Cornelia Coventry Burling's Civil War

 

Chintz quilt associated with Cornelia Ann Burling (1794-1882)

Collection of the St. Louis Art Museum.

https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/69107/

The center is a chintz fruit basket cut out from a repeat print and

appliqued to a white background. It looks like the original background was white,

which would have made trimming the basket easier than using the colored backgrounds below.

Cooper-Hewitt Collection

Scrap with a tan blotch ground.

And a pieced repeat on a blue ground. The print

alternated two baskets; one with a scalloped top as in the quilt,

the other with a flat wicker top.

From the museum's records:

"Family documentation records the maker as Cornelia Ann Coventry Burling, a young resident of New York City. Burling’s granddaughter Anna W. Pond McGrew [McGraw?] recalled in a note contained in the family’s papers that she received the quilt as a wedding gift in 1880 and that her grandmother commenced this quilt in 1816, and I quote, 'and it was a year in the quilting frame,' unquote. According to genealogical records, this would have been just before Cornelia’s marriage to Lancaster S. Burling and the birth of their first child in 1818."

And there were at least two Cornelia Burlings

The elder Cornelia Ann Coventry married Lancaster S. Burling, a New York banker from a ship-building family in 1817.  His family owned a good deal of city real estate including the Burling Slip, a docking port and business area indicated by the red star below.

The Burlings were important Methodists in their time, affiliated with the city's first Methodist church now called the John Street Church. Cornelia was said to be the first female superintendent of the first Methodist Sunday School in New York (Always wary of "firsts!") They were both active in the church's missionary society, with Cornelia serving as treasurer in the women's branch there for many years. They sent missionaries to foreign countries acting as "The Heathen Woman's Friend" as one of their affiliated publications was named.

They also maintained an early type of settlement house in the New York slum called Five Points. Their Five Points Mission at the Old Brewery was founded about 1850, providing shelter, food, schooling, counseling ----and they promised---no Methodist doctrine to the largely Catholic immigrant clientele.

Christmas at the Five Points Mission

Husband Lancaster in 1845. He died in 1853.

About 1857 Cornelia was living on W 81st Street in New York City

according to the city directory...

On the upper west side as in this 1890s neighborhood on 81st.

June 1882 obituary. A "relict" is a widow.

The other Cornelia Burling (1820- x) was their daughter---one of six children--- who married Daniel Farnum Pond on Valentine's Day in 1849 in a ceremony officiated over by Bishop Edmond Storer Janes. 

Pond owned a clothing factory Blake & Pond in New York City.

Their daughter Annie probably did receive that quilt as a wedding present when she married towards the end of the century but the family story of its making in 1815 that was passed on with it may not have been accurate. 

Monochrome print / Winterthur Collection

When and where was that fruit basket fabric printed? Where---probably England, supposedly exported to the U.S. when the first Cornelia was preparing her wedding trousseau? But an unlikely time frame. We were not importing much fabric from England in the early teens as we were at war with them until the end of 1814 and trade suffered for years.

See many more examples of the popular basket fabric in seven colorways at this post:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2020/11/catherine-tompkinss-basket-quilt-chintz.html

Catherine Tompkins of Virginia used the flat-topped basket in similar fashion in 

her quilt, pictured in the book Quilts of Virginia.

 The quilt is initialed C.T. for Catherine? who died in 1820 ---again another attribution for the fabric from the teens.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/143689360/cornelia_ann_burling