2026 Applique BOM: Baltimore Belles & Rebels

 

Becky Collis

Central wreath for Baltimore Belles & Rebels

End of the year and time to plan for next year's appliqued Block of the Month design with a Civil War history. Baltimore Belles & Rebels blocks will be posted on the last Wednesday of each month in 2026 with the first free monthly pattern here on January 28th.

Baltimore's Brown Veil Club, also known as the 

Monument Street Girls, sewed for the Confederacy.

Women in Civil War Baltimore held conflicting loyalties despite Maryland's position as a Union state. Many slaveholders in the city hoped vainly for secession. Others considered themselves so Southern there was little question as to which side deserved their support. 

Yet the city's women included Union-sympathizers among its social leaders and those of lesser status such as free Blacks in that city with the country's largest such population. 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels will tell stories over the year of the city's women with patterns in the traditional Baltimore manner popular in the late 1840s and '50s. Our proposed sampler quilt has a medallion set with a large center wreath. You can get started on that now so here is the pattern for the 13th block, a 24" finished center and a 6" finished frame around the wreath.

12 monthly blocks finishing to 18"

with a center block finishing to 24"

in a frame finishing to 36"

No border

 

You'll have all year to stitch those leaves and roses.

Print this on an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet of paper.

Colonial Williamsburg

Sarah Anne Whittington Lankford 1830-1898

The setting inspiration is the Lankford quilt in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg (photo modified above to be square with 12 blocks.) 

Some monthly applique designs will be similar to Sarah's---not the same.

https://emuseum.colonialwilliamsburg.org/objects/58956/quilt-appliqued-baltimore-album;jsessionid=8C7253ADC6073FE0659AFC7585B99D90?ctx=ddf4a937a0bfa463b013156517b533b65d611a0d&idx=1

See a post on more Baltimore Albums with a central focus here:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2016/06/baltimore-album-quilts-medallion-sets.html

Fabric: Becky Collis is planning traditional reds and greens for her version so you might want to do likewise and look through your stash for reproductions suitable for a ca. 1860 applique. As in most Baltimore albums the prints and plains are scrappy. For a consistent background in the blocks, center & border buy 7 yards of one fabric. Over the year we'll give ideas for borders and I am sure you readers will come up with some on your own.

Ooops

 I see I accidentally published all my notes for future Civil War posts. I'm taking them down.

Liberty's Birds #9: Mulberry Tree

 

Liberty's Birds #9: 

Mulberry Tree by Denniele Bohannon, 

the last of nine bird appliques for 2025

Sara's journal:in the house on Mount Oread

Alexander Gardner photograph from Mount Oread, Fall, 1867

 Gardner was told the stone wall in the foreground is the remains 

of a fort from Territorial days 20 years earliier.

After Sara's first rather primitive house in Lawrence, Kansas was destroyed in May, 1856,

 she and Charles may have moved into this stone house photographed

 in 1867 by Alexander Gardner. We are looking at the rear view. 

The street now called 14th runs on the other side.

The house is still there next to The Wheel bar, viewed from the side and

 remodeled in bungalow style.

Side view from 14th

Mulberry Tree by Elsie Ridgley

Charles & Sara's major building project was a house across the river where they lived the rest of their lives. They never had children and much of their estate went to the University of Kansas....

...Including "Oakridge." 

The University--- never dedicated to preservation--- let it

fall into neglect and Oakridge is long gone.

Mulberry Tree by Becky Collis

In the new house far from Mount Oread (at top across the river here) 

they lived a long and happy life together. We could

 follow them through the ups and downs of his political career 

and her lifelong devotion to his causes and memory

----but this is a story about the first house on the rocky ridge, 

where rattlesnakes still sun themselves.

The Block

Mulberry Tree 

The inspiration has seen better days.

A pair in a mulberry tree for the Robinsons.

Mulberry Tree by Susannah Pangelinan

She continued the block applique into the sashing.

Susannah's finished top!

Becky Collis's nine blocks

Denniele's

Elsie's

Petticoat Press #11: Herald Square for Mary Clemmer Ames

Petticoat Press #11: Herald Square for Mary Clemmer Ames

by Jeanne Arnieri

Mary Estella Clemmer Ames Hudson (1831-1884)

Mary Estella Clemmer was born in New York and grew up in Massachusetts. At 17 she married Presbyterian minister Daniel Ames who was dispatched to Winona, Minnesota. 

Herald Square by Becky Brown

When Civil War commenced Daniel became a chaplain and Mary accompanied him to Harper's Ferry, (West) Virginia in 1862. Mary published an account of the Battle of Maryland Heights, also called the Battle of Harper's Ferry, which surprised her at her door one morning.

"We were eating our breakfast in a comfortable home on Camp Hill on Saturday morning, the 13th of September, when we heard the quick, cruel ring of musketry cutting the air. We ran out upon the hill in the rear of the house overlooking the village below, London Heights [Loudoun Heights, the second highest mountain overlooking Harpers Ferry], the Shenandoah, the Potomac, the Heights of Maryland, a vast green precipitous wall, on the opposite shore. [Stonewall] Jackson had come."

View of the Potomac River from Maryland Heights

Confederate General Thomas Jonathan

 "Stonewall " Jackson (1824–1863)

"We knew the foe was advancing; we heard his hellish war cry; we heard Dixie shrieked by thousands of barefooted fiends."

Alta California, October, 1862

Her account of the battle, “The Battle of Harper’s Ferry As a Woman Saw It,” was published in The New York Evening Post on September 26, 1862 and widely copied afterwards...and embroidered upon over the years as in this drawing of her in heart of battle.

Herald Square by Denniele Bohannon

Mary relocated to Washington where like so many other women she tended to ill soldiers in her spare time and despaired of Union victory. Was she living with Ames at the time? She was certainly unhappy in her marriage and in her outlook in those years.

The Cary Sisters

The happiest days during her marriage were recalled as those she spent in New York as a guest of Phoebe and Alice Cary, sister poets.

Her second husband's memorial to her after her death 

included an 1863 letter to her friends Representative

Justin Morrill and his wife Ruth Swan Morrill.

After the war she began a regular column for the New York Independent titled "A Woman's Letter from Washington," later collected in a book Ten Years in Washington.

As was expected of "A Woman's Letter" her columns were full of fashion and gossip but she addressed politics as well.

Like many she was not a fan of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Read it here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=0EAIGA6XQ-4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=ten+years+washington+clemmer+ames&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizt4KW39WEAxUVmIkEHaAgDoUQ6AF6BAgMEAI#v=onepage&q=ten%20years%20washington%20clemmer%20ames&f=true

In 1874 Daniel Ames divorced her in West Virginia.

She'd been earning her own living through journalism for years.

Mary Clemmer Ames became Mary Clemmer again.

She lived with her parents at 134 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington when the 1880 census taker came to call. Nine years after her divorce she married Edmund Hudson Washington, editor of The Army & Navy Register. He was said to be well-known but little about him appears in the records. They married in 1883 and she died the following year, of a cerebral hemorrhage (a stroke). Edmund thought it the result of hitting her head in a carriage accident, but she had been complaining about painful headaches for a while before the accident. Mary Clemmer died at 53 in August, 1884.

Edmund seems to have loved her very much as indicated by his published memorial.

The Block

Modified Herald Square, revised from Nancy Cabot's Herald Square.

Herald Square in New York City was home to the New York Herald. Mary

wrote for a smaller paper on a smaller square: The Utica Herald.

Utica

Herald Square by Elsie Ridgley. Elsie followed the original Nancy

Cabot pattern.

Becky Collis's Petticoat Press recently won a prize at her guild show.

Read More:

An American Woman's Life and Work: A Memorial of Mary Clemmer
https://books.google.com/books?id=zPo_AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=An+American+Woman%27s+Life+and+Work:+A+Memorial+of+Mary+Clemmer&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-8dqe89aEAxX2mIkEHQL0BFQQ6AF6BAgIEAI#v=onepage&q&f=false