Pineapple, Prickly Pear, Tobacco Leaf, Chestnut Burr

Many of us learned our love for quilt patterns from Cuesta Benberry who was the expert on patterns and also on African-American quiltmakers twenty years ago. In her book Piece of My Soul: Quilts by Black Arkansans she showed this quilt by Alice Young Trammell of Magnolia, Arkansas who was born in either the 1860s or 1870s in Arkansas to parents who were slaves.

Two of Alice's quilts were documented in the Michigan

project where her granddaughter lived.

"The quilt design....object of years of search for its place of origin. Not until the South Carolina & North Carolina quilt documentation projects were conducted was it confirmed the quilt design was indigenous to the southeastern coastal regions of the United States...seldom found in other parts of the United States."

From a Jeffrey Evans Auction

Example found in North Carolina, sharing many style characteristics with Alice's. Solid color fabrics, partial blocks along one side. Pattern is a four-way rotating fruit that people today call Pineapple. We've also seen families calling it Prickly Pear and Tobacco Leaf. The arcs, here chrome orange, are important to the design. 

Variations on Prickly Pears (Opuntia) are native in nearly all the United States

but this showy variety with the edible fruit is a Southwestern plant.

South Carolina's book used it on the cover and called it Pineapple.

We posted pictures and did some close looking at the design in our QuiltHistorySouth Facebook group and found quite a few of these---from further afield than the Carolinas.

From a Virginia auction

By Alpha Slemp Haburn, Lee County, Virginia.

Some were rather eccentric.

Florida Museum of History

"Melon Patch Variation with Cock's Comb"

Cora Sibley Mardre, Boston, Georgia

Susan Price Miller found one made in Georgia in the Florida project's book. Several of these pictures are scans from her library.

Kathleen McCrady collection at the University of Texas/Winedale

Kathleen thought it to have been made in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Mary Germany Hatcher, Winston County, Mississippi book.

 Martha Spark's collection, attributed to Alabama

Betty Meek McKenzie from the Louisiana Project

The family called it Tobacco Leaf.

The Louisiana Project saw quite a few.

Louise Hill McDermott, made in the 1920s, Louisiana

She got the pattern from an old quilt. Sharing the pattern from quilt to quilt seems to be the way

it was handed around, which is why Cuesta was so confounded by the source. Popular as it was it was only published once (see below.)

From the Cornett Family, Madison County, Arkansas

Jeffie Beaver Smith, Calico Rock, Arkansas

Buckboard Quilts

Ebay, attributed to Oklahoma

Cindy Rennells's inventory, found in Oklahoma

Bell Dossey Latham, Turnersville, Texas

Ida Isenblitter Vaughan, St. Augustine, Texas

We've got an example from every Southern state including

this variation found in Missouri

Doddie James Winston, Danville, Kentucky

Except for Maryland, Tennessee & West Virginia. None from Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania or New York so Cuesta was right about the Southern origins. You can't call Arkansas and Oklahoma Southern coastal regions as Cuesta suggested but it would seem it's not so much an upland South pattern but a design popular along the Atlantic & Gulf Coasts and into Texas, Arkansas & Oklahoma.

None of the quilts is actually date-inscribed but most are attributed to 1880 to 1925, during a Southern revival of interest in applique. 

The only published source is this one from Comfort magazine in 1922, a block mailed in by Mrs. M.F. Williams of Texas. Her arcs are upside down, but that may be the only way she could fit them into the block. She called it Chestnut Burr...

The nut covering looks just like it.

Comfort was published in Maine but had a wide Southern audience. Virginia B noted, "It was the first publication in America to have over one million subscribers (in 1894) so it had a wide audience which included the South." Wilene Smith wrote an Uncoverings paper on the "cheap story papers published in Augusta, Maine" said, "They left by the box car load every month." It was so inexpensive (almost a free advertising medium) that people who couldn't afford other periodicals subscribed.

Mrs. Williams's pattern probably did not inspire many readers to make a copy, but we can see that she was interested in the pattern as late as 1922, when several of the quilts above were probably made.

Her block also shows us how it was constructed. While we might make a template with serrated edges she looks to have done hers in simpler dog-tooth style. Some stitchers were more adept at turning those slashes under to make curved arcs. Mrs. Williams slashed and stitched with abandon.

Recent auction described as a "A Southern-Looking Pattern."

This used to be in Cindy Rennell's inventory---Oklahoma.

We didn't come up with any examples from Northern states.

Pineapple attributed to New York via the Rhode Island project

But, like several other patterns we've looked at, the design did not begin as exclusively Southern.

The four-way design repeat goes back to the early red & green appliques of the 1840s. Older examples do not have that extra arc. 

No information, probably 1850-1880. Border does NOT look Southern.

Ditto below.

Found in the Iowa project, made by Mrs. H.C. McIlravy, Illinois, 1850-1875

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=18-36-808

Album possibly Maryland, Julie Silber's inventory

You could look at it as a combination of fruit and Reel

with Reel designs going back to the earliest days of applique.

M. Rapp 1836, Skinner Auction

Gulf Coast 

It would seem the arcs (and perhaps all those serrated edges) were combined with the traditional pineapple about 1880 and became a Southern regionalism.

Paulding County, Georgia

The quilts are often made in the unstable solid colors so typical of Southern quilts

from 1880 to 1930.

When did the pattern first appear?

Here's a hard-to-date example.

The blocks fit the 1880-1930 clues.

But the chintz strip---looks like a Portuguese-style stripe

popular in the 1830s and '40s...

in South Carolina.

Moar are typical of style about 1900

and a little later.

The pattern seems a great example of the Southern creativity apparent

in applique 1880-1930. Begin with a basic pattern---make it your own.

The stars in this one are also probably slashed and turned under

dogtooth style.