Mud-Dyed Fabric in Southern Quilts

The Texas book Lone Stars: A Legacy of Texas Quilts shows this Whig's Defeat attributed to Gail C. (Gatsey) Worden of Georgia who moved to Grayson County, Texas about 1855. The family thought it might have been made in Georgia before that date but style, pattern and fabrics all indicate it's a Texas quilt made after 1880. They also believed the "unusual solid rosy beige fabric" to have been dyed with Georgia's famous red mud.

QuiltIndex link: http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4F-88-CB

Benita Creek runs through Nacogdoches, Texas

Gatsey from Georgia must have felt right at home in the landscape.

The discussion for this quilt in the book on page 42 is perhaps the best print summary of mud-dyeing in Southern quilts. They quote an interview with a woman in Nacogdoches who recalled "as a little girl going to a river near the old city to the 'community dye-hole' and dyeing fabrics there. The method most frequently used was to bury fabric in the moist red mud until it was the desired shade. According to her, the longer the fabric was left, the redder it got, and all shades of red could be obtained...."

Zilpah Frisbie of Marion, McDowell County, North Carolina told an interviewer gathering North Carolina folk practices for the Frank C. Brown Collection in the 1912-1943 years that "pure red clay and water" made a fast color.

(Zilpah was an editor at the Marion newspaper in the 1920s---she must

have known everything that went on in McDowell County.)

In a 1996 book Carolina Piedmont Country John M. Coggeshall records mud dying of  "extra white cloth that mills sometimes distributed to village residents." A few people in the Facebook group had heard similar stories, particularly in regard to quilt linings or backings, inexpensive fabric or recycled flour or fertilizer sacks that were colored with the local dirt.

For her book Tennessee Delta Quiltmaking, Teri Klassen interviewed Jean Bolding (1932-) of southwest Tennessee who described:

"how her mother used the red clay of North Mississippi to dye fertilizer sacks for quilt backings: 'She would dig a hole outside the house on the hillside. She would pour the water in... She would take the fertilizer sacks... and she'd put it in this red clay, kept water on it, and I presumed it stayed about a week. And she'd turn it every day or two, make sure the color was going to be even all through the material..., and the hole was about like this, about the size of a washtub, and she kept adding water to it to make sure that it'd stay moist all the time.' " Page 45.

Georgia soil, red dirt

Many readers had stories of accidental dyeing with the local red dirt on kid's baseball pants, socks and t-shirts. Anyone who has lived in a region with iron-high soil from Australia to Argentina to Oklahoma has had experience with the permanence of the stain.

Marybeth Thomas Tawfik: "I know personally that the Georgia clay does NOT wash out, at least not on things you weren't meaning to dye."

Claire Bear at Uluru (Ayre's Rock) in Australia

Suzanne Louth "grew up in North Texas, living on a farm between Dallas and Ft.Worth. Dallas has black, fertile soil, Ft.W. had red dirt...we lived closer to Ft.W!!! I am still no lover of 'ochre' in anything! We were loosely known as 'rednecks' and I also, despise that term to this day. (I got to bathe in red water, wear clothes washed in red water, and swim at a lake, full of red water.)"

Trish Gau from Argentina: "It is similar to our Misiones, province in the NE of Argentina. Very red soil. Very fertile." 

The red dirt in the U.S. tends not to be fertile (see Joy's comment questioning this), one reason why it is associated with poor farmers---red necks rather than blue bloods.

The Michigan project saw this mid-20th century quilt 

with a reported mud-dyed backing (no photos though of

the back of the quilt.)

Mud with the right combination of chemicals can indeed color fabric. African textile dyers who know the chemistry have printed mud-dyed cloth for generations. 

http://www.ricemuseum.org/african-mudcloth/

Women in Mali stencil Bògòlanfini (Mud Cloth), 

combining a vegetable dye with a mineral dye (leaves & mud)

 in a resist dyeing process.

 Not at all what we are talking about here.

South Koreans mud-dye cotton in a technique similar to U.S. Southerners. Barb Eikmeier spent her time there collecting lovely examples of traditional cloth. She was told these were mud dyed. The shades of pinkish-orange and a reddish-brown seem typical of what we would see in the U.S.  If you come across a quilt backing in these characteristic shades---it's a possibility.

Questions raised:

How colorfast is this fabric? Coloring is easy---color fastness is not. Perhaps the iron in the soil not only colors the fabric but mordants it too. My white socks colored while camping in Oklahoma did not have red stains, they had nondescript brown stains. Just looked like dirt (which of course it was.)

Which brings up the point that Kathy Moore made:

"The red in the soil...comes from ferrous oxide. That's iron in layman's terms. We know how caustic iron is to textile fibers. Shouldn't we see more deterioration in this very old fabric?"

Do we have to worry about the reds in the characteristic shade is patchwork quilts? In Clues in the Calico, written about 40 years ago, I say: "Plain terra cotta cottons in quilts from South Carolina to the Southwest may have been mud dyed." Scratch that out in your copy. After looking at a lot more quilts since then I don't think we see mud-dyed cottons in the patchwork but as we have learned there are memories and accounts of mud-dyed backings.

Back to Gatsey Worden's Texas quilt:

Note that red spot in the center orange. I bet those
shapes were red when she pieced it but it's
faded just the way Congo red synthetic dyes after 1880 did.
We can imagine why the family believed the diamonds were mud-dyed.

I'd guess patchwork pieces described as dyed with red clay are often variations of that very unstable Congo Red.
See our post on Congo Red and how it fades here: https://quilthistorysouth.blogspot.com/2020/04/congo-red-april-fools.html

How-to's on mud dyeing:

https://plymagazine.com/2019/12/dyeing-cloth-with-mud/?

fbclid=IwAR3yQD6Im5qgEt2pDXpkggd2kxUYZOSlEAGWc5tINvfJg4C5D7RUnAUT54g
.
https://www.doctordirt.org/teachingresources/dirtshirts