One trouble with fact checking quilt stories is disappointment at finding that all those lovely memories are often just myth, wishful family recall and/or the universal love of an inspiring narrative. The example we are following here, a pair of Missouri quilts, combines a spectacular-looking quilt or two and tales of slavery, historic houses and the Civil War with a few Jayhawkers thrown in for extra drama.
See two previous posts here:
https://quilthistorysouth.blogspot.com/2020/11/tennessee-to-missouri-1-regional-style.html
https://quilthistorysouth.blogspot.com/2020/11/tennessee-to-missouri-2-maria-rodgers.html
The Feathered Star quilt, one of a pair of unusual fringed, pieced quilts with stuffed-work quilting, has descended in the family and in the historic house of slave-owners who emigrated to Missouri in the early 1840s.
The Gillenwaters/Browns came to Cass County from Rhea County, Tennessee with about 30 enslaved people. Descendants passed on the history that one was Maria Jane Rodgers who'd have been about 11 years old when she arrived in Missouri. She married Fred Martin of the farm and left Missouri for the free state of Kansas without him in 1863 when she was about 32.
Did Maria make this quilt between 1845 when she might have been old enough and 1862 when she left Cass County for Lawrence? We can look at opportunity and ability.
1) Opportunity. Did Maria sew?
The quilts are obviously the work of a talented seamstress. The piece-work designs are not for beginners; the stuffed work quilting, which would have taken months of hand work, is quite impressive. The fringed edge might have been hand knotted (People sat around in the evenings and knotted fringes) or purchased.
Each step in this quilt was labor-intensive and well-executed.
We can only glimpse Maria's life in Missouri and in Kansas.The 1850 slave schedule for the Gillenwaters/Browns lists 20 people, 6 of them female, ages 42, 35, 12 (possibly Maria actually about 18), 11, 6, and 5. The adult and adolescent women might be field hands but more likely were employed as house servants in typical occupations such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and child care. Along with family history that Maria made the star quilt we also hear she was the caretaker for the Brown family's children.
Slave owner Mary Roddye Gillenwaters Brown (1819-1890) brought 3 children from Tennessee (an infant, a 5 year-old and a 3-year old) in 1842.
Maria as a young adolescent would typically be the right age to act as nanny to children not much younger than herself. Mary went on to have 7 children, the youngest born in 1853.
Maria's job supervising 6 boys and a girl would have left her little time for sewing fancywork, although one could imagine that she might have been put to work at a quilting frame after the children were in bed.
Maria had eight children of her own, although hers are not so well documented. The 1865 Kansas census lists three: Elvira and Charles born in the 1850s and Benjamin born about 1861.
2) Ability. Did Maria sew well enough to make this elegant quilt?
Before the sewing machine and the advent of factory-made clothing, women spent a good deal of their time hand sewing in three categories:
1) The everyday necessity of plain sewing: making and repairing clothing and household linens.
2) Skilled work such as fitting and stitching fashionable clothing, doing upholstery and interior goods.
3) Fancywork, the enjoyable activities at which women of a certain class passed their free time
In the hierarchy of women's work those trained in skilled sewing, Black or white, were far more able to earn a living than those who could only do plain sewing or those who had no sewing expertise. The only evidence we have of Maria's actual sewing skills is rather oblique. After her life as a slave she lived in Lawrence for over 40 years. She did not prosper. As Kansas historian Katie Armitage writes in her study of African-American residents in Lawrence: "Single black women were among the poorest in the community."
Maria, listed as a "pauper" in the 1865 census, was certainly among the poorest of the 2,000 Lawrencians of African-American descent. She was one of 27 Black women who worked at "Washing & Ironing" that year, and apparently laundry work was her long time employment. In the hierarchy of women's work Washing & Ironing was near the bottom. The work was hard; the pay was bad. Had she any other talents, skills or assets she would likely have used them to rise above paupership.
Really fascinating detective work!!!!
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