibus Burch's body home from Gainesville and buried him on their farm southeast of town. The women who dug the grave as best they could obviously had no men to help them. 

 James Martin Neely Jr. (1835-1927) 

Elizabeth's husband James appears to have been in Little Rock, Arkansas at the time where he enlisted in Charles Leroy Morgan's Confederate Texas Cavalry Battalion on October 10, 1862. He'd been in Charles DeMorse's 29th Texas Cavalry Regiment earlier in the year.

Barnabus Burch's grave in the grown-over fence line

from Find-A-Grave.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11255043/barnibus-burch

Had the young Confederate private been at home might he have saved his doddering father-in-law from the noose? Barnabus seems harmless, a 70-year-old man too crippled to ride a horse who testified at his vigilante trial with stories of a dream of peace, good whiskey and a Bible quote. They hung him as a Union threat to the community, as they did 43 other mob victims in October. 

The Leslie's illustration of "Rebel Barbarities"

took liberties with the facts. Executions took place a few

 at a time over a period of days.

When her father was killed Elizabeth was the 20-year-old mother of infant James Austin Neely named for his father. She might also have been caring for stepchildren 3-year-old Laura and Charles Martin Neely, 5-year-old son of her husband's first wife, the boys the only males in the Burch/Neely family living on the farm near Burns City. Elizabeth's mother, Mary McConnell Burch, Barnabus's second wife, had one son David A. Burch and seven daughters. 

Gainesville is up by the border of what is now Oklahoma,

then Indian Territory.

Barnabus also had older sons from his first marriage but the older Burches remained in Missouri when their father and Mary left for Texas in the 1850s. Elizabeth's half brother Milton Burch was a Lieutenant in the Union Missouri State Militia with a reputation for warring against secessionist guerillas, enthusiasm perhaps motivated by his father's murder.

The blogger at GainesvilleTX1862 has done much writing about the Great Hanging:

"Most of the Burch family...traveled back to Missouri sometime after their father died... Elizabeth Ann Burch Neely left Texas and took her little family to Missouri to live with her older half-brothers. [Polly's been told she drove an oxcart with her children in it.]  Elizabeth's younger sisters most likely traveled with her... it seems as if the younger children of Barnabus Burch were scattered, living with whoever would take them in. It is not known what happened to their mother, Mary.

http://gainesvilletx1862.blogspot.com/2011/04/barnabus-burch.html

The 1870 census shows Elizabeth and husband James living in Benton, Dallas County, Missouri. Rosetta, born in Missouri in 1866 (interpreted as Lazattia here), and the quiltmaker, 2-year-old Mary A., were Missouri natives. Also living with them is Elizabeth's young sister Angeline for whom Mary A. was probably named.

Dallas County, full of Union sympathizers, suffered its own losses in war-ravaged Missouri. A year after Barnabus's death Confederate troops burned the county courthouse in the town of Buffalo. But few western towns suffered as much as Gainesville, Texas and we can hope the family found some peace in the Missouri Ozarks.

Thomas Hart Benton painted the second Dallas County Courthouse in 

1965 remembering the townsfolk who gathered to gossip

in the yard.

Elizabeth is buried in Cooke County,

Texas.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11255287/elizabeth-ann-neely

Awful as the Texas memories were the Neelys returned to Texas, to Burns City where Mary Angeline married Cornelius Avant Fogle in 1896, perhaps the occasion for which the quilt was made.

Wedding picture of Cornelius & Mary Neely Fogle?

The 1900 Cooke County, Texas census finds Mary, 2-year-old Josie and husband Cornelius who is listed as a blacksmith. 

Katie Hawkins married twice according

to Find-A-Grave

Cornelius had been married before; apparently he and first wife Katie Hawkins divorced in the mid- 1890s

The 1910 census lists the Fogles in Avoca, Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma with their four children. Clide was born in 1907 in the new state indicating they moved there sometime about 1905. And that's where they stayed. Avoca is southeast of Shawnee.

Shawnee, the county seat, in 1907

Polly writes: "There are two monuments in Gainesville at the site of the Hanging Tree: One of pink granite was placed there in the 1960s and supported the people that hung the 'northern sympathizers'."

Polly's dad Henry Fogle, great-grandson of Elizabeth & James

"I remember my father saying in the 1960s that that it was not safe to bring up the subject of the hanging even then. In 2014, fifty years later, another Monument was placed on the site remembering those that were hung placed by descendants of the hanged."

Mary Angeline chose a popular pattern for her late-19th-century or early 20th-century quilt. Seven stars in a circle is a regional Southern favorite and many like to speculate it indicates nostalgia for the Confederate cause. After reading her family story one wonders if Mary saw a Confederate flag in there.

As we have recently seen---every insurrection has a demagogue in charge and in Gainesville it was James Bourland. Head of a Secessionist military group, he knew how to appeal to the paranoid, the gullible and the conspiracy-obsessed when he convinced locals that men like Barnabus were plotting to bring in Kansas Union Jayhawkers from 500 miles away.

James G. Bourland 1801-1879

Bourland came to Texas in 1837 from South Carolina where he traded in horses and enslaved people. He maintained a plantation and a store in Cooke County although that doesn’t appear to be his residence. He was the second- largest slave holder in the county before the war.

Texas papers copied an article from the Denton Monitor

in August, 1879

After the war there was talk of prosecuting Bourland for murder but it never happened. In his late 70s he slipped into dementia and as he was dying in 1879 newspaper editors had a bit to say about his crimes and his reputation.

Austin American, September 1879

He still had his supporters.

Bourland's grave in Dexter, Cooke County, from Find-A-Grave

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45447914/james-g-bourland

See more about the Seven Stars in a Circle patchwork pattern here:

http://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2016/07/seven-stars-in-circle.html

Richard B. McCaslin is the authority on The Great Hanging. Read a preview of his chapter in The Fate of Texas here: 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fate_of_Texas/miZLCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=leslie%27s+magazine+great+hanging+gainesville+texas&pg=PA52&printsec=frontcover.