Frances Cunningham Burnes Gehricke's Civil War

 

Fan quilt attributed to Frances C. Gehricke on the cover

of a catalog from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell.

Although more patchwork fans than random pieces this show piece is described

as a crazy quilt.

Frances Cunningham Burnes Gehricke (1839-1903)

About the time of the quilt.

Frances Cunningham was born to Rachel Stokes & Robert Wilson Cunningham in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1839. Her mother died when she was 7 and her father remarried, adding four more children to Rachel's five.

New Castle, 1861

When the war began Frances was in her early 20s, probably assisting her stepmother Caroline Woodward with the younger children. The baby of the large family was another Caroline born in February, 1865. 

The Cunningham Home 

Robert W. Cunningham was an "industrialist," an Irish-born machinist, later an entrepreneur who
did well. Three of Frances's younger brothers enlisted in the Union army.

We assume brother Charles Pomeroy Cunningham is on

the center drum in this photo posted on his FindAGrave site.

Charles was a musician in Company A of the First

Pennsylvania Volunteer Reserve Corps. Brother George played the bugle.

All three brothers survived the war. After the peace Frances, perhaps inspired by war-time nursing, decided to become a doctor, graduating in 1878 from the Woman’s Medical College of New York. Dr. Cunningham married a man named Pealer D. Burnes and worked as a woman's physician in New York. Mr. Burnes, elusive despite his unusual name, disappears from the record leaving only a name she sometimes hyphenated.

Her second husband was Prussian-born Californian Otto Ernest Frederick Gehricke, married in New York in 1883. In 1886 she (they?) moved to Pasadena, California and then to San Francisco. 

1888 City Directory, Pasadena

1893 Interview

1890 ad in the San Francisco Chronicle

In 1891 she filed for divorce; Otto relocated in England and married again.

The quilt is not dated but the style of silk with elaborate embroidery

is seen in the decades 1880-1900, her California years. 

I'd bet more on a Pasadena creation rather than San Francisco.

Many of the pictorial appliques are probably purchased. See more

about the peacock, a popular addition at this post:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2023/04/crazy-embroidery-3-commercial-appliques.html

The makers of these machine-embroidered applique patches advertised them as perfect for needleworkers with "neither the time nor taste for filling-in the traced outlines with needle and silk."  

"If ladies have no time to embroider...they will find the Kursheedt's embroidered color silk appliques most convenient."

Frances was just the type of busy woman who might have been the customer for these small luxury items. What was she doing in the 1880s and '90s? The newspapers tell us of the Doctor's mission to help poor women with "female trouble," like Kate Griffes who was murdered in a saloon.

Testimony in Kate Griffes's husband's murder trial, summer, 1893

A personal dispute over furniture, debt and financial chicanery, dismissed in 1900,

was extensively covered. Charles deWitt Spencer seems to have

been some kind of a mining con-man and Maude Lord Drake a

spiritualist who led Frances to make unwise investments.

Maude Lord-Drake [1852-1924]

A Tale of Woe

November, 1899

Cannot find a Caroline Gehricke described as a daughter who may actually be a step-daughter or step-daughter-in-law. Another option: a woman with the married name Mrs. Lou Bates, an actress. One of these younger women apparently took the fan quilt to Puerto Rico where it escaped the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to descend in the family, loaned to the Cornell show by Mary Rogers Cain in 1991. 

Mrs. Lou Bates, a witness in the Kate Griffes murder trial.

1893

Women led such interesting lives. And what do you suppose Dr. Gehricke was offering all those poor women with "female troubles?"

January, 1904 record of France's death from "Dropsey," possibly heart disease, at 66.

Frances's FindAGrave file

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/235086312/frances-c-gehricke

See more about Frances and Kate Griffes here: 

https://heathermonroe.medium.com/the-unspeakable-murder-of-kate-griffes-16e6b823bee8

How to Make a G.A.R. Quilt

 

From the Massachusetts project & the Quilt Index

Turkey red and white album block. A popular look after 1880.

The National Tribune was a newspaper published from 

1877 through the early 20th century for Union veterans of the Civil War.

W.R.C. = Women's Relief Corps

Wives and families of veterans were also readers and contributors, whether official members of the W.R.C., the auxiliary of the men's G.A.R. organization or not.

Lucia L Whitney of South Dakota sent an article with a how-to for a commemorative quilt suitable for beds in a Soldiers' Home. She advised twenty-four red and white blocks in an "album quilt" design with names of "dead heroes," soldiers and soldiers' wives and children.

Beaver County, Pennsylvania project & the Quilt Index

What was an album quilt pattern?

Ideas varied.

Massachusetts project & the Quilt Index

Red and white album quilt designs were quite the thing at the time.

Regional ideas and individual design choices were a factor.

Kansas State Historical Society Collection

https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/221786

Veteran's names inscribed on a quilt from LaCygne, Kansas

GAR quilt, Ohio, James Frasca Auction House

The instructions: Buy 5 yards of "fadeless red."

Ooops.

Atlanta Garden #5: Crossed Square and Draft Dodging

Atlanta Garden #5: Crossed Square by Denniele Bohannon

Crossed Square can recall Georgians who crossed Confederate recruiters at every turn.

Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910)

Atlanta diarist Sam Richards, in his forties during the Civil War, hatched methodical plans to avoid serving in the Confederate Army. Once men his age were required to join, Richards bought a substitute.

 When enlisting a substitute was no longer a way out, he tried a couple of draft-exempt occupations.

 "The life of a soldier never had any charms for me, and a soldier’s death I do not covet." 

Union cartoon "Southern Volunteers" detail, 1862

Library of Congress

 Crossed Square by Jeanne Arnieri

Carrie's father Maxwell R. Berry avoided conscription himself. In a short autobiography published in the Pioneer Citizens' History of Atlanta, 1833-1902 he recalled:

"Being in impaired health and not feeling very beligerant [sic] or anxious to engage in the unpleasant pastime of killing Yankees, I sought...the position of Money Clerk in the Southern Express Company's office." 

The Southern Express was the Confederate parallel to the Adams Express (the national UPS of its day.)

 Adams Express office in the field.

They undoubtedly delivered many quilts to soldiers.

Apparently working in the Southern Express accounting department gave Maxwell a Confederate draft exemption.

 Crossed Square by Jeanne Arnieri who is doing 2 sets

Carrie's family used every means at their disposal to avoid conscription. Uncle William Markham's industry, the iron mill, provided an exemption for family members and workers on the payroll. Like Oskar Schindler's list during World War II, the list at the Rolling Mills sheltered employees.

These quasi-legal draft dodgers lived alongside many other Atlanta residents out of uniform, some deserters, some runaways avoiding small-town conscription. In the interests of morale perhaps The Southern Confederacy, an Atlanta newspaper, did not often mention the "skulkers who are hiding about her secret places, when they should be at the front face to face with the foe,"

Georgia Senator Rebecca Latimore Felton (1835-1930)

who served one day in the Senate in 1922.

In 1917 during another discussion over a wartime draft Rebecca Latimore Felton recalled earlier Southern resistance when "conscription was not popular...."

Atlanta Constitution

"Resistance became more determined, gangs of deserters grew larger."

 Crossed Square by Addie

One reason for desertion was the poverty the soldiers' service imposed on their families. Cyrena Stone of Atlanta described poor county women walking barefoot ten miles to Atlanta, clad in rags, looking for sewing work. "The dresses of these country women are sometimes made of flour sacks dyed with bark....They said their rich neighbors persuaded their husbands to volunteer in the first of the war, promising that their families would never suffer. But the promise was forgotten & the little sewing they could get hardly kept them alive."

 Crossed Square by Becky Collis

Carrie's father had a few close calls. After Sherman moved on to other parts of Georgia, Maxwell Berry was ordered to report to a court of some kind in Macon, threatened with impressment once again for collusion with the enemy, although the Confederate authorities let him return home in January 1865.

Carrie's Diary 1864

His younger brother Oscar S. Berry did join the Confederacy's 30th Regiment of the Georgia Infantry at war's beginning when he was 20. He was killed in September, 1864 in Alabama while Atlanta was under Union occupation. Niece Carrie did not mention his death in her diary.

Oscar's memorial is in Jonesboro, Georgia

Detail, "Southern Volunteers"

 Crossed Square by Becky Brown

The Block

The block is BlockBase #1904: Crossed Square from 

the Household Journal magazine with set-in seams. The pattern

shows an easier way to piece this variation on a log cabin type of block.

Above the cutting instructions for 10" and 15" blocks.

A rather random mix of shading and pattern in nine-patches, about 1910.

Perhaps based on this variation:

Nebraska Farmer 

Here's a fairly recent, full-size variation on a single block sold 

in an online auction a few years ago.

Read the 1902 Pioneer Citizens' History of Atlanta, 1833-1902

https://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/georgiabooks/pdfs/gb0378.pdf

See page 275 for Madison [sic] Berry's biography.

Patriotic Union Socks

 

Skinner Auction

One of a pair of Union socks with a Confederate

 flag on the sole

Benjamin Brown French, Commissioner of Public Buildings during the Abraham Lincoln administration, really functioned as sort of a master of protocol arranging public events and apparently delivering gifts to the President.

"I had the honor to present to the President a pair of woolen socks, knit by Miss Addie Brockway of Newburyport, the secession flag underneath the foot of each, the Flag of the Union in front on the top. Very suggestive. The President received them most graciously & with much apparent pleasure." March 20, 1864

His description matches another pair of socks.

"Pair of Hand-knit Civil War Era Wool Socks with Flag Motifs, reportedly Pennsylvania, c. 1861 framed with a clipped newspaper article explaining the origin reported to have been shorn, carded, spun, and knit by a young Pennsylvania woman in 1861 for her friend A.J. Arnold" Skinner Auction catalog.

Editors of French's journal thought Addie Brockway might be Harriet Brockway of Newburyport, Massachusetts, but with better access to public records today we find an Adelaide M. Brockway (1838-1903), Harriet's niece. 

Newburyport Public Library Archival Center

Brockway Osgood house, 1937

Addie's father Charles bought this Newburyport house in 1842 with a friend. They converted the school building into a two-family dwelling. The Osgoods and the Brockways created separate gardens in the yard.

Addie and their home full of women are described in a recent local history:

"The Brockways had only one child, Adelaide, who was noted to be fat and jovial and one of the last to wear hoopskirts long after they were no longer fashionable. They also had two sisters of Mrs. Brockway who lived with them: Mrs. Alden and Miss Bartlett. These ladies filled the land with prolific gardens wearing big sun bonnets. They were also kindly and would pass out gingerbread men to kids in the neighborhood."

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/209735145/adelaide-m-brockway 

Addie was in her mid-20s when she sent the socks to the President. The design must have had a pattern, handed around or published. The pair auctioned at Skinner had a newspaper clipping that credited them to a young Pennsylvania woman, unnamed.

Rev. Alfred Judson Arnold led a rather itinerant life as an Episcopalian minister.  Born in Connecticut, he worked at New York and several Pennsylvania posts. Were the socks knitted in Pennsylvania where they wound up?

Remember our Hospital Sketches BOM?

 

Roseanne Smith won an honorable mention in the Large Quilts: Stationary Machine Quilting category at the recent AQS show in Paducah with her version of our 2019 Hospital Sketches BOM here.

 

I'd like to take more credit---I did the block patterns! but it was her fabric choices, setting, her own border design and of course her machine quilting on her Viking machine that won the prize.

Congratulations. I hope there is a big fat ribbon involved.