8 Cotton Boll

Cotton Boll

The Cotton Boll block remembers Dolly Lunt Burge (1817-1891) and other Southern plantation owners who made their livings off cotton---and the slaves who made it all possible.

Dolly was Northern-born but moved to Georgia after marrying her first husband. Widowed the first of three times, she married Thomas Burge and actively helped him run his plantation during their eight years together. She, like so many other women, spent the War years alone. Much of her diary is filled with short descriptions of her work and the supervision of the slave labor on the large farm.

Freed slaves at Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862

The women are preparing cotton for the gin building behind them.

Photo by Timothy O'Sullivan from the Library of Congress.

Cotton cultivation was central to Dolly's plantation---ginning, picking, selling and planting cotton. Her daughters Lou and Sadai were a pleasure to her in her widowhood, although Lou caused concerns, beginning with her adolescent rebellions.

"Lou is making a bed quilt but says she is never going to cut up pieces of cloth again for such work that only poor white folks made bed quilts that the rich buy blankets."

Concerns over Lou grew serious as she wasted away with tuberculosis. Dolly, Sadai and the slaves Martha and Mary strugged on after Lou's death, with Dolly keeping accounts of hardship and high prices.

A greenback from the State of Georgia depicts a load of cotton at top left

"I have hundreds of dollars in my pocket book & yet I cannot buy a yard of calico to make my Sadai a sunbonnet it cannot be had. For weeks she has been wearing a bunch of rags for her bonnet is nothing else. Yesterday however Aunt Polly Davis gave me a peice of a dress of hers which I shall gladly make up to day."

Unknown women about 1865

The pair in the back are wearing cotton striped dresses,

 quite a popular look in the 1840s and '50s.

Many women recut dresses of old fabric into new styles during the war.

Unknown woman in cotton dress about 1870.

Cotton was the basis of the Southern economy and the basis of North/South trade. Raw cotton went North to be processed into printed calicoes. With wartime trading stopped, cotton prices escalated and cotton fabrics became impossible to find, particularly in the Confederacy.

This week's block is a variation of one published as the Cotton Boll quilt in the Kansas City Star in 1941. The Star pattern featured white triangles representing the "bolls". See #4103 in BlockBase (I added extra seams to make it easier to piece.)

Cutting for an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 4 dark rectangles 3-3/8" x 6-3/8". Or use the template drawn in Electric Quilt on this PDF. Click here:
http://www.barbarabrackman.com/8CottonBoll%20A.pdf

NEW LINK (as of 9/1/2011)
https://acrobat.com/#d=T6bYTokmiEbjgkuuih74fQ
The gray rectangle on the sheet should print out close to 5" x 6"

B - Cut 4 light squares 2-7/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with one cut. You need 8.

Piece the block by adding B triangles to either side of the A shape. Make four squares and piece into a four-patch.

Becky stitched her version from a striped print. She rotary cut the pieces rather than using a template. Here's how she assembled it.

She then cut the corners to make an 8-1/2" square. 

Here's Becky's second block.

Dolly Lunt's diary was first published in 1918 as A Woman's Wartime Journal: an Account of the Passage over Georgia's Plantation of Sherman's Army on the March to the Sea, as Recorded in the Diary of Dolly Sumner Lunt (Mrs. Thomas Burge). There is a recent edition pictured at the top, edited by Christine Jacobson Carter.

Read the 1918 publication at the Documenting the American South website by clicking here:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/burge/menu.html