Grief and Laughter Sewn into the Patches: Quilts on the Frontier
Quilts have long been a source of enjoyment and expression for women of all ages, providing warmth and comfort in frontier homes and large mansions, on long overland journeys and weekly trips to church or to market. Many quilt patterns not only brightened homes and warmed their occupants, but also made social, political and economic statements. Quilts helped to bind women together and make them stronger, and in many cases provided eloquent and enduring records of women's lives. Quilting was one of the few social diversions available to women of the 19th century.
The first known quilts in America date back to the Colonial period. The quilts of this time resembled those of the lands from which the quilters came. The top layer of these early quilts was of woolen fabric dyed dark blue, green or brown, with a bottom layer of a coarser woolen material left a natural or yellow color. The filling was composed of a soft layer of carded wool. The layers were held together with small, evenly spaced stitches called quilting. A popular style of quilting among the New England colonists was called "Trapunto," in which a design was quilted through two layers (rather than three as in other types of quilts), with the design made through the outline of the stitches, and perhaps selective overstuffing, alone. A Trapunto design was not differentiated by using different colors of fabric, and was usually formed in the shape of feather wreaths, cornucopias, baskets of flowers and leaves.
The art of quilting developed during the Colonial period, and gradually the pieced quilt was introduced in the early 1800s. The early western pioneers often brought pieced quilts along for warmth along the trail and in their new frontier homes. Scraps of leftover material from shirts, dresses and pants were carefully cut and sewn together to make blocks, which were then assembled to make the cover of the piece-work quilt. A style of quilt similar to this was the Crazy Quilt, the oldest type of pieced pattern, developed in the late 1700s. As this style of random piecing evolved, women began to plan where each colored piece would go and what design would eventually be formed. These quilts often had thousands of mosaic-like pieces; one example had 30,000 pieces, each measuring just one-quarter by three-quarters of an inch in size.
The hours that went into the manufacture of each quilt were countless, and women could rarely finish a quilt by themselves. In addition to the amount of labor needed, this was also due to the lack of quilting frames in a community. When a quilt was to be made for a bride or as a gift to a special person, a "quilting bee" was held at the residence of a woman who owned a quilting frame, where the women of the community would gather. Not only could women trade for scraps of fabric at quilting bees, but they were also occasions when they could catch up on the latest news. Social time for the pioneers was very limited, and a "bee" provided a forum where women could create a quilt and talk at the same time. When the finished product was given to a woman about to leave the community for "greener pastures," a "friendship quilt" was made, in which bits of the clothing of the quilters were used, then inscribed with a special message and their signatures. Friendship quilts served as tactile reminders of connectedness between individual women, and represented a clever way for the receiver to remember the makers, symbolizing the fact that physical distance cannot destroy emotional bonds.
While traveling on overland journeys, and after their arrival in their new frontier homes, women used quilts for many purposes. They were a source of warmth, serving to protect families against the cold of winter, but were also used on beds, over drafty doors and windows, and as coverings for the bare sod walls and floors homes on the Great Plains. Women felt there was a need to add beauty and color to their sometimes primitive shelters, and quilts were a way to bring a touch of civilization to a newly-settled frontier. Quilts also served as items for psychic survival, for they often helped to relieve feelings of homesickness for lost friends and loved ones left behind. The sod house display in the Museum of Westward Expansion exhibits a quilt which represents many of these positive aspects of the quilter's art.
Quilts often had an influence which reached beyond the home, however. Women could not mark ballots in the 1800s, but this did not stop them from forming their own political opinions, based on conversations, speeches and newspaper articles. Quilts were a way for women to voice their concerns within society. Women used their skills in needlework to make quilts that registered responses to major social, economic and political developments, from work in Civil War relief to participation in reform movements such as abolition and temperance. As women claimed for themselves a larger and more public political space, quilts began to make statements about social and political causes, with ramifications far beyond the domestic sphere of the home.
Throughout the 1830s and up to the eve of the Civil War, women abolitionists used their quilting skills to produce statements reflecting their abhorrence of slavery. A type of quilt which developed from this movement was called the "Underground Railroad," and consisted of a series of contrasting light and dark squares as a visual representation of the dangerous path to freedom for escaping slaves. Women taking part in this movement began holding fairs and bazaars where their needlework products were sold, with the proceeds going directly to support the abolitionist cause.
When the Civil War began women could not go off to fight, but helped the cause through Women's Aid Societies, which made stockings, shirts, quilts and other necessities for the United States Sanitary Commission. It was estimated that women supplied as many as 250,000 quilts to the army, which included heirlooms from their own homes and tied coverlets made for the war effort.
Following the Civil War, women became more vocal and political than in the pre-war era. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed in 1874, which addressed such issues as male alcoholism, the eight-hour work day, vocational training for women, prison reform, and suffrage. Quilts were designed which referred to drunkenness and crusades held for the WCTU. Many historians agree that women who supported the suffrage movement gained many of the organizational skills needed for their eventual triumph through their work with the abolition, Sanitary Commission and the temperance movements.
Today, although quilts are more of a luxury item than a necessity, and are most often made by artists and craftspeople rather than by the ordinary, everyday women of modern society, they remain highly prized items. Quilts are often found which have been passed down from generation to generation, used as bedcovers, given as wedding presents to brides, and even used as a way to remember friends and family that have passed on. Today, quilts are not often noted for their messages about alcoholism, abolition or woman suffrage, but they have continued in their political role, as evidenced by the AIDS Quilt project, which began in 1987 as a way to remember the victims of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The AIDS quilt began as a simple remembrance, but gained larger significance as it became a symbol of the movement toward awareness of AIDS. As of September 1993, the quilt contained more than 21,000 decorated panels from 29 countries, and covered more than fifteen acres of ground, the largest, and perhaps the most universally symbolic quilt ever made.
Quilts were an important part of people's lives during the 1800s. Used as protection from cold frontier winters and to brighten up dreary homes, they had a very important impact on the women and the families that used them. Carrie A. Hall's poem, The Patchwork Quilt, expressed the feelings many women had about these practical, symbolic, and artistic talismans of homelife:
"Of all the things a woman's hands have made,/The quilt so lightly thrown across her bed-/The quilt that keeps her loved ones warm-/Is woven of her love and dreams and thread.
When I have spoken to you of its beauty-/'A mere hodge-podge of calico,' you said/'A necessity of homely fashioning,/Just a covering made of cloth and thread.'
I knew you'd miss the message hidden there/By hands that fashioned quilts so long ago./Ambition and assurance are the patches/And the stitches of a quilt are love, I know.
I think a quilt is something very real-/A message of creation wrought in flame;/With grief and laughter sown into its patches/I see beyond the shadows, dream and aim."
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