Kentucky Classic #5: Rose Tree for Missouri Immigrants

 

Kentucky Classic #5: Rose Tree by Becky Collis

Decades ago I saw this quilt in Missouri, attributed to Zerelda McClary Oliver, probably born in Paint Lick, Kentucky in Garrard County. She died in Kansas but the quilt shows her Kentucky roots.

Zerelda E. McClary Oliver (1822-1907)

Her design is obviously associated with the Garrard County quilts:

Carnations, similar leaves and an abundance of Rose Trees around the edge.

Rose Trees of all kinds are important in the Kentucky Classic medallion.

But they are not a design unique to this regional pattern.

 The Rose Tree or Missouri Rose, as Carrie Hall called it,

was popular all over the south before the Civil War.

Lucinda Chesnut's  Rose Tree or Missouri Rose in Carrie Hall & Rose Kretsinger's

  Romance of the Patchwork Quilt.

 I found maker Lucinda Garrard Chesnut (1827- 1894) born in Clay County, 

Kentucky, moved to Missouri in 1859 and buried in Platte City, Missouri,

 near Kansas City. She was granddaughter to Governor James Garrard

 for whom Garrard County is named. Her family remained Union loyalists.

This month's pattern can also tell us of Margaret Jane Arnold Allen (1827-1902), another transplanted Kentuckian. After Missouri was created as a slave state in 1821 many Kentuckians migrated west including Margaret, born in Garrard County.

We often forget that Missouri and Kentucky share a border.

Margaret came to Jackson County with husband Eastham Allen and two sons about 1857.

Their son's obituary

Hicks City is in the southeast corner of Jackson County

Margaret's story is typical of many Kentucky-born Missourians. The Lincoln administration worked hard to keep Kentucky loyal. The President wrote in 1861, "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game…Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri...."

Although both Kentucky and Missouri remained in the Union, Missouri's Kentucky transplants were much more inclined than their Kentucky relatives to follow southern loyalties as Missouri Confederates and guerilla fighters. 

The Missouri countryside was a nightmare of guerilla warfare.

The Allens did not appear to hold slaves (no record of the Allens in the 1860 Jackson County census schedule) but when the war broke out Eastham joined Sterling Price's Confederate Army. Sergeant Allen fought in the Battle of Lone Jack and spent much of the war in Arkansas.

Escaping war-ravaged Missouri Margaret and the children returned to Kentucky. She may have had to leave after Order #11 took effect in 1863 banishing Confederate sympathizers from Jackson County. After Eastham surrendered at Shreveport, Louisiana he traveled to Kentucky to take his family back to Missouri.

The Allens left few records and I could find nothing about Margaret making quilts but her journeys like Lucinda Chesnut's explain why I would stumble upon Zerelda Oliver's Garrard County quilt in Kansas City.

1902 Obituary

The Block

A Rose Tree or Missouri Rose

The set for nine square blocks 14"/15" or larger.

This is the month we include a pattern for the medallion set.

The lower right side of Becky Collis's medallion.

Rough sketch of Becky Brown's Plan B.

Her four Rose Trees fit into rectangular blocks finishing to 25" x 32".

 Becky B. loves to applique so her Rose Tree blocks grew way beyond

her initial plan.

You should increase the size on the Rose Tree pattern by about 180% for the rectangular blocks.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/63904063/jane-arnold

http://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2017/04/rose-tree-show-off-piecing.html

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