Another View of Ann Knox's Quilt

Quilt attributed to Ann Sloan Knox

North Carolina Museum of History

Last week I discussed this quilt of plaids, stripes and butternut---coarse fabrics commonly called linsey and jeans. My first thought when I saw the details was that the fabrics were homespun and home woven as the donors suggested---clothing worn by Ann's sons in the Confederate Army, perhaps spun and woven by Ann herself during the war.

But a little research into Ann Knox's life reveals she was a wealthy woman who was unlikely to have spent her time at a spinning wheel. Before the war husband Samuel Buie Knox was worth over $200,000. The 1860 census lists him personally as having a dozen slaves. When he died in 1875 he left hundreds of acres in various plantations in an estate worth $7,000,  a diminished fortune, but still substantial. 

Lucindy Jurdon, former slave, shows

her mother's spinning wheel to a 

WPA interviewer in Georgia in 1938

"My mammy was a fine weaver..."

If any domestic fabric production took place on the Knox properties before Emancipation, the spinners and weavers were probably the slaves.  The origins of the fabric and of the patchwork quilt raise many questions.

An alternative view of the quilt's fabrics is that the various cottons, wools and mixed materials were factory-woven at local mills in the Steele Creek community along the Catawba River. 

The Catawba River runs near Steele Creek on the 

North Carolina/South Carolina border.

William Henry Neel's Steele Creek Cotton Mill was a grist mill converted to cotton production in the 1850s. The neighborhood mill did not produce a lot of cloth, but some of it may be in this quilt.

The small Schenck Mill began cotton production in 

1813, the first cotton mill in North Carolina.

In 1848 the Rock Island Woolen Mill, named for Rock Island shoal in the Catawba, was founded.
In 1849 the machines produced about 200 yards of cloth per day. The following year's census records 53 people employed there, a relatively large enterprise.

In 1852, the mill advertised cassimeres, tweed, jeans and kersey. These were not fine wool broadcloths, fancy delaines or crepes but cheaper fabrics woven from coarse yarns.

A reproduction cassimere wool

Cassimere weave 

"a cross between the basket weave and a twill... "

Four patch of finer printed wools known as delaine and challis,

probably imported from Europe

The types of cloth described differ mainly in type of weave and weight.

An 1875 description of various types of wool.

The fabric in the center of Ann Knox's quilt

looks much like the reproduction

"Brown Jeans Cloth"

sold today by William Booth Drapers.

The Rock Island Mill seems to have thrived in Steele Creek until the Civil War began in 1861. Operations then moved a few miles into the city of Charlotte, probably to ramp up production for Confederate uniforms. As the War dragged on higher quality fabric was harder to find. The fabrics in the medallion quilt may have been scraps from Ann Knox's wartime family clothing, stitched from locally purchased cloth.

Post-war production at Rock Island continued in similar style.  An 1869 description of the mill's Charlotte products:

"One thousand to twelve hundred yards of cassimeres per day...The goods are from all wool cassimeres with double and twisted all wool warps, fit to adorn a Broadway dandy, down to the strong, heavy, durable jeans, so much liked by our own people, and so cheap as to be within the reach of the poorest."

So while the fabrics in the Knox quilt may have been cut from the shirts Ann's sons wore before their deaths near war's end, the fabric might very well have been factory cloth from the local mill.

Linsey quilt, a nine-patch set with madder-dyed wool strips

similar to fabric in Ann Knox's center.

The romanticism of "homespun" often embellishes the view of donors. As Clement Anselm Evans wrote in his 1899 Confederate Military History:

 "Homemade woolens had a sanctity in my eyes as true emblems of honesty and innocence."

Homewoven or factory woven?

The results would look the same, no matter how mechanized

the small pre-War factory

Steele Creek Presbyterian Church today

Locally produced fabrics from small mills/factories are also worth saving as quilts and in museums, but the romance of "innocent homespun" tends to override an accurate history of successful industry. 

The Spinner 1880,

Painting by Thomas Wilmer Dewing

Lewis Hine, "Warper at his Machine,"

Mill in Newton, NC, 1908

Library of Congress

Account of a fire at the old Rock Island Woolen Factory building.

Screen shot from American Memory

from the Library of Congress.

By the time Charlotte's Rock Island Mill building burned in 1883 it was being used as a warehouse. Larger mills had taken over the state's fabric production.

The question of who actually made the quilt might also be contested. It's time to look at these "honest homespun" quilts in an honest historical context.

Read about the cotton mills of Mecklenburg County here:
http://www.cmhpf.org/essays/cottonmills.html

Stars in a Time Warp 34: Bronze-style Prints

Becky Brown's reproduction star

Nancy Near Philadelphia's reproduction star

Both blocks reflect a significant style revolution in quilts at the end of the 19th century:
New shades of brown became the look.

 By the 1890s, reddish browns obtained from madder looked dated. Fashion demanded greener, golder browns--- bronze-shaded prints that combined a khaki brown with olive, rose, ivory and a new blue.

A bronze shade of brown in the lower left,

a madder red at top right, set with a faded California gold.

The greener brown indicates a date of after 1880.

The earliest piece of bronze-style print I found when I went through swatch books at the American Textile History Museum  was dated March, 1881. In his 1887 dye manual Antonio Sansone described “Manganese Bronze Styles” with various colors on a "bronze ground" . (In my Making History book Sansone is mispelled as Sansome.)

A selection of vintage bronze-style,

brown prints from the end of the 19th century.

A crib quilt top from my collection with a few madder reds and many bronze-shaded browns.

I'd guess it's about 1880-1900. The new browns are a good clue to a date after 1880.

Ocean Wave quilt set with a golden brown print,

again probably end of the 19th century.

It wasn't only the new shade of brown, it was a new

color combination in the prints. Light blues, rosy pinks

and olive greens were apparently easy for printers to combine.

Vintage block: 3 Bronze-style prints and a white shirting

Two of Bettina Havig's repro stars

with the late -19th century olive green as a ground.

Quilters loved these new prints.

Remember: If you dawdle taste will change. 

The front of this quilt has many madder browns and reds, perhaps from the 1870s; the back is a combination light blue and tan with pink, red and olive figures--- A decade or two later.

The fashion continued into the 20th century.

Here new grays, blacks and reds with a bronze stripe

in the upper right corner or this vintage block.

Reproductions

This vintage doll seems to be dressed in the same

print I reproduced in Metropolitan Fair a few years ago.

Sharon Keightley,

Pinwheel from Pine Valley Quilts

using Union Blues prints from a JellyRoll.

http://www.quilterblogs.com/tag/union%20blues%20jelly%20roll/

The browns in Union Blues definitely lean towards the green

rather than the madder reds.

Alice's Scrapbag, my newest reproduction line from

Moda, also has some manganese bronze shades,

combining pinks, reds and olive greens with brown.

Heart's Content for Laundry Basket Quilts

by Edyta Sitar

We love the color combination at Moda.

Edyta uses it often and well.

Milky Way quilt pattern from Laundry Basket Quilts

Peace on Earth by Three Sisters

By Lane at That Man Quilts

Look for golden browns

Quilt by Quilted Pineapple

Fabric: Moda's Collection for a Cause: Faith

Pattern: Sweet Spot from Miss Rosie's Quilts

Terry Thompson and I did Calico Craze

maybe 12 years ago.

Becky's star of a bronzey green print with brown and pink figures is from that line.

It's certainly a romantic look.

My Richmond Reds. 

Florals focus on olives, pinks and reds on an ivory ground.

Vin du Jour by Three Sisters

Free Pattern from Moda

What to Do With Your Stack of Stars

Make a Double Irish Chain

Quilt date-inscribed 1845

by Mrs. Frank Miles,

Somerset County, New Jersey

Photo from New Jersey Quilts 1777 to 1950

This beautiful scrappy quilt is corralled by a Turkey red

double swag border.

A close interpretation of the vintage quilt

 was patterned

in Quilters Newsletter in 2009,

called "Remembering Rebecca Jill Reed"

The pattern is a Double Irish Chain

Double Irish Chain 90" x 90"

You need 41 framed star blocks

and 40 checkerboard blocks.

The traditional Double Irish Chain is based on two blocks, one a checkerboard of 25 squares: 5 x 5. For our 6" stars those squares would finish to 2". 5 x 2" = 10"

The other block has the same size square in the corners.

UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter who corrected my math.

These blocks should both finish to 10 x 10"

Add a frame to each of your stars.

Cut strips 6-1/2" x 2-1/2" and

cornerstone squares 2-1/2" square.

This gives you a 10" block

For this shading you need 13 light and 12 dark

squares cut 2-1/2"

Another 10" block

Or you could switch the shading 13 dark and 12 light for

each checkerboard block, and the reverse coloring for the star frames.

Or refer to Mrs. Miles's 1845 quilt above for a more scrappy look.

One More Thing About Manganese Bronze

Bronze variations from the end of the 19th century

Dye historians credit the discovery of a mineral dye for manganese bronze to the early nineteenth century when it was temporarily popular but impractical. Like madder browns the early manganese bronze tended to rot fabric. That original dye process used manganese chloride but had nothing to do with bronze, an alloy of tin. The word bronze in the name probably refers to the greenish-brown shade, somewhat like a bronze patina. 

Late-19th century bronze-style

The brown could be dark too. It's the light blue, pink and olive greens

that are the signature here of a bronze-style print.

My guess is that cloth was dyed in the true manganese-bronze process early in the century, but after 1880 the term "Manganese Bronze Style" was used for cotton color schemes obtained by other methods. 

Look for this print in my next line Old Cambridge Pike, 

which should be available in late fall. Becky used it in

the star at the top of the post.

Ann Knox's Linsey Quilt

Quilt pieced of homespun clothing by 

Ann Sloan Lowrie Knox

The North Carolina Museum of History has in its collection a quilt made of  fabrics believed to be home dyed and home woven.

These plaids, stripes and solid fabrics, usually of wool yarns 

crossed with cotton, were called linseys.

According to family tradition, the quilt is made of pieces of shirts worn by boys in the Lowrie/Knox family, several of whom died in the Confederate Army. The cloth, according to the family story, was homespun and dyed with walnuts and chinaberries.

On the reverse: a post-War plaid, perhaps factory woven.

Ann Sloan, born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1808, married twice. With her first husband Robert B. Lowrie she had two sons Robert and Samuel J. Lowrie. After his death she married widower Samuel Buie Knox (1798-1875) in 1836.

With Samuel she had nine more children between 1837 and 1849---4 girls and 5 boys.  The family lived in the Steele Creek community, now a part of Charlotte. Of Ann's seven sons, six joined Confederate units.

Many of Ann's family are buried at the 
Steele Creek Presbyterian Church

Sons James, John and Joseph who died in 1864 and 1865 are remembered on a single gravestone.

Joseph died at 18 at Petersburg, Virginia, where he is buried. John, 24 years old, died a few weeks earlier and is buried in Staunton, Virginia. James, 38 years old, died at home in the last days of the Civil War from his wounds.

Attorney Samuel J. joined the Confederate Navy (the county history informs us he was too heavy for the cavalry). He survived the War, although he died in 1870 at the age of forty.

Steele Creek was an early Scots-Irish community.

The cemetery is known for its 18th-century headstones.

Robert Lowrie was paroled at Appomattox Court House when the war ended. He died four years later at 37. William Harrison Knox survived the war, but suffered from his wounds until his death in 1919. The only boy who did not fight was the youngest Charles Pettus Knox, about 12 when the war began. Ann Knox died in 1884, survived by just two of her sons.

 Her quilt is similar to other post-War quilts of mixed wool/cotton/linen fabrics, often made to save cloth that held memories of the War. The four-patch with its butternut yellow border might have been made any time between the last days of the Civil War and Ann's death two decades later. Such quilts are hard to date because the fabrics are difficult to date.

See more about the quilt here:
http://ncpedia.org/quilting-part-ii-civil-war-reconstruction

[This link isn't working. We may have overwhelmed it. Try this one:
http://collections.ncdcr.gov/RediscoveryProficioPublicSearch/SearchResults.aspx?knox&&quilt

Read a post I wrote a few months ago about similar linsey quilts here:
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2015/02/confederate-quilts.html

The Knox Family Papers are in the J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Click here to read a summary:

https://library.uncc.edu/manuscript/ms0403