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