American Stars: Links to the Monthly Patterns

 

The pieced Block of the Month here for 2022 at the CivilWarQuilts blog is American Stars. Below links to the free monthly patterns.

Jeanne Arnieri is one of our model makers.

13 blocks on point by Jeanne

Introductions & Sets

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2021/12/2022-block-of-month-american-stars.html

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/01/sets-for-american-stars-bom.html

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/06/sets-for-american-stars.html

Links Below

Becky Brown, Block 1

Stellar Memory for the McKim Family

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/01/american-stars-1-mckims.html

Click on each link to read the family story and see the pattern.

Joan Hinchcliff, Block 2

Star-Spangled Four Patch for the Key Family

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/02/american-stars-2-keys.html

Denniele Bohannon, Block 3

Double Pinwheels for the Gratz Family

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/03/american-stars-3-gratzes.html

Christine Laine, Block 4

Prosperity's Star for the Morgan Family

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/04/american-stars-4-morgans.html

Christine Romero, Block 5

Mariner's Compass for the Allston Family

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/05/american-stars-5-allstons-mariners.html

Lane Wilhite, Block 6

Star of Destiny for the Peales

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/06/american-stars-6-peales-destiny.html

 Dena Brannen, Block 7

Grammercy Park for the Fieldses

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/07/american-stars-7-gramercy-park-for.html

Elsie Ridgley, Block 8

Steadfast Star for the Mays

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/08/american-stars-8-steadfast-stars-mays.html

Block 9

Erica Cannon

Star of Illusion for the Butlers

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/09/american-stars-9-star-of-illusion-for.html

Block 10

Jeanne Arnieri

Kansa Star for the Papins & Gonvilles

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/10/american-stars-10-kansa-star-for-papins.html

Block 11

Lutgarde Fleurinck

Keepsake Star for the Sedgwicks & the Freemans

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/11/american-stars-11-keepsake-star-for.html

Block 12

Erica Cannon

Kaleidoscope Star for the Grimkes

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/12/american-stars-12-kaleidoscope-star-for.html

And a label to print on pretreated cotton:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/11/label-for-your-american-stars-quilt.html

See our Facebook Group. It's public so you don't have to join. Lots of blocks up there!

AmericanStarsBOM

https://www.facebook.com/groups/441761124005847

And you can buy all the patterns at Barbara's Etsy shop. $12 to print yourself.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1145717185/

Charlotte Gaulden's Civil War

 Georgia quilt in a Tennessee museum

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=22-18-1918

A little bluer photo

McMinn County Living Heritage Museum

Attributed to Charlotte LaFayette LeSueur Gaulden (1825-1889)

 Brooks County, Georgia by the family member who donated the quilt.

Charles Screven Gaulden (1812-1884)

At 21 Charlotte LaFayette LeSueur married 34-year-old lawyer Charles Gaulden in Bibb County, Georgia in 1846. He represented Stewart County in the Georgia Legislature in the mid-1840s where he practiced law in Lumpkin the county seat. Charlotte joined Charles in Lumpkin where she gave birth to six children, three of whom died in childhood.

A biography tells us Charles "amassed a fortune of about $200,000 in about 15 years" in Lumpkin. We also read that he was a Whig.

Memoirs of Georgia, 1895

Charles renounced politics? His wife's quilt pattern, though, seems to reflect Democrat party politics.

The pattern dates to the 1840s and has many names in the commercial

pattern literature and the vernacular, among them Whig's Defeat,

which would have been a Democratic victory when Whigs and 

Democrats were the major parties in the 1840 and '50s.

Charles Gaulden ran again for the Georgia Legislature in 1857

Atlanta Constitution, 1857.

He was a Democrat in this election.

 They moved to Brooks County in 1859.

Having made a fortune he bought a plantation known as Okapilko. Their last child Samuel was born there in 1859 after Charles had a religious revelation and decided to become a Missionary Baptist minister, preaching at churches in the Quitman area.

He apparently founded the Okapilco Missionary Baptist Church.

"Brother Gaulden was for several years the only preacher, and the missionary spirit that gave life and energy to Baptist principles is chiefly due to his instruction and influence."

The 1860 census found them in Brook County where Charles

was listed as a Minister Farmer

"Politics did not suit his taste"? Yet he was an impassioned advocate of the slavery system and voted for secession before the Civil War.

Atlanta Constitution, June 1859

In 1859 he gave a 90-minute speech advocating the repeal of federal law prohibiting importation of enslaved Africans. The Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves had been in effect since 1808. 

The Gauldens kept many slaves according to the 1860 census, which counted 32.

Charles represented Brooks County at the 1861 Georgia Secession Convention

voting to leave the Union.

When the war began Charlotte was raising four children on the farm. Her brother Thomas LeSueur in his early 20s had enlisted in a Georgia volunteer regiment.

His cemetery marker in the Gaulden family cemetery tells us

he was fatally wounded at the Second Battle of Manassas in August, 1862.

The 1870 census does not tell us much about how the Gauldens fared in the war.

They continued employing former slaves according to Freedman's 

Bureau records. Charles seems to have held on to several plantations.

In their last years they moved to Madison Street in Thomasville.

1880 Census, Thomasville, Georgia

Charles is listed as a Clergyman; the children are on their own and they 

have three live-in-servants: Ida and Flora, Black women seem to have no last names.

Atlanta Constitution

Charles died in October, 1884

Charlotte died 5 years later. Many family members are recalled by monuments

in the Gaulden Cemetery at Okapilco.

We return to Charlotte's quilt.

The seam lines in the block emphasized here. The design

is often fitted into a curved shape and then a square block.

Texas quilt in a similar pattern

Did Charlotte make it in 1860 soon after the birth of her last child?

She certainly had household help with the children and the farm and perhaps assistance with the quilting from the many enslaved women at Okapilco.

The three plain color cottons are no help in dating beyond the broad

range of  1840-1920 when Turkey red and Prussian blue on a white background

 were common in patchwork. The pattern dates to the mid 1840s when

Democrats dreamed of defeating Henry Clay, the great unsuccessful Whig candidate

who ran for President several times. 

Less of a mystery is how the quilt got to Tennessee.  

The maker's daughter Charley Mary Gaulden Tillman (1847-1925) had a daughter Ela Tillman Key (1874-1929), wife of Atlanta's mayor in the 1920s. They had a daughter Ruth Key Butler (?) McDonald (1912-1994) who had a daughter Marie Butler Neel (1937-1910)---all of these women lived in Georgia. Marie had a granddaughter Gay who lived in Tennessee and when Gay inherited the quilt she donated it to the McMinn County Living Heritage Museum.

An impressive list of women descended from Charlotte LeSueur Gaulden. 

The Museum makes the most of their quilt collection.

See posts about the pattern here:
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/10/political-quilts-4-democratic-victory.html
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/10/political-quilts-5-quilt-pro-or-anti.html
http://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2019/11/whigs-defeat-in-block.html
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2019/09/whigs-defeat-indiana-rose.html

American Stars #4: The Morgans

 

American Stars #4 

Prosperity's Star by Becky Brown

 Prosperity's Star recalls the Morgan family who've been prosperous for generations.

Prospect Farm, Princeton, New Jersey

The couple under the tree must be Mary Baynton and George Morgan who built this home in the 1780s. George (1743-1810), born in Pennsylvania, was a Colonel in the Revolutionary Army, an agent to the Lenape tribes. His family benefitted from the privilege he passed on. Many threads in the Morgan genealogy reveal impressive achievement (and a good deal of gossip.) 

Born in New Jersey, George's grandson Thomas Gibbes Morgan (1799-1862) found prosperity as an attorney in antebellum Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He married his second wife Sarah, born in colonial Guyana in South America, and they raised 9 children including Sarah Ida (1842-1909).

Duke University

Sarah Ida Morgan Dawson (1842-1909)

 .

The Morgans' home on Church Street when the Civil War began

 & and their idyllic life began to crumble

Son Henry was killed in a duel; father Thomas died six months after war was declared and the Union Army occupied Baton Rouge in 1862. Several Morgan men joined the Confederacy and the Morgan women became refugees.

Sarah's diary, published in 1913, chronicles their war, which changed her from a careless girl to a heart-broken woman. Her first enthusiastic accounts of brothers George, Gibbes and Jimmy joining the Southern troops reflected dreams of battlefield glory but hopes for Morgan heroics soon became anxiety for their safety and vain prayers for their survival. In the last months of the War both Gibbes and George died within a week.

#4 Prosperity's Star by Denniele Bohannon

Nine years ago we did a B.O.M. based on Sarah's Diary.

Dixie Diary from American Homestead

In the words of Sarah's son: "The war over, Sarah knitted together the threads of her torn life and faced her present." She began writing for the Charleston News & Courier and married editor Francis Warrington Dawson. 

Frank Dawson (1840-1889)

This happy interlude in Charleston ended when Frank was murdered by a vengeful neighbor.

Sarah sought refuge from memory in France where son Warrington worked for the American Embassy and established a reputation as a novelist, newspaper reporter and interpreter of French life for Americans.

  Francis Warrington Dawson II (1878-1962)

The expatriate was friends with Josef Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.

Warrington accompanied Theodore Roosevelt on a 1909 

African trip as photographer.

The Block

Prosperity's Star

The block is adapted from BlockBase #1256, July's Summer Sky designed in the 1970s by Evelyn Brown who published a little magazine devoted to quilts. For Prosperity's Star I erased a few lines in Electric Quilt to make the center triangles simpler.

Print the pattern on an 8-1/2 x11" sheet of paper. Note the inch square for scale.

The Next Generation

Philip Hicky Morgan (1825-1900)

Sarah's half-brother attorney Philip Hicky Morgan was a Union

 sympathizer in Civil War, one of only two of the five Morgan boys 

to survive the war years. He served as Minister to Mexico in the 1880s.

Henry Hays Morgan I (1860–1933),

His only child Harry Hays Morgan was also in the diplomatic corps, consul to several foreign cities including Berlin, Havana and Buenos Aires. He married the daughter of a diplomat, Chilean heiress Laura Kilpatrick.

 Laura Delphine Kilpatrick Morgan (1877–1956)

And here, you might guess by her portrait, the tone of the tale changes.

Gloria and Thelma or vice versa.

Harry and Laura Morgan had four children including twins Gloria and Thelma, who grew up to be international socialites---Thelma famous for her affair with the Prince of Wales in the 1930s.

Wallis Simpson broke up Thelma and the P.O.W.

Jeanne Arnieri is setting her blocks on point side by side

with a narrow sash between them. Here are blocks 2,3 & 4.

Sister Gloria earned international headlines for marrying and divorcing a Vanderbilt and for a sensational custody battle in the mid-30s over their daughter Gloria Vanderbilt II.

Readers (especially those suffering a Great Depression)

 love to hear about the misery of the super-rich 

to remind them that fur coats cannot buy happiness.

Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper (1924-2019) 

Little Gloria in 1970

Gloria Vanderbilt married and divorced Wyatt Cooper. Here she is with their sons

 in the 1970s. The boy on the right is Anderson Hays Cooper (b. 1967), who

informs us evenings on CNN.

UPDATE: See the comments for Bella Pink's correction to Gloria's marriages. (I know a lot more about Sarah than the 20t- c Morgans.) Wyatt died during heart surgery when he was 50. Poor Gloria, poor boys.

Anderson Cooper and eldest son Wyatt.

Anderson Cooper recently published a book on his family heritage with Katherine Howe. 

Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty traces his mother's father's family. If you see him tell him he picked the wrong line. His mother's mother's family the Morgans are much more interesting!

Here's one post about about Sarah Morgan's life after the Civil War:

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2014/01/sarah-morgan-after-war.html

Twelve of Becky's blocks photoshopped into an

impressive quilt.