The North Carolina project recorded this quilt forty years ago.
A great-granddaughter who'd inherited it attributed it
to Mary Gaddy Inman of Robeson County.
Mary Catherine Gaddy Inman (1829-1902) is buried in the Whiteville Memorial Cemetery
with her husband Benjamin Hardy Inman (Inmon?)
(1825-1896.)
The couple had five children and the great-granddaughter recalled one was named Christian Orella. She also told the documenters that the squares were made during the Civil War by a group of friends and finished at a quilting party when the war was over.
That child was actually named Christine Orilla Inman (1863-1946) but that error is a small detail. The story of the quilt as an album stitched during the War and then quilted after 1865 is more than a detail. And it is not likely to be true as everything about the quilt's appearance, style, quilting and especially fabric look to be after the dominance of solid fugitive colors in Southern quilts.
The colors have lost their brilliance with the blue-green
shifting towards tan and reds completely losing their color. The
bright yellow-orange, chrome dyed, is one of the solids that
was not so prone to fade, a rarity in Southern solids after the Civil War.
Two post-1880 Southern quilts with similar color loss
and utilitarian quilting.
The Inman quilt is a beauty in its own right despite the wear.
Quilts do not need a false connection to the Civil War to make them valuable artifacts.
I drew a pattern I call Southern Crabapple, based
on one in Mary's sampler.
Print this out on an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet.
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