Irene Sheridan's Memorial Quilt

Hourglass or Broken Dishes quilt with embroidery and the words

"Mother Sheridan" under a silk portrait of Philip Sheridan

Philip Henry Sheridan 1831–1888

Similar to this portrait widely printed at the Civil War hero's death.

Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

70-1/2" x 64", 1880s

The curators assume it to have been stitched by Irene Rucker Sheridan, the General's wife.

Perhaps a mourning quilt.

Irene in the center, a very ill Phil Sheridan on the right, his brother

Michael standing and Michael's wife on the left, late 1880s.

The girls dressed as triplets included a pair of twins and a sister a year older.

The youngest Phil, Jr. was 8 when his father died.

Irene may have begun the piece soon after his death when embroidered silk quilts were all the rage. Widowed at 32 years old she must have framed herself narrowly as "Mother Sheridan," raising their four children. An attractive woman, a Washington socialite, she never remarried, telling would-be matchmakers she'd "rather be Phil Sheridan's widow than any living man's wife."

Irene Sheridan (1856-1938) lived well into the 20th century, at home in 

Washington with her three unmarried daughters for fifty years.

Their brick home at 2221 Massachusetts Street NW still stands.

Congress awarded the widow a one-time sum of $50,000, which apparently kept them in style.

Irene Rucker was a child of the army, born at Fort Union in New Mexico while her father General Daniel H. Rucker was stationed there. She met General Sheridan in Chicago in 1874 and they married soon after. Although he had led a rather wild life in the Army with at least one daughter by a Native American woman in Washington Territory, Irene was his first legal wife and the newspapers made much of the romance

Sheridan & Union Forever at the time of his 1875 wedding.

The quilt was given to Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987 by Mrs. Yoerger Kiehl, Sarasota, Florida.

(Possibly Dorothy Yoerger Kiehl of Columbus, Ohio.)
http://collection.imamuseum.org/artwork/48637/

Waterwheel Block: Variable Shading

Block 3

Yankee Notions

by Laura A.

Block #3 Waterwheel

Pictures from our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/543662069820849/

Jean

Cathy

Cindy

Darlene

Dena

Erica

Laura

Roberta

Sara

Shawn

Lisa

Altogether I have photos of 16 blocks while I'm writing this.

I Photoshopped them into a quilt in random order---

no design wall to work out color and shading balance.

And what I wound up with is a quilt that looks very much like the 20th century

style that Fawn Valentine called Mutating Blocks in her book on the West Virginia project.

Mid-20th-century quilts

with mutating color and shading.

It may look disconcerting when viewed in the context of today's tastes but it was

a look that Southern quiltmakers valued. They must have or they wouldn't have

made so many.

Mary Ann Elam Ross's Civil War

Quilt attributed to Mary Ann Elam Ross (1832-1906) Texas. 

Recorded in the book Texas Quilts, Texas Treasures.

Mary Ann's version of the Rocky Mountain or Crown of Thorns design with the unusual appliqued strips was probably made long after the Civil War when these quilts were made across the upland South (which reached way west into Texas.)

74" x 61"

She may have constructed this as blocks like the diagram below:

Which explains the awkward vine intersections

in what might have been a sashing.

The family thought their quilt might date to the Civil War but the pattern, fabrics, small size and partial blocks along the edge---among other clues---indicate it was made after 1880, perhaps into the 20th century as she lived until 1906.

The 1870 census tells us Mary Ann Elam was born in Tennessee (no surprise to those who have seen quite a few of the patchwork design made there) but a family site tells us she was born November 02, 1832 in Cold Springs, Mississippi.

She married Edward Hampton Ross in Mississippi in 1850 when she was 18. E.H. Ross, born in 1825 in Alabama or Mississippi went to Texas in 1852 with Mary Ann, a baby and his extended family. One would guess the confusion over origins is due to the families' continuing need to move west looking for fertile farm land for cotton and corn, a few years in one state, a few years further west.

As Robert Caro wrote in his biography of Lyndon Johnson: "Thousands of rural Southern families...took one last look at their eroded, exhausted soil, chalked GTT [Gone to Texas] on their gates and headed for a new land and a new start."

Edward's father David Ross was a Methodist minister who founded the Friendship Methodist Church in Milam County, where the families settled.

Mary Ann's first child Sarah Jane was born in January 12, 1852 in DeSoto County, Mississippi. She gave birth to another girl and three boys in Texas in the 1850s.

Ghostly photo of her husband with revolver and 

Bowie knife in his mid-30s, 1861 from Find-A-Grave.

When the Civil War began Edward, listed in the 1860 census as a stockman (a cattle rancher?),  left 28-year-old Mary Ann and their five young children to join Company A of the 8th Texas Cavalry called Terry's Texas Rangers. They traveled into Kentucky where Edward wrote homesick letters telling of his affection for his family:.

"I can imagine...that I see you and Sarah Jane, Davey, Wiley, Margaret all down at friend Ned's and that you are about now, calling them up to start home."

Terry's soldiers wound up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in the summer of 1862, supporting Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest's successful assault on the Union-held town.

Union camp in Murfreesboro

From a history of the regiment:

"Now occurred one of those unfortunate blunders which often mar the best laid plans; probably made by Forrest himself. Colonel Wharton with the Rangers was to attack a camp of the enemy on the Liberty pike north of town. Forrest, who had been riding at the head of the column, turned aside to allow us to pass. When six companies had gone by he fell in with his staff and escort. Thus it happened that nearly half of the regiment followed Forrest into the town and out to the westward. The courthouse was garrisoned by a company of the Ninth Michigan Infantry, who poured a hot fire into our ranks from the windows."

Edward was one of  over 1,000 soldiers killed in the battle at the Courthouse Square on July 13, 1862...

...  buried in a mass grave in Tennessee.

He is first on the list.

The widow suffered another loss towards the end of the war with the death of eldest son Davey, David Alan Ross, about 11 years old.

1870 Census, Milam County, Texas

Mary Ann did not remarry and raised her remaining children among her husband's family. In the late 19th century she moved to the nearby railroad town of Bartlett on the Bell/Williamson county line.

Cotton crop in Bartlett about 1910.

Farmers covered bales with old quilts. See the star quilt on the right.

She died May 16, 1906 at the age of 73 and is buried in Bartlett.

See her husband's letters in the files of the Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee.
https://www.nps.gov/stri/learn/historyculture/regftexas.htm

Yankee Notion #4: New Waterwheel

Yankee Notions #4 New Water Wheel by Dorry Emmer

Nine-inch blocks, note the needle in the center and the words.

Part of Yankee industry was fiddling with things: Yankee ingenuity. A Yankee engineer no sooner built a waterwheel than he was thinking about a better waterwheel.

Water wheels were replaced by steam engines in the New England

mills in the late 19th century.

Yankee ingenuity and engineering:

 An incredibly complicated cylinder printing machine for printing different colors on one piece of cotton. Much of our textile technology originated in England but American mill engineers added their own inventions.

New Waterwheel by Becky Brown

In his 1890 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Mark Twain began with a familiar type:

"I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut.... So I am a Yankee of the Yankees — and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose — or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both...."

Sir Launcelot gets a bicycle from the Yankee

"I could make anything a body wanted — anything in the world, it didn't make any difference what; and if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one — and do it as easy as rolling off a log."

And speaking of rolling off a log:

A Northern view of Southern culture. The more relaxed attitude,

anathema to the great-grandsons of Puritans, is perhaps best

expressed in a few catch phrases:

Don't fix it if it ain't broke.

Leave well enough alone.

Englishman Basil Hall contrasted attitudes in the 1820s:

"In the more northern parts of the country, we had been every where much struck with the air of bustle, and all sorts of industry—men riding about, chopping down forests, building up houses, ploughing, planting, and reaping—but here in Carolina all mankind appeared comparatively idle. The whites, generally speaking, consider it discreditable to work, and the blacks, as a matter of course, work as little as they can. The free population prefer hunting, and occupy themselves also very much with the machinery of electioneering." Basil Hall, Travels in North America: In the Years 1827 and 1828

Another Northerner's view of Southern culture.

Walt Kelly's Pogo cartoon

Denniele Bohannon's 12-inch block

The Block

New Waterwheel

It's BlockBase #1649 published as New Waterwheel by
the Chicago Tribune's Nancy Cabot column in the 1930s.

Reader Anna Law sent a block to Comfort magazine in 1906
 and called it "Checkered Square."

12-Inch Block

A - Cut 4 squares 4-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally with a single cut. You need 8 triangles, dark and light.

B - Cut 12 rectangles 1-7/8" x 4-1/2".

C - Cut  9 squares 1-7/8".

18-Inch Block

A - Cut 4 squares 6-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally with a single cut. You need 8 triangles, dark and light.

B - Cut 12 rectangles 2-1/2" x 6-1/2".

C - Cut  9 squares 2-1/2".

Dorry's 12-inch New Waterwheel

Rube Goldberg satirized Yankee Ingenuity in the 20th century.

This month's Tangible Yankee Notion

Needles

Woodblock print, Yashima Gakutai (1786-1869)

Engineering and fiddling with things might have changed technology over the centuries but there have not been many changes in the needle. Like pins, needles were first fashioned from bone and as industry improved then formed from fine metal wire hand ground to fine points, finally sharpened and drilled by machinery. 

The English pride themselves on making the best needles. Americans have relied upon British manufacture for their hand sewing needles for centuries.

And like pins, New England factories began manufacturing needles for hand

and machine sewing. The Excelsior Needle Company in Connecticut began in 1866.

Henry Spernon Tozer, The Quiltmaker

Some of us spend as much time threading the needle

as sewing the fabric. I wouldn't mind a better needle but

I'm still sewing with 19th-century technology.

Denniele's 18-inch New Waterwheel

The rocking chair is said to be a New England invention, designed so Yankees could continue to move while sitting still. This one from the Maine State Museum is made of a recycled spinning wheel.

Norman Rockwell illustration

Denniele's 18-inch blocks 1-4

See Mary Carolyn Beaudry's Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework & Sewing:

https://books.google.com/books?id=rvT_aYLCKfIC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false