Ida Minerva Tarbell's Civil War: Sewing Scraps

 

Scraps of madder style cottons

Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857-1944)

An eminent journalist

Ida spent her childhood and the Civil War in the oil field country of

western Pennsylvania. Her father manufactured wooden oil containers

and made good money along with the many other small entrepreneurs in

this first oil boom.

1867 photo by Jon Mather of Titusville, Pennsylvania

Until John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company destroyed the small businesses.

Ida is famous for getting her revenge decades later; here she is caricatured 

smoking out Rockefeller's business practices. 

But that is another story.

This story is about her memories of the seamstresses who came

to spend the day in western Pennsylvania when she was a girl.

A professional sewing machine operator?

Born in 1857, Ida was only 3 or 4 when the Civil War began but she remembered vividly her days of collecting buttons for a charm string and sorting the leftover sewing scraps--- probably in the 1860s in Rouseville, where sister Sarah was born during the war.

Rouseville when Ida lived there in the late 1860s

Three versions of her story are in her manuscripts collection at alma mater Allegheny College.

The serious business of sorting leftover scraps.

Ida took great pride in the accuracy of her many magazine articles, but here she seems to have been recalling her own memories rather inaccurately, perhaps confusing the sixties with the eighties.. 

"The little scraps went into Mother's piece bag to be used on the crazy quilt she always had under way."

Crazy quilts were not the fashion in Ida's childhood, but later in the early 1880s when she was in her twenties.

She may have been recalling these scrappy, organized quilts made of small pieces that look more likely to date from the 1860s or '70s before she went off to college.

The "Tarbles" in 1880 with Ida away at school.

Another Tarble lives next door, a milliner.

Collection: Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Quilt dated 1862, Catherine Fisher of Ohio

Collection of the International Quilt Museum

Holstein Collection

After the Civil War the family moved to this impressive

Titusville, Pennsylvania house, salvaged from a defunct hotel

in an oil boomtown turned ghost town

The house has been restored after a fire. The recent

hexagon quilt in the cupola room is more of an

anachronism than Ida's 1860's memories of crazy quilts.

Ida left home after college to write and manage magazines, living in Paris, New York and at the end of her life in Connecticut but she often returned home to the Titusville house where sister Sarah maintained a home for her parents and brother into the 20th century. Seamstresses undoubtedly continued to visit as the crazy quilt fad predominated in the 1880s through the teens.

Ida has outlined the hierarchy of the scraps in her home:

Piece box for repairing clothing
Piece bag for making quilts

Rag bag for dusting, etc. and eventually burning

I recently read Kathleen Brady's biography Ida Tarbell: Portait of a Muckraker.

Mary Moody Emerson's Civil War

 

Mary Moody Emerson  (1774 - 1863), perhaps in her 20s

Silhouette signed Williams, Concord Free Library collection, portrait

 reproduced in the published journals of her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson (V. 4)

Mary Moody Emerson's life spanned two defining American wars. Her last years in her late 80s during the Civil War were spent in Brooklyn, New York. Those who knew her were probably relieved that cognitive degeneration interfered with her understanding of the world outside the Williamsburg home her younger relatives had made for her, so far from her familiar New England.

A year before the war began 86 year-old Mary M Emerson was living at the home of August and Hannah Parsons on South Fourth Street in Brooklyn.

Today Mary is appreciated for her singular attributes and her determinedly single life. She was born a year or two before the war for independence to a soon-to-be-war widow in Concord, Massachusetts near the battlefield famous for "The Shot Heard Round the World." Mary resolved not to marry at about the time the silhouette above was cut. She realized she was ill-suited without the "meekness or gratitude required" in marriage but "throbs of vanity and triumps [sic] of self exultation." Unable to understand others she believed most of her female peers would also prefer to be "unyoked."

(Must tell you most of Mary's analysis was written long after events.) She kept a series of "Almanacks," which Waldo Emerson read and copied for inspiration and enjoyment. An 1870s house fire at the Emerson's "Bush" damaged the Alamanacks and the Emersons' good neighbors Louisa and May Alcott helped clean them but the manuscripts show the damage.

Kin to many clergy, their wives and a few philosophers, most notably nephew Waldo Emerson whose father was her younger brother, Mary Moody Emerson also had several more than eccentric relatives, some institutionalized. This woman came to be viewed as a force of nature by family and neighbors. Her self-confident youth was spent in the home of a childless aunt and uncle in Malden, Massachusetts after her mother remarried and began adding stepchildren to Mary's Concord family.

Library of Congress/HABS/Late 1930s

Mary's birthplace "The Old Manse" was her mother's home with two husbands

over many decades.

Mary's childhood self-confidence was remarkable in her recollections. She later wrote of an exalted sense of her youthful self and her ultimate purpose based on an unusual religious fervor grounded in  New England's Puritan/Congregational/Unitarian/Trinitarian/Transcendental transition. 

Ghostly apparitions often 

appeared in shrouds.

Mary was viewed as an irascible eccentric, but she exceeded that New England personality type with a religious vision encouraging her to spend a good deal of her adult life wearing a burial shroud at home and on the street. She looked forward to death in both manic and depressive episodes, infuriated when doctors pulled her back from its doors. Those unfamiliar with her garment believed she wore her nightgown to the shops and services---eccentric. A shroud---perhaps mentally ill.

In the summer of 1863 Waldo commented on the dying woman's wardrobe.

Mary who suffered little influence from others also came up with some admirable ideas, abolition being one important concept in a family with a history of slaveholding. After nephew Waldo married Lidian Jackson in 1835 and she moved to Concord Aunt Mary created a social event at the newlyweds' breakfast table with a small group of antislavery advocates.

Lidian sent a donation to the National Anti-Slavery Association

during the Civil War. Aunt Mary did not change Lidian's basic

position but she did make it easier for her to meet the local anti-slavery leaders.

"I love to be a vessel of cumbersomeness to society."---one of Mary's apparent personal maxims.

Waldo was fond of and intrigued by his Aunt Mary. (We'll omit those five years some time after that breakfast when Mary was not invited to the newly established Emerson house in Concord.)

The Emerson's "Bush" on the Old Cambridge Pike was also home to Waldo's

 widowed mother Ruth Haskins Emerson after his second marriage. 

Lydia Jackson Emerson (Lidian) about 1850

Daughter Ellen remembered Mary & Lidian's sharp relationship as "diamond cut diamond" but we know of no other description of the sisters-in-law's relationship.

Ruth Haskins Emerson (1768-1853)

Mary's sister-in-law

We do note, however, that when in Concord Mary checked into a hotel.

Mary cared little for others' opinions and maintained a mighty sense of resentment over slights small and large--- Large being her exile to relatives at the age of four. Some of the smaller resentments.... typical behaviors in an innate narcissist. One could never do enough for her.

Waldo's journal reminds us how much laudanum (opium & alcohol) fueled the

daily life of proper females. (And how much she amused him.)

1863

Franklin Sanborn, editor of Boston's Commonwealth wrote an obituary for Mary: "She was thought to have the power of saying more disagreeable things in a half hour than any person living."  Waldo could not argue.                 

Elizabeth Peabody published a tribute to Mary Emerson on her death in The Boston Transcript recalling her Antislavery activities and her intellect.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/98397070/mary-moody-emerson

Washington Whirlwind # 7: Whirling Star

 

Washington Whirlwind # 7: Whirling Star for the First Lady

by Elsie Ridgley

Despite the war Washington's social life whirled around frequent 

White House receptions.

Above: Mary Lincoln in a typical off-the-shoulder dress showing off

her "poitrine" as they say in France.

During the first year of White House life Mary Todd Lincoln must have enjoyed herself mightily as the nation's First Lady. She set about refurnishing the Executive Mansion, acting as hostess and buying a wardrobe that "befitted her position," as Julia Taft recalled. Mary's idea of that position was a bit lofty for a democracy. She and some newspaper editors viewed her as a "Republican Queen." She modeled her wardrobe on the French Empress Eugenie's.

Eugenie, Emperor Napoleon III's consort from 

1853 to 1870, set western fashion with her 

elaborate bell-shaped skirts.

Mary Lincoln clipped sketches of the Empress's gowns and asked seamstress Elizabeth Keckly for copies.

Whirling Star by Becky Brown

Mary Clemmer Ames (1839-1884)

During the Civil War journalist Mary Ames sent dispatches to various newspapers including one widely copied story telling of the "Late Slaves," meaning once-enslaved Washingtonians now free. 

This 1862 article about Lizzie may be the first published reference to Elizabeth Keckly's skills. 

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly (1818-1907)

Whirling Star by Elsie Ridgley

Jean H. Baker in her 1987 biography of Mary Lincoln tells us of the French Empress's influence. Baker thought Mary Lincoln's personality problems and her need to outshine others were due to her mother's early death and resulting trauma, a somewhat Freudian explanation.

"Nobody suffered as she suffered."

Mary Clemmer Ames seems to have been more perceptive. In her 1873 book Ten Years in Washington: Life & Scenes in the National Capital, she describes the First Lady:

"Incapable of lofty, impersonal impulse. She was self-centered, and never in any experience rose above herself. According to circumstances, her own ambitions, her own pleasures, her own sufferings ...consumed every other. As a President's wife she could not rise above the level of her nature....."

Freud had not yet borrowed the term Narcissist for the extremely self-centered but Mary Lincoln seems to have been a classic example.

National Museums of Liverpool

Greek myth painted in 1903 by John William Waterhouse.

The rejected Echo looks on as Narcissus loses himself in his own reflection.

He cannot pull himself away and eventually dies, his handsome corpse

turned into the daffodils named for him.

Writing in 1914 Freud would have linked Mary Lincoln's personality disorders to sexual repression or some such thing but today that inability to view the world through any other prism but one's own feelings is considered an innate personality disorder, crippling in many cases. The Narcissist is often "her own worst enemy."

New Year's Eve at the White House, December 1861, London Illustrated News

Whirling Star by Elsie Ridgley

Like many Narcissists Mary was attractive and even compelling. Her husband did love her despite her tantrums. At her sparkling best she was quick-witted, amusing and up-to-date on the latest conversational topics, something he seems to have valued.

Mary's social whirl may have gotten her and the White House budget into financial trouble but this first year as First Lady was the only bright year in her Washington life. The year 1862 would bring her the first of the losses she was constitutionally unable to overcome.

Whirling Star by Denniele Bohanon

The Block

The pattern is Blockbase+ #3295, attributed to the Nancy Cabot column in the Chicago Tribune. 

Fifty years ago when I was compiling my Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns I relied on other indexers as sources and this is one I cannot back up today. But it's a pretty block in shades of mauve & magenta, representing the Republican Queen well. 

Further Reading:

Read Mary Clemmer Ames's 1873 book Ten Years in Washington:

https://books.google.com/books?id=0EAIGA6XQ-4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Ames+Ten+Years+in+Washington:+Life+and+Scenes+in+the+National+Capital&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiYpZmYoof-AhUsoWoFHaSVDxYQ6AF6BAgPEAI#v=onepage&q=Ames%20Ten%20Years%20in%20Washington%3A%20Life%20and%20Scenes%20in%20the%20National%20Capital&f=false

Psychology Today on Narcissism:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder

And information about Mary Lincoln's questionable associates:

http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/residents-visitors/marys-charlatans/marys-charlatans-chevalier-henry-wikoff-1813-1884/

The Lint & Bandage Mania in Boston

Soldiers marching on Washington Street, Boston

 

Caroline Healy Dall witnessed an impressive community event in Boston in late August, 1862. Shocked to hear that Confederate forces had badly defeated the Union Army at the First Battle of Bull Run, Bostonians resolved to do something about this unexpected loss as they heard that a second battle was being waged. Women responded by gathering en masse to make bandages and scrape lint, used to pack wounds.

Currier & Ives's print frames a Union victory but the

truth was the reverse.

Caroline Wells Healy Dall (1822-1912)

 in the hairdo popular in the 1840s

Caroline who lived in nearby Medford rode to the city on a car "crowded to a crush with women & bundles. Most of them were weeping." Outside Tremont Temple three tables had been set up to receive donations to pay for shipping the hospital supplies.

Tremont Hall

"On the side walk immense boxes were being packed. In the building 1800 women sewed all day."

She was most impressed by the bundles everyone was carrying into the hall, filled, presumably, with fabric and material from which to make the bandages.

"Women with bundles were crowding all the avenues and the streets as far as we could see...."The bundles were passed...tossed from hand to hand along the lines, till they reached the immense inner work-room."

For bandages newspapers advised volunteers to use absorbent, unbleached cotton muslin rather than bleached or glazed fabric, cut in long strips rolled into cylinders secured with a pair of pins. New fabric was often unavailable, and much cotton and linen from household textiles and clothing was recycled into hospital supplies.

Lidian Emerson was glad to supply the necessary pins as the war went on. See a post about her daughter Ellen and the pin donation here:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2024/02/ellen-tucker-emersons-civil-war.html

 Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president, recalled that linen was prized for both bandages and linting. A patriotic Southerner "sacrificed "the table linen she had treasured for forty years."

Detail of a painting by Mihály Munkácsy

showing European women scraping lint in 1871.

When the war began everyone was sure that poultices of well-worn linen thread scraps were the best thing for packing wounds. 

"Lint should be made of unraveled linen, new or old (the latter preferred), by cutting it in pieces of four or five inches square, which would be highly acceptable, while lint made from canton flannel is irritating to the wound.” Peterson's Magazine, August, 1861

Northerner Mary Livermore recalled the "lint and bandage mania" with hindsight in her history of women's work during the Civil War.

"Every household gave its leisure time to scraping lint and rolling bandages, till the mighty accumulations compelled the ordering of a halt."

Apparently, enthusiastic women donated far more supplies than necessary and the whole idea of packing wounds with lint or fluff raveled from linen quickly fell into disfavor with the doctors' experiences. Commercially produced linen lint was available and some surgeons preferred new cotton wadding, also available commercially.

A national call for lint a few days after the second battle of Bull Run.

Caroline Dall happened upon an example of the enthusiastic, early response of women when the nation realized that the Civil War was going to be a series of bloody battles. When she returned to Medford she found a smaller version of the same street activity. "A perfect crowd were hurrying with bundles."

Read more about lint scraping here:

https://civilwarrx.blogspot.com/2015/03/civil-war-bandages-lint-and-charpie-its.html

See a preview of Caroline Healy Dall's published diary Daughter of Boston, edited by Helen R. Deese:

https://books.google.com/books?id=A0GEcnfZ2VIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=daughter+of+boston+dall&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi067X9v5CEAxX8JzQIHTSiBawQ6AF6BAgBEAI#v=onepage&q=daughter%20of%20boston%20dall&f=false