Liberty's Birds #4: Old Orchards

 

Liberty's Birds #4: Old Orchards by Becky Collis

Sara was an optimist (and she edited her diary for the public) so she saw more in the Kansas landscape than is evident in Alexander Gardner's photographs taken about ten years after her arrival.

Mount Oread in 1867 with the university building starred.

Has someone started some trees in the foreground?

 Old Orchards by Denniele Bohannon

We have plenty of trees now but they were scarce in the early days of the territory. Trees require rain---more rain than eastern Kansas usually has--- or another water source, so in Sara's day groves tended to thrive only along a river or creek (see the blue areas in Kuchler's map below). 

The Native Americans often burned the prairie. Consistent fires, accidental or set to flush game, encouraged grasslands rather than forests. Lawrence was in a mixed Tallgrass/Oak Hickory Forest area with more trees along the waterways but oak and hickory rather scarce.

Sara may have seen those patches of trees as old orchards but the bluejays here are probably munching on a native berry tree like Coralberry or Hackberry.

 Old Orchards by Susannah Pangelinan

The Block

The applique inspiration is in a quilt in the collection of

Colonial Williamsburg.

OBJECT NUMBER1979.609.1

https://emuseum.history.org/objects/58914/quilt-appliqued-with-tree-and-birds;jsessionid=A14A30A6BC0869E45348AB33A8F6E4E3

  

Elsie Ridgley's version

Two Blue Jays/Three Coralberries

My block on a sort of a nine-patch of pastels. Applique

from an old William Morris repro line:

Petticoat Press BOM: Links to the Free Patterns

Civil War reporting was man’s domain but we find bylines from several female journalists who we recall in the Petticoat Press Block of the Month for 2025. The 12 monthly blocks are based on an "X" seam structure. See the posted free patterns below and click on the links.

 #1 Olivia's Chronicle by Jeanie Wyrick

 https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/01/petticoat-press-1-olivias-chronicle-for.html

#2 Sarah's Favorite by Sara Reimer Farley

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/02/petticoat-press-2-sarahs-favorite-for.html

#3 Pathfinder by Heidi Kapszukiewicz

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/04/pathfinder-block-3.html

#4 Starry Path by Erica Cannon

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/04/petticoat-press-4-starry-path-for.html

#5 Twin Sisters by Denniele Bohannon

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/05/petticoat-press-5-twin-sisters-for.html

#6 Old Maid's Ramble by Brenda Douglass Esslinger

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/06/petticoat-press-6-old-maids-ramble-for.html

SETS & INTRODUCTION

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2024/11/petticoat-press-next-years-pieced-block.html

13 X blocks and 12 sampler blocks

The "Official" set alternates a simple X block. You need 12 sampler blocks and 13 of the alternate block.

Or

 13 sampler blocks & 12 alternate blocks.

Readers have their own ideas:

Blocks 1-3 in a set by Jean Etheridge

Denniele's alternate blocks

Here's our Facebook group: PetticoatPressQuilts: 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1219592372466568

Print a PDF for all 12 sampler blocks from my Etsy shop: $12

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1836924572/petticoat-press-pieced-block-of-the

Petticoat Press# 6: Old Maid's Ramble For Kate Field

Petticoat Press# 6: Old Maid's Ramble For Kate Field by

Jeanne Arnieri

"Old Maid" was an insult when single women were considered a threat to domestic order.

Women of marriageable age were urged to "settle" rather than face spinsterhood.

Mary Katherine Keemle Field (1838 – 1896) 

She never married.

Old Maid's Ramble by Becky Brown

Kate Field was born in St. Louis to a pair of actors. In her mid-teens they sent her to live with her mother's sister Cordelia Riddle Sanford who'd married wealthy Boston textile manufacturer Milton H. Sanford. After boarding school the Sanfords took her to Europe. Precocious Kate in her teens began writing columns about her travel for the influential Springfield Republican under the penname Straws, Jr., after a pseudonym her father had used with his published poetry.

Old Maid's Ramble by Elsie Ridgley

As the Civil War approached Kate and her Uncle Milton differed in opinion on many topics from John Brown's terrorism to whether girls like Kate should be writing for the public. He threatened to cease supporting her unless she promised to cease writing. She did not acquiesce. Her 1861 memoir of a European friend poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was published in the Atlantic Monthly.

When the Civil War began Uncle Milton increased his fortune by manufacturing blankets for the Union Army, money he invested in horse racing. Kate earned her own living writing about topics such as the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in New York to raise funds for Union soldiers' aid.

"General Fremont and Mrs. Fremont were there, he looking very intensely out of that eagle eye, and she the embodiment of a strong, brilliant, impulsive woman. General McClellan also was there, creating a little curiosity and indeed a vastly interesting study to the impartial critic. It were not possible for such a head and face to save a country."

The Metropolitan Fair

Old Maid's Ramble by Denniele Bohannon

For five years in the first half of the 1890s, Kate published Kate Field's Washington.

Kate, like many political commenters, was not always on the side of the angels. She was caught up in anti-immigrant hysteria in the years when your great-grandparents and mine were escaping wars and famine.

My European grandparents from Ukraine and Belarus

who came here about 1890.

Nazis killed their parents in the 1940s.

"I said I failed to see the virtue of opening our arms to the scum of Europe and of closing them to the Chinese, who never get drunk, who do their work and don't vote, and ask nothing in return except to live." A speech at the 1893 World's Fair.

She took some rather eccentric positions such as opposing the Statue of Liberty. After trying the stage for a short career she spent time in Utah studying Mormonism to write about her opposition to polygamy.

Old Maid's Ramble by Denniele Bohannon

At the end of the century she traveled to Hawaii, advocating U.S. acquisition of the Sandwich Islands, and perhaps hoping to find relief from an unspecified health problem. She died there of pneumonia in 1896 at 57 to national shock.

1896

The Block

Old Maid's Ramble BlockBase 2338a

Half done with #6. Here's Becky Collis's setting alternating

a neat nine patch in black and white and red all over.

Read issues of Kate Field's Washington here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=5Q0-AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=kate+field+washington&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB_-zl1--EAxUyC3kGHT7hAnQQ6AF6BAgIEAI#v=onepage&q=kate%20field%20washington&f=false

Liberty's Birds #3: Cardinal

 

Liberty's Birds #3: Cardinal by Denniele Bohannon

Cardinals live year round in Kansas. We usually see them in pairs; males a flash of red, females less brilliant. Sara Lawrence Robinson may have enjoyed seeing their bond as she had made a life-long pairing herself.

Sara Tappan Doolittle Lawrence at about 20 years old

In her teens Massachusetts-born Sara attended Salem Academy where she fell on the stairs and hurt her back, injuring her enough that she returned home to Belchertown where she was bedridden and, so the story goes, afflicted with a "sympathetic blindness." A novice doctor who specialized in homeopathy and other innovative practices was called in and he decided it was a case for electric shock therapy.

Sara recovered her mobility and her sight. It might have been Doctor Charles Robinson himself who was the cure. They married eight years later. Sara was his second wife. His first, another Sarah, was Sarah Adams Robinson whom he married in 1843. By 1846 Sarah Adams Robinson and their two infants had died.  

From Family Search

During the goldrush Charles traveled overland to California where he was jailed for his radical views on slavery, land distribution and civil disobedience but elected a state representative. 

Sara Lawrence and Charles Robinson married in October, 1851

when she was about 24 and he about 33. A few months later they began

 an antislavery newspaper in Fitchburg. 

Fitchburg in 1867

The Liberator, the premiere abolitionist paper, occasionally

noticed them.

They sold the Fitchburg News after a year.

Cardinal by Susannah Pangelinan

Susannah's set is part of her background. The applique

glides over the seam lines.

Charles and Sara seem to have been a devoted, loving couple. Patricia Michaelis wrote an article about ten years ago touching on their relationship: "Lawrence in Perspective: A Love Story." As archivist at the Kansas Historical Society, Pat read many of their letters, written during their frequent trips back east when one or the other was feeling neglected.

"If you know how my heart yearns for your presence, & how much of the time my thoughts are with you, you would not think me too cold.... I do love you most fervently & will try in future to make you realize it at all times. I hope to leave for Kansas this week if I can get through in Boston. In the mean time I am your own loving husband." 

Charles to Sara, September, 1857

Cardinal by Elsie Ridgley

There's only one cardinal here but you know he has a mate close by.

The Block

The Inspiration

Two sheets this month.

Cardinal by Becky Collis

Read More:
Patricia Michaelis, "Lawrence in Perspective: A Love Story."
https://lawrencebusinessmagazine.com/2016/07/10/lawrence-in-perspective-a-love-story/