Kentucky Classic #2: Kentucky Wildflower for Caroline Amelia Moore

 

Kentucky Classic #2: Kentucky Wildflower

 for Caroline Amelia Moore

by Elsie Ridgley

The individual design units here, the conventional rose and simple leaves are planted in an absurdly small vase...something rather characteristic of these Garrard County quilts. We can see the design as a metaphor for Carry Moore Nation, a Garrard County native.

Attributed to Lucy Kemper West of Garrard County

DAR Museum

Overgrown plants in need of repotting are a Kentucky Classic theme

Caroline Moore Floyd Nation (1846-1911)

at 28 when she married for a second time in 1874.

Carrie Amelia Moore was born to George & Mary Campbell Moore in 1846 on their farm west of Bryantsville in Garrard County.

The cliffs at Dick's (Dix) River

Carry remembered the enslaved people on their Kentucky farm; Betsy, Mary, Judy and Eliza were the matriarchs.

1850 census showing mother Mary Jane at 26 with 7 children including 3-year-old Caroline.

Mary Jane James Campbell Moore (1824-1893).

Perhaps Edna on the left and Carrie on the right in the 1850s.

Mary gave birth to her last child in 1861 in Missouri.

George Moore (1815-1883)

Irish-born George Moore seems to have been rather restless, taking the family to other farms in Kentucky and moving them to Missouri in 1855 when Carry was 9. 

The Moore's home in Cass County, Missouri

Portal to Texas History 

Dr. Charles Gloyd (1840-1869)

After the Civil War Carry married Dr. Charles Gloyd a veteran of the 118th Ohio Volunteer Infantry  when she was in her early 20s. Traumatized by the war Gloyd was an alcoholic. Carry, pregnant with her only child Charlien, left him and Charles died within a year. His alcoholism prompted her to become the tavern keepers' foe thirty years later when she was known for smashing saloons.

Kansas Museum of History

Carry in jail in Topeka with a nine-patch quilt on the bed.

She began her hatcheting career in 1900 in her mid fifties, after the failure of her second marriage to David Nation. She traveled the country to make speeches and chop up bars and other furniture with her signature ax. 

Kansas Museum of History Collection

She was often jailed. Being an expert at calling attention to herself and her crusade she was frequently in the national papers in the first decade of the 20th century. Her ten years of notoriety ended when a nervous breakdown caused her hospitalization at the Evergreen Sanitarium in Leavenworth, Kansas.

She died there at 66 in 1911.

Unfortunately sanitariums were familiar territory to the Moores. Carry's mother Mary died in the mental hospital in Nevada, Missouri and her brothers Charles and Campbell are also buried in the hospital's cemetery. Carry's daughter Charlien Gloyd McNabb died in an asylum in Texas in 1929.

The Nevada Hospital for the Insane was the largest building in

Missouri for a time.

Women patients on an outing

Carry Moore Nation may have been technically insane, affected with a hereditary schizophrenia, psychosis or perhaps early-onset dementia. She was certainly eccentric. This Kentucky Wildflower remains one of Garrard County's most famous natives.

A little fancy cutting from Becky Brown

The Block

45" Square

No medallion set this month---here's the side-by-side set 

for nine 14/15-inch finished blocks. Look for the Beckys' progress in May.

Read Carry's surprisingly readable autobiography The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, published in 1904.

https://books.google.com/books?id=K4U-AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=life+use+carry+nation&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwid083Fi9r_AhW1JH0KHTZwAeAQ6AF6BAgIEAI#v=onepage&q=life%20use%20carry%20nation&f=false