Collection of the St. Louis Art Museum
Silk star quilt attributed to Susan Cutter Wyman
Susan Frances Cutter Wyman (1789-1864)
Susan Cutter Wyman was in her 70s during the Civil War, living in Hillsboro, Illinois. The Wymans, Massachusetts natives, came west to join eldest son Edward (1815-1885) who'd moved to Hillsboro to teach at the Hillsboro Academy, which became a Lutheran school.
According to family history Susan pieced this quilt of over 3,600 patches of silk in seven months in 1860 right before the war began.
That year the census taker found her and husband Nehemiah, a retired butcher, in Hillsboro with daughter Sophia, her four children and Barbara Cothra (?) probably a live-in, teen-age servant.
With servant Barbara, daughter Sophia and possibly granddaughter Ellen to help with the housework Susan may have had a lot of free time. Susan was mother to six grown children, most of them living in St. Louis.
Susan's death notice from the St. Louis Daily Republican November 16, 1864.
Style, pattern and fabric make the date difficult to corroborate. Changes in silks, especially plain and plaid silks like those found here, are not easily put into a time line. When one compares it to other quilted bedcovers of silk satins & taffetas one finds similar style in early 19th-century Quaker quilts.
Smithsonian Institution
Quilted silk star associated with Clara Tarleton Penn (1782-1831)
of Maryland. We can guess being married to a man
named William Penn she was a Quaker.
Detail of Susan Cutter Wyman's quilt showing feather quilting.
Susan's quilt has much in common with Quaker quilts from the first half of the 19th century. Was she a Quaker? We find little to corroborate that notion. While she seems to have dressed plainly in Quaker-style dress I was surprised to find a picture of her husband with a fancy silk top hat.
Nehemiah Wyman 1786-1869
From a genealogy book focused on the family.
Quakers do not create coats of arms to show their pedigrees.
But...
When Sukey Cutter and Nehemiah married in 1812 in Massachusetts an Intention of Marriage was published. Other religions might require a declaration of intentions but Quakers certainly did. Was Sukey a Quaker until she married Nehemiah? (One cannot marry outside the religion and remain an
official Quaker.) I am not a Quaker but I had a Quaker father-in-law for 20 years and he enjoyed telling me Quaker history.
Was this quilt one Susan made early in the century? Or perhaps a gift from a Massachusetts Quaker relative?
Her Find-a-Grave file:
