Quaker quilts from the Delaware River Valley, 1760-1890

Magazine Antiques, August, 1999 by Patricia J. Keller

1 "Early Recollections [1889]," p. 1 (collection of the estate of Ann Miller Durnall Hawley).

2 The information in this article was gathered in preparation for the exhibition entitled "Of the best Sort but Plain".' Quaker Quilts from the Delaware Valley 1760-1890, the first major museum show to focus exclusively on quilts made by or belonging to Quaker women, which was held at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in 1997.

3 The Quakers of the Delaware valley drew together their first compilation of "advices" relating to "good Order and Discipline" in 1703. Unless otherwise indicated, citations in this article are to the Book of Discipline disseminated by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Society of Friends.

4 The information about Elizabeth Coates Paschall's quilt is from Patricia A. Chapin's thoughtful and well-researched entry in Philadelphia.' Three Centuries of American Art (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1976), No. 15. This quilt is also discussed in Patricia T. HeWs pathbreaking article on Quaker quilts and quiltmaking, "All in Modesty and Plainness," Quilt Digest, vol. 3 (1985), pp. 24-25.

5 The Academy of Armory, or, A Storehouse of Armory and Blazon (Chester, 1688), part 3, p. 97.

6 I am indebted to Patricia Chapin O'Donnell for bringing this and other advertisements to my attention.

7 For a discussion and graphic representation of typical British quilting layouts, see Janet Rae, Margaret Tucker, and Dinah Travis, Quilt Treasures of Great Britain: The Heritage Search of the Quilters' Guild (Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, 1996), pp. 79-81 and 122-123.

8 According to Averil Colby, in England "most of the surviving eighteenth-century wadded quilting was padded with a thin layer of natural wool" (Quilting [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1971], p. 22).

9 The practice among Pennsylvania Quaker women of recycling quilted petticoats into quilted bedcoverings is discussed in Herr, "All in Modesty and Plainness," p. 27. See also Tandy Hersh, "Quilted Petticoats," in Pieced by Mother: Symposium Papers, ed. Jeannette Lasansky (Oral Traditions Project of the Union County Historical Society, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 1988), p. 10.

10 The British quilt historian Dorothy Osier has noted that center-medallion quilts made in Cumbria and the Isle of Man in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are usually quilted with simple allover designs of square-diamond, clamshell, or wave patterns. Quilts made in Wales, Yorkshire, northeastern, and western England at this time are quilted with strip designs and allover designs that "rarely have any direct relationship to the pattern of the quilt face" (Traditional British Quilts [B. T. Batsford, London, 1987], p. 33). This apparent regional variation may correlate to patterns of Quaker emigration to America.

11 Osier finds that surviving British patchwork reveals two traditions, which she links with social divisions in Britain. Upper- and middle-class women pieced "silks, satins, and velvets as well as cottons" in mosaics of diamonds and hexagons and in block patterns from the second half of the eighteenth century onward. The lower classes and those remote from urban influences practiced a simpler type of patchwork using less expensive cottons to make center medallions and strip-set quilts (Traditional British Quilts, pp. 28-29). The persistence of the English silk-quilt tradition among nineteenth-century American Quakers has been noted by Herr in "All in Modesty and Plainness," pp. 25, 33-34.