The International Quilt Study Center - Museum Accessions - Robert and Ardis James donate quilts - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, August, 2002 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

The International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a pair of guardian angels in the collectors Robert and Ardis James. Not only did they donate more than 900 quilts and an endowment to establish the center, but they have since donated some 250 additional examples, including, recently, the Sara Miller collection of Amish crib quilts, along with funds for acquiring other quilts and for establishing a professorship at the university as a part of its graduate program in textile history. Among their most extraordinary donations is the so-called Reconciliation quilt shown above. It was made by Lucinda Ward Honstain of Brooklyn, New York, in 1867, soon after the end of the Civil War, and its iconography reflects her hopes that a stronger nation would evolve from that conflict.

Born in Ossining, New York, Lucinda Ward moved to lower Manhattan with her parents when she was about five years old and later to Brooklyn with her husband and daughter. Her father, Thomas, was in the dry-goods business from 1826 until 1848 with a man named Burroughs, an affiliation noted in the quilt by a block containing a horse-drawn wagon bearing the cross-stitched inscription "W. B. Dry Goods." Other blocks contain additional motifs of domestic, commercial, and political life in the United States in the years surrounding the Civil War, including one showing Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, being released from Fort Monroe, Virginia, and another showing an African American proclaiming "Master I am free." American flags abound.

The quilt descended in Honstain's family until 1991, and the Jameses acquired it several years later. In researching the quilt for the International Quilt Study Center, Melissa Jurgena, a graduate student in the university's textile history program, discovered another example made by Lucinda Honstain still in family bands. Fortuitously, it, too, has been donated to the Quilt Study Center.