Amanda Paralee (Pairalee/Pairlee) Hammonds Linn, (1839-1909)
Rusk County, Texas
Family history says it was made in 1858.
Winedale Quilt Collection at the Briscoe Center for American History
Read more about it at these links.
Quilt reported to have been made in 1868 for wedding of Margaret Eppwright Johnson (1850-1938) in Liberty Hill, Williamson County. This quilt has a reliable story; Margaret's first child was born there in 1871. Twelve names are inscribed in the border and central area.
From the Texas project & the Quilt Index
Links:
Kathy Moore noted: "I live in Williamson County now. From my reading of local history it would have been a bit of a hard scrabble existence. This beauty would have definitely taken the edge off the hardness of her daily chores."
It seems obvious with these star quilts obviously associated with the Lone Star state that Texas... As Texan Laura Curl Syler wrote: "Texas is 'a State of Mind'!! And all that implies!
And it's been that way for quite a while:
Houston's Museum of Fine Arts
Bayou Bend Collection of Ima Hogg
Links:
https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/a-unique-quilts-salute-to-texas
Texas was more than a geographical place. It's been a larger-than-life icon from the first days of the the Alamo and rebellion from Mexico in the 1830s through the 1844 Polk/Clay Presidential campaign in which Tennessean James K. Polk ran on a platform advocating making the Texas Republic a new slave state to the days of President Lyndon Johnson.
The Hearth & Home magazine group published Texas about 1900
with the five letters in TEXAS in the star's points.
More quilt patterns are named for Texas than for any other state---many of them Texas stars of varying types.
Quilt made by Catherine Ann Waring
DAR Museum
She was known as Kitty throughout her life.
Catherine Ann Waring Waring (1788-1867)
Alden Tullis O'Brien, textile curator at the D.A.R. Museum, brought this quilt to our attention as perhaps the earliest Texas-made quilt in the literature. The chintz fabrics date it to the 1840s when Kitty Waring lived in Texas.
The star's oxblood brown and dark blue prints, being of the same value,
are difficult to see in a photo. Names for the pattern include Mathematical Star,
Star of Bethlehem and Lone Star.
Kitty married her her cousin Edward Gannt Waring in 1808. In 1840 they went to Liberty County, Texas where he died in 1850 leaving "a large family" many of whom remained there. Kitty returned to Maryland to live with son Dr. James Waring.
The 1860 census finds Kitty "A Lady" in her son's family.
The quilt on the cover of the book Lone Stars
was made in Texas in the 1880s in Brown County
by Sally Beaird Lewellin.
In the 1880s Sally Beaird Lewellin made two of these Sunburst quilts that Kathy Moore wrote about in Uncoverings 2017.
Sally Beaird Lewellin (1852 - 1941)
Sally Beaird, born in Georgia, went to Texas as a young woman and married rancher Gabriel Brence Lewellin in 1883. They lived in Brownwood, Brown County between Abilene and Austin.
Sally's is one of many late-19th-century quilts made in Texas. The lack of earlier quilts might be explained by demographics. A look at census figures indicates Texas had about 12,000 women over 20 years old in 1850. Compare that to Ohio where women numbered nearly a million in general.
Rocky Mountain Quilt made by Mary Elam Ross (1832-1906)
Milam County, Texas
Mary, born in Mississippi, went to Texas in the early 1850s. The quilt probably dates from the last quarter of the 19th century or perhaps even into the early 20th. Her quilt is pictured in the book Texas Quilts: Texas Treasures.
See a post on her life here:
Texas counties where the five quilts above were made
It also may be that emigrants brought bedding with them. Quilt were both functional and sentimental and would likely have been carried from home in the East. It isn't until the transported bedding wore out that Texans made new (as we also found in Kansas).
All that said---Suzanne Yabsley in her book Texas Quilts, Texas Women quotes from an account of a quilting party along the Gulf Coast about 1840. Cornelius Clay Cox wrote a lengthy memoir of his life in Texas. He went to the Republic of Texas with his sister Catherine Sherman's family when he was twelve. Her husband Sidney Sherman had fought in the Texas war for independence and received a land grant. The Sherman/Cox family left Kentucky in the winter of 1836 and settled on the Bay between Houston and Galveston.
He described the isolation:
"It must be remembered that Texas was very new, and at this time very sparsely settled and except the occasional settlements, the Country was in a state of Nature...The families settled along the Bay shore, on either side were mainly from the different southern States. [Each family received a grant] of 4,600 acres...and consequently neighbors were usually 2 to 3 miles apart."
Catherine Cox Sherman (1815 - 1865)
The University of Texas at Austin. The Briscoe Center for American History
Photo probably 20 years after the quilting at the Brinsons.
Their near neighbors were the Louisiana family of Enoch Brinson. Some time about 1840 the Brinsons staged "an old fashioned country quilting." Cornelius remembered the "modus operandi."
"The quilt was stretched in the primitive way, that is between 4 slats and drawn out to the full size of the quilt---and the 4 corners each suspended by a rope to the ceiling---in the best room....The gents on the ground are expected to roll up the sides as fast as needed to pass the thread and scissors---and with anecdotes and small talk to entertain the workers."
He remembered the menu more than the quilt as a teenager would.
Two more books on Texas quilts:
Kate Adams's Comfort and Glory, a catalog of the quilts at the University of Texas's Briscoe Center for American History.
And this long ago catalog Quilts of the Texas South Plains.
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