Hospital Sketches #9: Star of the East - Camp Letterman

Hospital Sketches Block #9 by Becky Brown

Our last block in Hospital Sketches recalls a giant field hospital set up after the Battle of Gettysburg in July, 1863. Gettysburg's three-day fight in Union territory resulted in the largest number of casualties in the war with 45,000 to 51,000 soldiers killed, wounded, missing or captured. Neighborhood volunteers were joined by official staff who traveled to tend to the wounded, among them several women discussed earlier, such as Georgiana Woolsey and Annie Bell.

Sarah Middleton Robbins Broadhead (1831- 1910)

Quaker Sarah Broadhead, 32 years old, was one of the Gettysburg volunteers. Four days after the battle:

"This morning we started out to see the wounded, with as much food as we could scrape together, and some old quilts and pillows.  It was very little, but yet better than nothing....  I assisted in feeding some of the severely wounded, when I perceived that they were suffering on account of not having their wounds dressed. I did not know whether I could render any assistance in that way, but I thought I would try.
 July 8 — Again at the hospital early this morning. Several physicians and lady nurses had come on from Washington the previous evening, and under their care things already began to look better." 

Block 9 by Janet Perkins

Dr. Jonathan Letterman (1824-1872)

The Union Army soon established a hospital near the railroad east of Gettysburg, naming it Camp Letterman for Dr. Jonathan Letterman, Medical Director for the Army of the Potomac who'd ably attended to wounded after the Battle of Antietam a year earlier. The hospital, which operated for only five months, was a huge temporary complex. 

Camp Letterman, 1863

Decorating hospitals with evergreen swags and wreaths was

considered cheering. One learns to recognize photos of Camp

Letterman by the decor.

Block #9 by Bettina Havig

During the weeks after the battle the wounded Union and Confederate soldiers were moved to more permanent hospitals or sent home while 4,200 too injured to travel remained at the Camp.

The site began with 400 tent wards, each treating 10 soldiers.

Dark days inspire black humor. Here Drs. Chamberlain and Lyford

pose with a patient and two of their victims in their "Office."

Camp Letterman was well-photographed.

Organizations such as the Sanitary Commission, the Christian Commission and the State Relief Agencies set up their own areas.

Sanitary Commission offices under an arch.

The seated man with the white beard is New Yorker Gordon Winslow.

The woman is probably Mrs. H.C. May

Gordon Winslow (1807-1864)

Winslow was a chaplain and a 

Sanitary Commission administrator. 

The King of Prussia Historical Society has a series of Gettysburg photographs

labeled with names, helping us identify the people at Camp Letterman.

http://www.kophistory.org/publicViewer.php?ID=120

The center woman in the plaid dress is Anna Morris Holstein, who

 served with her husband Major William Holstein in

supplying the field hospitals for the Army of the Potomac.

Anna Morris Ellis Holstein (1825-1900)

CDV of Anna taken during the war with the field photo

superimposed.

Anna Holstein was from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. After the Battle of Antietam in 1862 she and her husband "gave up our sweet country home, and from that date were 'dwellers in tents,' occupied usually in field hospitals, choosing that work because there was the greatest need, and knowing that while many were willing to work at home, but few could go to the front."

Major William Hayman Holstein, Seward King, Mrs. Knowles, 

Anna Morris Holstein, Dr. H.C. May, Mrs. May, Rev. Gordon Winslow

Perhaps this is a portrait of the Holstein's "Valued friends who regularly met in our tent, when the fatiguing duties of the day were over."

Katherine Fish Winslow is thought to be the woman on the left with husband Gordon Winslow at right. The Doctor on the table is possibly Cyrus N. Chamberlain, the jokester from Massachusetts, and the seated woman is Sarah Smith Sampson from Maine. 

Block 9 by Paula Smith

Sarah Smith Sampson (1836 - 1907)

Sarah Smith Sampson from Bath worked with Maine Relief and spent several weeks at Camp Letterman. The larger photo looks to have been taken long after the war by the curly fringe (we'd call the hairstyle bangs). See block #4 for more information about the Maine organization. 

As patients died or recovered enough to travel home and to other hospitals the tents were packed to go to the next battle. By October only 300 patients remained and in November, after President Lincoln gave his short Gettysburg Address in the hospital cemetery, Camp Letterman closed.

Crowds in Gettysburg for the cemetery dedication

The Block

Our final block appeared in many quilts in many variations.

It's in the lower right corner in this humorous stereograph from

the end of the 19th century

Esther Blair Matthews inked a name "Star of the East" on her 1858 quilt

in the collection of the Virginia Quilt Museum.

Crocosmia, the Star of the East 

See more about the pattern history here:

http://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/09/hospital-sketches-9-star-of-east.html

By Block #9 anarchy reigns. Follow the pattern!?!

You'll have to choose the parts you like. I couldn't get

all five petals in there or the stems.

To Print:

Create a word file or a new empty JPG file.

Click on the image above.

Right click on it and save it to your file.

Print that file. Be sure the square is about 1" in size.

Cutting:

For the background cut a square 18-1/2".

Add seam allowances to the pattern pieces if you are doing traditional applique.

The last block is non-directional so goes on a

north/south axis.

Becky Brown

Added dots

Subtraction

8-1/2" x 8-1/2"

Cut a 9" square

1 Each of B and E to I

2 of C

1/2” Finished bias stem

Denniele Bohannon's #9 Star of the East Sprout

with an extra freckle, finishing to 9"

After the War:

Locket inscribed:

"Presented to A.M.Holstein from the wounded officers 

and soldiers,1st Div, 2nd Corps,Gettysburg,July 1,2,3, 1863."

The photo of the locket is from her Find-A-Grave file:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/15459924/ann-morris-holstein

Anna and William Holstein were among those discussed in this series who went to Annapolis, Maryland after the war to tend to Union prisoners from the Andersonville prison. After that grueling duty the Holsteins went back to Pennsylvania in the summer of 1866. 

The Hosltein's farm in 1877

Anna published her memoir Three Years in Field Hospitals of the Army of the Potomac in 1867 and remained an activist, working to preserve Mount Vernon and the Valley Forge Battlefield, until her death at 75.

Colonel Cleveland Winslow (1836-1864)

One wonders how much post-traumatic stress syndrome hospital workers had to deal with for the rest of their lives. One sad clue: Chaplain Gordon Winslow, the white-bearded man in the Gettysburg photos, died in May, 1864 after falling overboard from Sanitary Commission steamer The Mary Rapley on the Potomac River. He was accompanying 28-year-old son Cleveland Winslow, mortally wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor. Old newspaper accounts of people falling overboard always beg the question: Did he jump?

1858 Sampler Quilt by Esther Blair Matthews (1776-1866) 

Collection of the Virginia Quilt Museum

Esther included several of the stylized, popular album designs such as the pineapple, a wreath, the Star of the East and the tulips, but many seem to be drawn directly from nature.

Block 9 by Barb Sanders

Extra Reading:

Three Years in Field Hospitals of the Army of the Potomac by Anna Morris Holstein

https://archive.org/details/threeyearsinfiel00hols/page/n13

1863 Album, Elizabeth, New Jersey

It would be great to see more of this 1863 album quilt

from Elizabeth, New Jersey

99  blocks, 96 of them signed

I've been sorting my paper files getting them in shape to send to the Quilt Research Collection at the University of Nebraska Libraries. I found this newsprint in my file of Civil War quilts, published in an article by Enola Gish in the small town newspaper, the Baldwin, Kansas Telegraphics in 1983. Enola met the Florida woman who owned it---she seems to have bought it at a garage sale.

Three names were mentioned: C.M. and S.A. Butler who signed the pieced baskets and Mrs. Woodward who signed the striped fabric on the left side below the heart and hand block.

That's all I know about the 1863 quilt. Was it a Civil War patriotic quilt

or one that just happened to have been made in 1863?

American Folk Art Museum Collection

Ladies of the Methodist/Episcopal Church, Elizabethtown, dated 1853 for the Dunns

Several surviving quilts made for ministers' wives have been attributed to Elizabeth, New Jersey, once called Elizabethtown. Lee Kogan wrote an article for the Folk Art Museum's Clarion (Winter 1989-1990 issue) about three similar samplers.

American Museum in Britain

Baptist Church, Elizabethtown, dated 1852 for the Waterburys

Newark Museum

Presbyterian Church, Elizabethtown, dated 1852 for the Reinharts

See Kogan's article in The Clarion here:

https://issuu.com/american_folk_art_museum/docs/clarion_15_1_win1989-90/60

Page 58

We might guess the quilt at the top of the page was made in the early 1850s in Elizabethtown

but that 1863 date leaves no doubt it was finished ten years later. 

Applique BOM Next Year

Gladi is making the most of her time healing a bone break by appliqueing.

One more block to go.

We have 830 members of our Facebook Hospital Sketches group with many wonderful examples posted every day. A week from today is the last Hospital Sketches block but it has been so much fun I think we ought to keep on making 18" traditional applique blocks (or whatever size.)

After next week you will have the nine blocks for the Hospital Sketches quilts and several months to finish that up.

At the end of January 2020 we'll start a new traditional applique block of the month, but next year's blocks will be more unusual. This year's were the common designs popular from abut 1840 to 1870. I'll draw them in the same size (I'm making mine 9" square.)

Newark Museum collection

These are NOT the blocks or border but this is the setting idea.

So you could just keep making blocks and make a large quilt or follow the set on next year's and make a second quilt. I've saved a few photos of medallion style applique quilts with a central block that is twice the size of the 12 blocks around it.

Similar style from a Freeman's Auction. 

May have been in Laura Fisher's inventory too.

Top based on 13 blocks arranged somewhat like this setting (no sash) with a larger block in the center (1 36" block, 12 blocks 18")---no 9" blocks as in the lower corner.

From the Iowa project and the Quilt Index.

1 large block, 8 smaller and some white sashing.

A little Photoshopping of some of Cassandra's Circle.

Adding new dresses and colorizing their portraits is like playing with paper dolls.

The BOM will be called Cassandra's Circle. Stories will have to do with the powerful women at the heart of the Confederate government, mostly based on Mary Boykin Chesnut's view.

Becky says she has four blocks done and so do I. Denniele's working on a Sprouts version with fewer pieces.

Here's the group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2152934498369880/

Miss Information

Textiles with a Civil War association certainly are worth more monetarily than equivalent textiles with no accompanying Civil War stories. With a little research one can associate much 19th-century  handwork with the Civil War. Everybody who lived through it (or died during it) had a Civil War story to tell.

You can also associate textiles to the Civil War with no research at all. Go to EBay and search in antique linens and textiles for the words Civil War. You'll find items like this Civil War handkerchief picturing a World War I soldier.

Many of these wool rectangle quilts cut from early 20th-century

fabric sample books are recalled as made of Civil War uniforms.

Always interesting that the maker had access to both blue and gray

uniforms.

On a related note a reader asked for information on a hooked rug with a Civil War connection; the yarns had been salvaged from Civil War uniforms. Again, an early 20th-century textile with an inflated story.

The questioner had done a little research and found this quote:

"There's a museum in Maine that features hook rugs that were made of Civil War uniforms, so these hook rugs are pretty much indestructible. You should be able to enjoy these rugs forever."

Just because it's on the internet does not mean it is true.

The facts are that these late-19th/early 20th-century rugs were a cottage industry in New England and Canada. Read some actual history here:

https://www.antiquetrader.com/featured/wool-art-antique-hooked-rugs-move-from-the-floor-to-the-wall/

Tonko's Been Stitching

Tonko in Japan has recently posted her Hospital Sketches blocks

#2

#3

#4

She usually converts American inches straight across to centimeters so these block designed for 18 -inch backgrounds are on squares finishing to about 7 inches.

#5

#6

#7

#8

See her blog: Mixed T: Thistly Room in Japan
http://thistlyroom.blog59.fc2.com/blog-entry-1159.html

Salmonella and Typhoid Fever

Frank L Keyes and unidentified woman, 1862

Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society.

We assume Civil War patient Frank Keyes has been wounded but odds are good he is a victim of disease rather than battle wounds. According to some assessments, 62% of Union Army deaths were caused by disease. Had Keyes been a Confederate soldier the chances would have been 65%.

Makeshift hospital set up in the Frederick Lutheran Church,

Frederick Maryland.

Hannah Anderson Ropes (1809-1863)

Soldiers admitted to hospitals for rather minor wounds often caught diseases that killed them, as did hospital workers like Hannah Ropes, matron at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington who died of typhoid in January, 1863. Typhoid almost killed her assistant Louisa May Alcott in the same outbreak. Typhoid had a high mortality rate, killing one third of those who contracted it.

Camp Letterman, a field hospital after the Battle at Gettysburg

Typhoid fever is a disease one comes across often in any reading about Civil War history but since it is rare today in countries with adequate sanitation we don't know much about it. I was surprised to find it is caused by the Salmonella bacteria, which continues to infect our food supply today. But there are several kinds of Salmonella and the highly fatal variation is caused by Salmonella enterica typhi rather than the nontyphoidal salmonellae that cause food poisoning today.

Quarantine was not an option at the Frederick Lutheran Church hospital.

Many of the beds look to be covered with quilts.

Of course, Civil-War-era medicine knew nothing of bacteria or causes of typhoid fever and typhoid pneumonia, which were common names for the illness at the time.

Wounded at Fredericksburg

The primary cause is poor sanitation---contamination in sewage and food handling and close proximity to an infected person, none of which they understood. Putting soldiers together in densely populated camps with makeshift latrines and unrefrigerated food was fatal for many. Flies were also a carrier.

Home Tidings by Winslow Homer

Sending wounded soldiers to wards with infected patients added to the misery.

Harewood Hospital, a purpose-built Union hospital in Washington.

They didn't know why but found that a ventilated room was healthier.

Symptoms began with gastrointestinal problems such as cramps, nausea and diarrhea and then an increasing fever. Some patients break out in a rash and some get a form of pneumonia. Organ failure, particularly lung failure, was the cause of death. 

As Hannah Ropes wrote her daughter a few weeks before she died:

"Miss Alcott and I worked together over four dying men and saved all but one....but whether [due to] our sympathy for the poor fellows or we took cold, I know not, but we both have pneumonia and have suffered terribly."

Typhoid is estimated to have killed 65,000 soldiers during the Civil War and no one counted the hospital workers and civilians. Confederate medical officer Dr. Joseph Jones estimated that 1/4 of the Southern soldiers who died of disease died of typhoid.

Typhus has similar symptoms but it's caused by bacterial infection from insect bites---lice and fleas, also a curse of camp and hospital.

Quilt made by a soldiers' aid society in

Florence, Massachusetts

And since we are talking about quilts at this blog: Civil-War era medicine did understand that the bedding of a person killed by typhoid fever was contaminated, so many sheets, blankets and quilts were burned, one reason so few of the donated Sanitary Commission quilts survive.

UPDATE: Merikay Waldvogel reminded me of a family story she and Bets Ramsey heard, recorded in their book Southern Quilts: Surviving Relics of the Civil War. Barbara Lotspeich Broyles of Rhea County, Tennessee loaned this white work quilt and others to Confederate soldiers who returned them when they moved on. The quilts were "covered in typhus germs, and both Barbara and her husband died within four days." The bedding was probably contaminated with typhus-bearing fleas.

Quilt by Barbara Lotspeich Broyles (1790-1862)

"In 1934, John W. Broyles wrote the following family history:

"They were kind enough to loan some bedding to a camp of sick soldiers who were mean enough to return some of it when the camp was abandoned. Grandmother was taken violently ill... .Grandfather was stricken with the same malady which I presume was typhus. They were buried in the same grave [Barbara and Matthias died on the 9th and 14th of December, 1862.]"

From Find-a-Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/167328000/barbara-broyles

Read more about Typhoid and Salmonella here:

https://www.merckmanuals.com/home/infections/bacterial-infections-gram-negative-bacteria/salmonella-infections

https://hekint.org/2017/01/22/the-american-civil-war-as-a-biological-phenomenon-did-salmonella-or-sherman-win-the-war-for-the-north/

And here's a whole book on the history of typhoid: Typhoid Fever: A History by Richard Adler & Elise Mara. A Preview:

https://books.google.com/books?id=umGkCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Read more about Hannah and Louisa at this post:

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2019/01/hospital-sketches-1-periwinkle-wreath.html

Label for Hospital Sketches Quilt

Here's a label to print out on treated fabric for your

Hospital Sketches Sampler.

One more block to go: September 25th.

Print it out 5 inches tall. We put our names on it.

You can ink yours in in all the white space.

Here's Gladi Porsche's plan as of last week.

Love her dots border.