Mary Gaddy Inman's Civil War Quilt?

 

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.

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=21-17-2936

Mary Catherine Gaddy Inman (1829-1902) is buried in the Whiteville Memorial Cemetery

with her husband Benjamin Hardy Inman (Inmon?)

(1825-1896.)

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/56346664/mary-catherine-inman

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.

Petticoat Press # 3 Pathfinder for Jane Cannon Swisshelm

 

Petticoat Press # 3: Pathfinder for Jane Cannon Swisshelm by Elsie Ridgley

Minnesota Historical Society

Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (1815-1884)

Jane was born in western Pennsylvania into a family of strict Scottish Presbyterians. She met her future husband James Swisshelm (a Methodist) at a quilting party.

"He was handsomely dressed...a man of giant strength," she recalled. He decided she would be his wife and they married in 1836. Religion, James's mother and two difficult temperaments were obstacles to happiness. If the traditional woman's novel relied on the "Marriage Plot" at the time, these tales of female writers rely upon the "Divorce Plot." Jane's story is no exception. She remembered her marriage as twenty years "without the legal right to be alone one hour."

She left her husband, taking their daughter Mary Henrietta. James divorced her for desertion in 1857. Our divorce plot here requires the talented woman to make a living for her family with her writing. Jane was drawn to newspaper editing, giving herself a platform for her strong opinions, which were primarily antislavery and pro-woman's rights. She moved to Minnesota and started a few newspapers in the fifties.

Pathfinder by Becky Collis

Jane's St. Cloud, Minnesota Democrat offices

Before the Democrat she edited the St. Cloud Visiter, which she insisted on spelling in odd fashion. The woman was stubborn.

Head of the household in Stearns, Minnesota, 1860

Pathfinder by Becky Brown

Woman listening to Congressional debate, later in the century

We might term all these female reporters pathfinders but who was first and who was significant are always debatable. We recall Jane Swisshelm, however, as a true pathfinder in the history of women reporters and columnists because it is well documented that she was the first female admitted to Congress's all-male Press Gallery.

Getting the news out of the Capitol

In 1850 she'd been listening and analyzing the rhetoric from the Ladies Section but there she had no access to telegraph lines and noisy chatter made hearing debate difficult. She asked editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune who had recently hired her to use his influence with the Taylor/Fillmore administration.

Just another day of violence in the Senate in 1850

As she recalled, she obtained a personal interview with Vice-President Millard Fillmore to successfully request entrance.

Greeley's clout must have been important.

With that important coup Jane played true to herself. She was, we have to say, her own worst enemy. She decided that in this new position of power she would further the antislavery cause by attacking revered Senator Daniel Webster, who'd betrayed the abolitionists and was well known to have mixed race children of mistresses he supported.

She published it. Greeley fired her as a regular columnist, she lost her pass after one day and a woman in the press gallery continued to be a rarity.

1915

Petticoat Press # 3 by Denniele Bohannon

During the Civil War she continued to write for Greeley, moved to Washington City where the action centered and obtained a clerkship in the quartermaster general's office while volunteering as a nurse in local hospitals.  After Appomattox she began another newspaper there The Reconstructionist. Never able to weigh her idea of right versus popular response Jane charged ahead with very few skills in reading the public mind.

Fired in 1866

After the war she moved to Chicago

Jane and Mary Henrietta (Zo) living on Vernon Avenue in Chicago, 1880

She wrote daughter Zo when a late-life visit was proposed that she would not be coming. Mother and daughter would just argue, she worried, and she took the blame: "You never know when I am going to hurt someone’s feelings or do something to make myself ridiculous."

Jane was an accomplished needlewoman, embroidering 

 Zo's 1881 wedding dress, now in the Minnesota Historical 

Society Collection.

But the woman seemed able to get into an argument at the drop of a needle. In 1956 a story about Jane recalled her anger when people wondered whether the hand embroidery was "self-trim" (purchased machine embroidered insertions.)

Jane was a talented writer and editor but she seems to have suffered from---shall we say today---a neurodivergent personality style. She really had a hard time reading other people and the consequences of her actions with them. A bit on the autism scale?

The Block

Pathfinder (BlockBase #2317) was published by the Chicago Tribune's Nancy Cabot column in 1935. The fictional Nancy told us it was from Southern Missouri but she is not a reliable source. Pathfinder is a good name for Jane Swisshelm who is remembered as the first woman writer given access to the Congress's press gallery, a "first" that may indeed be accurate.

Petticoat Press # 3 by Jeanne Arnieri

Further Reading

Hoffert, Sylvia D. Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815–1884. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

McCarthy, Abigail. "Jane Grey Swisshelm: Marriage and Slavery." In Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays, edited by Barbara Stuhler and Gretchen Kreuter, 55–76. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998.

Swisshelm, Jane Grey. Half a Century. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, and Company, 1880.
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=lbViAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1

Bathsheba Phillips Crane's Civil War

In my files of silk quilts I have one attributed to Bathsheba Howard Crane. Notes say 

it's in the Vermont Historical Society but I don't see it in their catalog.

An image search was of no help either.

In 1861 when the Civil War began 50-year-old Bathsheba Howard Crane was living in Boston, Massachusetts, married to Baptist minister Denzel Mansfield Crane (1812-1879) since 1837.

Bathsheba Howard Phillips Crane (1811-1895)

Frontispiece from her 1880 book

 Life, Letters, and Wayside Gleanings, for the Folks at Home. 

The Cranes had three living children, Helen A. in her early twenties and two sons Herbert Webster about 20 and her youngest George Merle about 8 (Charles had died as an infant.)

The 1855 census found them in Worthington with a resident maid Lucy M. Foster.

Bathsheba published an obituary of her husband:

"At the age of 18, he was impressed with the importance of the gospel ministry. He commenced study ... at Franklin and Pierce academies and Brown University, preaching and teaching to meet his expenses." 

A year after their marriage at her home in Newfane, Vermont he was ordained and began a series of Baptist pastorates in Vermont and Massachusetts, where local religious tradition disdained the Baptist faith.

Allison Lockwood (1920-2021) wrote several articles about the Cranes in Northampton for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Allison Lockwood

Cannot find that journal.

In 1858 they left Northampton for Boston where he was well-known for his speaking style and conversions. His wife recalled that in the six years they spent in Boston he claimed 189 converts. Crane adapted Baptist ideology to New England mores, campaigning against alcohol and slavery. It is said he joined the free soil antislavery party in the mid 1850s. His church was called the Union Baptist Church because they supported the Union. Separating themselves from Southern Baptists the Union Baptists Missionary Magazine in 1862 resolved:

"That we believe the institution of slavery to have been the principal cause and origin of this attempt to destroy the government, and that a safe, solid and lasting peace cannot be expected short of its complete overthrow."

1863 was not a good year for the family. Nine-year-old George Merle died of diphtheria on January 2nd and the Union Baptist Church burned that year, requiring Rev. Crane to conduct services in City Hall.

The following year the Cranes left Boston for another pastorate and daughter Helen married John R. Haskins in May, 1864. Bathsheba began collecting her letters and writings with an eye to producing a book published in 1880.

 Son Herbert, living in New York City died there on May 14, 1869 of pneumonia at 28.

I doubt Bathsheba Crane made this quilt, which as a pieced, quilted

silk piece looks to be a Quaker quilt from the first half of the 19th century.

Bathsheba is associated with another textile, a woven

coverlet in the collection of the Vermont Historical Society.

The woven coverlet was given to the museum in 1955, where it was displayed in a textile exhibit the following year. It is doubtful Bathsheba wove the coverlet either. She was 14 in 1825 and coverlets were more an item of commerce than home needlework for teenagers. She may have owned this coverlet, woven by a professional weaver.

And perhaps a Quaker friend gave her this lovely quilt.

Marilla Riser Wise's Civil War Quilt?

Sampler applique quilt that descended in the Wyse family

of Columbia, South Carolina with a family tale related 

to the Civil War, a gift for soldier Allen M. Wyse. 

Mary Boozer (1906-2005) who brought the quilt to be recorded by the South Carolina project was daughter to Allen Wyse's eldest child Gertrude Wyse Boozer. The story Mary passed on told of a pre-Civil-War quilting party to make a bedcover for grandfather Allen who in his late teens left college in 1863 to enlist in the South Carolina Volunteer Infantry (Eutaw Regiment, the 25th.)

He and Marilla Elizabeth Riser, one of the women who signed a block, married after the War and lived near the town of Prosperity in Newberry County until they moved to Columbia in later life.

Prosperity is in an area known as the Dutch Fork, due to the Deutsch (German) settlers. By their names the Risers and Wyses would seem to be German. Allen's unusual middle name Melanchton honors Philip Melanchthon, a German Lutheran associate of Martin Luther.

Town of Prosperity in the 1880s

Mary's tale:

"This quilt was made for my grandfather, Allen M. Wyse (1846-1929), to take with him when he entered college....He [joined] the Confederate army (Company A, Twenty-Fifth Regiment, Infantry in 1863. The squares were appliqued by girls of the community [from] material which had been bought in a piece by his mother. They were then put together at a quilting party in the family home near Wyse's Ferry on the Saluda River not far from Prosperity....One of the squares was made by the girl who later became Allen's wife, Marilla Riser."

Allen II and Joseph were twins.

 

Family Search records indicate they married in 1866 but do note that Gertrude and the other children arrived in 1873 and later. The 1870 census shows Marilla Riser at 23 (without occupation) living with her parents and siblings. She was not yet married.

From Marilla's 1928 obituary: "Mrs. Wyse was before marriage Miss Marilla Riser....She and her husband celebrated their golden wedding anniversary five years ago [1873]."

Granddaughter Mary and the Family Search informants seem to be inaccurate about the wedding date. And Mary's tale of the pre-Civil-War quilting party seems equally inaccurate. There was likely a quilting party but perhaps in the 1870s or later.

South Carolina's Saluda River is the boundary of the Dutch Fork

We see evidence of a later date in Dutch Fork culture and the album quilt itself. The German immigrants who'd lived in Newberry County for a few generations made their beds in different fashion from neighbors of British descent until about 1880 when they adopted the "English" style of sheets and blankets rather than feather comforters. When analyzing patchwork quilts in the area for the South Carolina quilt project Laurel Horton found, "Nearly all the quilts surveyed dated from the late 19th or early 20th century." German-Americans there would not have been stitching appliqued album quilts in the early 1860s when Allen went off to college.

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=53-155-2496

The red is not this pinkish, but probably a brighter, deeper Turkey red solid.

The greenish-blue, the familiar late-19th-century teal color from new synthetic dyes.

The fabrics are all solid colors, the kind of cotton produced by Southern mills after the Civil War. Mary Boozer had a different opinion about the choice of solid, primary colors: The fabric: "Clearly made for utility in strong, masculine colors." Born in the early-20th century, Mary was too young to recall the limited choices in Southern stores and attributed the typical fabric choices to taste not trade.

The blocks are set in a triple-strip sashing, a hallmark of late-19th-

century Southern design. While the floral wreath might have been

made anywhere in the U.S. after 1840 or so there are three wheel

designs found primarily in the Carolinas late in the century.

Repeating arms in a circular pattern with

reverse applique

From the Lexington Museum in the Dutch Fork, 

 a better picture of this quilt locally called Sundew.

https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2017/07/carolina-mystery-pattern-plume-circle.html   

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=53-155-2495

Marilla left a second quilt, which Mary also brought to be photographed in 1985, this one dated June 9, 1869, before her marriage. It's the popular single pattern 9-block quilt sometimes called Democrat Rose.

Similar fabrics

  

An empty flange between the blocks. If it had

a cord inside we'd call it piping.

Laurel Horton wrote about the Dutch Fork: “Textile Traditions in South Carolina’s Dutch Fork,” in Bits and Pieces: Textile Traditions, editor Jeannette Lasansky (Lewisburg, PA: Oral Traditions, 1991), 72-79.

Read a post about the quilts of the Dutch Fork here: http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2020/04/quilts-in-dutch-fork.html