Libby Prison on a Silk Quilt

 

"B.F.B. 1837 Libby Prison "

This elegant silk fan quilt with a lace edge was auctioned at Jeffrey Evans Auctions
in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia three years ago, found in Richmond.
https://www.jeffreysevans.com/auction/richmond-virginia-dated-pieced-crazy-quilt/

Libby Prison was a Confederate prison for Union prisoners in a converted tobacco

warehouse on the James River in Richmond.

The last of several dates on the quilt is its probable date,

as silk fans were popular in the 1880s and '90s.

"1790 Rhoda Fuller"

Way too early.

"Stoney Point / Valley Forge / Bunker Hill, 1775 /" 1759 Edward Annable 1836

This block may be our best clue to the maker and the meaning.

Edward Annable was born in 1753 in Ashfield, Massachusetts and died at 83 years old in 1836 in Marcellus, Onondaga County, New York, according to his FindaGrave site. Other biographies tell us he was born in Connecticut. He married Jemima Smith in Ashfield in 1782 and the family moved to Onondaga County soon after 1800. Mima and Edward had 11 children.

Biography from a Sons of the Revolution publication

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/44821002/edward-annable

Lieutenant Annable fought in the Revolution beginning at Bunker Hill, later at the Battle of Stoney Point in New York and Valley Forge. Some of his children moved to the Michigan territory, among them Rhoda Annable Fuller (1790-1883) who settled there in 1830.

This Rhoda Fuller died in Ann Arbor 13 years before the date of the quilt

so was not the maker, more likely an ancestor honored

by the maker.

Rhoda was a "Real Daughter" of the American Revolution,

heritage recalled by the Michigan D.A.R. 

recorded here placing a marker on her grave.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/44946033/rhoda-fuller

Perhaps D.O. fought in the War of 1812. The date may refer to the

Battle of Craney Island, Virginia July 10, 1813

The maker seems to have been commemorating military service by her family. The Civil War memorial doesn't give us much to go on. Libby Prison was active in the early 1860s so the year 1837 might refer to B.F.B.'s birthdate

As one of the last names on the quilt is Blair I guessed this Civil War Union

soldier might be B. F. Blair and I found a Libby survivor in a list.

Lt. B.F. Blair of the 123rd Ohio Volunteers. You guess any man born before 1850 or so with the initials B.F. might be Benjamin Franklin, which is some help.

https://www.green-wood.com/2015/civil-war-biographies-berdan-boesen/

The best information about Benjamin F. Blair is at this site, which tells us he spent time in Libby Prison, survived the war, moved to Brooklyn, New York where he became a successful lawyer, occasionally lecturing on Libby Prison. He was born in Constantine, Michigan in 1837 and graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Surely this is the soldier remembered on the quilt.

He married Mary Louise Blair, who according to a passport application, was born in Ann Arbor.

Obituary Brooklyn Eagle, March 2, 1915

He and Mary Louise had two sons John N. and Frank Ross Blair.

The border has skillful ribbon-work florals.

Mysteries remain. Who made it? And how did it get back to Richmond, the home of Libby Prison but not the Blair/Fuller/Annable family?

Here's a surviving letter 

"Prisoner letter for Flag of Truce, B.F. Blair Lt. 123rd Regt. O. V. I"

addressed to

 "Miss M. L. Ormsby

Walnut Hills

Hamilton Co.

Ohio"

Mysteries: Some solved.

1837 Civil Disobedience in Canada

Blocks attributed to Fanny Riley, 1837

Niagara, Upper Canada

Collection: Niagara Historical Society and Museum 

These two patchwork blocks are attributed to Fanny Ross Riley Rowley (Possible dates 1831-1913). It's not clear how the museum has determined the year, but there may be dated papers on the back.

The lighter block design was published as Yankee Puzzle by the Ladies' Art Company at the end of the century. The black, striped silk block has no popular name.

The fabric looks to be silk. Triangles are pieced over paper, first basted and then whipstitched together, arranged in two different patterns of 16 HST squares, a common technique in North America and Great Britain at the time.

The story associated with the blocks is that Fanny pieced them during the Moseby Incident of 1837, also known as the Niagara Court House Riot. Solomon Moseby escaped from slavery in Kentucky and headed north to Canada, where he found a temporary refuge. His former owner David Castleman of Fayette County, Kentucky tracked him to Upper Canada and Moseby was jailed before awaiting his return to slavery.

Niagara on the Lake (Ontario) is just across the Canadian border

north of Buffalo, west of Rochester

Young Canadian family from the Archives of Ontario

Read about the blocks here:

http://www.narrativethreads.ca/explorer-explore/patchwork_de_1837-1837_patchwork.html

David B. Castleman

1786-1852

Castleman sent bounty hunters to

Niagara while he waited in Lewiston, Canada

A group of resisters refused to let the Kentuckians take Moseby away, camping for two weeks around the courthouse and blocking any attempts by officials to enforce the law. A petition went to the Lieutenant Governor, signed by 131 citizens, 17 of them black. Many of the protesters were women. 

Supposedly, Fanny stitched these blocks while she camped.

The confrontation came to a head in September when protesters and officials clashed. The sheriff ordered the soldiers to fire, leaving two black men dead and Solomon on the run again. Killed were Herbert Holmes, a minister, and Jacob Green, who tried to jam a tree limb into the wagon wheels.

Anna Brownell Jameson (1794-1860)

Anna Brownell Jameson published a travel book the following year. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada tells the tale as she heard it.

"Coloured people assembled from the adjacent villages, and among them a great number of their women. The conduct of this black mob, animated and even directed by the females, was really admirable...."

Jameson met one of the young women who led the protest. Sally Carter about 25 years old, had  "a kindly animated countenance; but the feelings of exasperation and indignation had evidently not yet subsided." A runaway from Virginia she had believed "nothing could touch us here, on your British ground, but it seems I was mistaken, and if so, I won't stay here."

International Underground Railroad Memorial.

Bronze sculpture by Ed Dwight at

Hart Plaza in Detroit, recalling the passage to Canada.

Moseby eventually made it to freedom in England and returned to Canada later in life.

Small scraps of dress silk basted to paper triangles

Were the blocks made by Fanny Ross Riley Rowley? The daughter of William and Fanny Riley (William was born a slave in Virginia) would have been six at the time of the protest. This was the kind of patchwork a young girl would have learned to stitch but whether she was camping with the adults is impossible to know.

Late 19th-century sketch from memory of the Riley home

Niagara Historical Society Museum

http://images.ourontario.ca/1812/72460/data

William escaped  to Canada in 1802

The 1851 census lists three Fanny Rileys in William's home in the city's "Coloured Village" framed by King, William, Ann and Butler streets. Wife Fanny was 57, daughter Fanny, 20, and granddaughter Fanny, 3. The middle Fanny born around 1831 is a likely candidate, although her mother born about 1794 is also a possibility. The elder Fanny was born in Germany and married in 1818, probably arriving in North America as an indentured servant.

The middle Fanny prospered in Niagara on the Lake. Husband Samuel B. Rowley, a Philadelphia glass manufacturer, built this Victorian mansion at 177 King Street that still stands, according to local history.

From King's Notable Philadelphians in 1902

I wonder if her husband is not Salmon Bostwick Rowley, President of the Hero Fruit Jar Company of Lockport, New York who patented glass preserving jars. 

See more about this guy here:

https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/Hero.pdf

But that's a genealogical rabbit hole and we are supposed to be discussing QUILTS.

See a post on a similar protest in Detroit, Michigan with a Canada Star block of new design:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2014/04/threads-of-memory-4-canada-star-for.html

The blocks, like many small fragments of women's work, help us recall the lives of people almost forgotten.

Coincidentally Carrie Hall named a variation of the block at the top of the page

"Catch Me If You Can.".... Perhaps the perfect block for an Underground Railroad,

with some underpinning in fact.

Atlanta Garden #7: Grandma's Favorite

Atlanta Garden #7 by Addie

Grandma's Favorite for the Flipper children:

Did Isabella Buckwalter Flipper have favorites?

Photo by George Barnhard, 1864, Library of Congress

Barnhard documented the destruction for Sherman's Corps of Engineers

This showplace house at Atlanta's outskirts on Marietta Street was shelled repeatedly in the summer of 1864. Well constructed of plaster-faced stone the house had been commissioned by slave trader Ephraim G. Ponder in 1857. On the roof an open-air observatory where one could enjoy the vista or shoot at incoming Yankees.

Marriage record 1853

Ponder and his wife Ellen B. Gregory had moved to Atlanta from Thomasville, down by the Florida line. Ellen, fourteen years his junior, is said to have been beautiful, lively, erratic and wealthy in her own right. 

Sketch by Lewis Miller 

Their 25-acre estate was known for its fine gardens kept by a talented, enslaved gardener. Over 60 slaves were reported to live on the property before the siege of Atlanta.

Local historian Wilbur Kurtz plotted the house on the Marietta Road

in 1930.

The estate had residences and workshops for the many slaves who made Ephraim Ponder a business success. More shrewd than enlightened he believed in educating his bondspeople---if not in literacy---in skills and trades, education creating a demand for the wheelwrights, blacksmiths and his best shoemaker Festus Flipper, all of whom he could rent out for a nice sum. 

The slaves' ownership was perhaps a contentious financial matter in the marriage and certainly later in the Ponder divorce. By the time the war began the Ponders' marriage was over. Ephraim sued Ellen for divorce in 1861 accusing her of promiscuity, drinking and a habit of aiming a pistol at him. 

Atlanta Constitution, June 30, 1930

Decades later Wilbur Kurtz interviewed Sarah Huff a child during the war,

 who remembered Ellen Ponder as a widow rather than

a divorcee. (Children needn't know everything.)

The Ponder home still stands at 324 North Dawson in Thomasville.

Grandma's Favorite by Becky Brown

Ephraim returned to Thomasville and the house he'd built there leaving Ellen in Atlanta to run the estate and manage the bondspeople. Her haphazard supervision was a form of benign neglect that benefitted the Black residents, most of who'd come with the Ponders from Thomasville. 

1862

Ellen Ponder seemed to have no trouble mixing in society despite the scandals. Here she used her own name as a Vice President of the charity supporting the Confederate hospitals.

1862

Her personal fortune must have helped maintain her status.

Another of Lewis Miller's Virginia sketches

Grandma's Favorite by Denniele Bohannon

Among the African-Americans living at the Ponder estate were Festus Flipper and his wife Isabella Buckwalter Flipper (1837-1887). 

Festus Flipper 

This may be the senior Festus (1837-1887)

or son Festus (1868-1943).

The couple met while bound to different slaveholders. Isabella's was Methodist minister Reuben H. Lucky (Luckey) (1801-1875.)  Festus earned enough money to buy his wife and their son Henry born in 1856.   

Photos of the Ponder house were taken by George Bernard

during the Union occupation in fall, 1864. 

By the time the shelling began in the summer of 1864 Ellen Ponder had left town, taking the Flippers and their small boys with her. 

Eldest son Henry, about 8, remembered moving to Macon. 

As Sherman's troops marched south from Tennessee the "dissolute mistress's" Atlanta house became an armed camp, filigreed with defense structures, its boxwoods and fruit trees scarred by shells. Ellen never returned to the house, which stood empty and damaged for many years after the war.

Diarist Carrie Berry noted Atlanta's chaos during Union occupation. Black Atlantans who welcomed the Union army bringing hoped-for freedom worried that Hood's Confederate troops might return, kidnap them and send them south. The Berry's enslaved servant Mary left right after Union troops took over. 

Another Atlanta girl Lucy Harvie Hull (1857-1923) remembered swinging on the gate watching soldiers pass. "We saw the neighbors moving out...our servants all ran away except Uncle Dick and Mammy."

Grandma's Favorite by Becky Collis

After nine months in Macon the Flippers returned to Atlanta as the war ended. Isabella cooked for the occupying armies and Festus repaired their boots. Their home, a restaurant, also became a school as the Flippers set about educating their boys who, due to Ellen Ponder's neglect, had been illegally taught to read.

After the war Henry and his brothers attended the Storrs School for Freedman

on Houston Street, near their home.

Students and teachers at the Storrs School,

perhaps a Flipper boy or two among them.

Their eldest went on to Atlanta University and West Point's Military Academy.

U.S. Military Academy Collection

Henry Ossian Flipper (1856-1940) as a West Point Cadet. 

Isabella's five boys were ambitious and successful.

Bishop Joseph Simeon Flipper (1859-1944)

& Professor Carl Flipper (1876-1961)

Isabella had many grandchildren who lived into the 20th century. Each a favorite, I am sure.

Grandma's Favorite by Jeanne Arnieri

The Block

Nine patch with four pinwheels, blocks from about 1910.

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

Further Reading:

Henry O. Flipper wrote an autobiography: The Colored Cadet at West Point. Read it online here:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Colored_Cadet_at_West_Point/qmbrAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

See more of Lewis Miller's paintings of enslaved Virginians.

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lewis-millers-virginia-slavery-drawings

An 1858 list of 47 slaves held at the Ponder place can be seen at the Thomas County History Center site here:
https://thomascounty.pastperfectonline.com/archive/A76B2F78-124A-4821-9BF3-172248183369