The assimilation of German folk designs on Maryland quilts

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1996 by Nancy Gibson Tuckhorn

Most of the Germans who immigrated to America following the Thirty Years' War, the Palatine war of succession, and Louis XIV's final devastation of the Palatinate in 1689 settled first in Pennsylvania. Although these early immigrants often came only with such essentials as clothing, guns, and tools, these objects were often decorated, providing Pennsylvania craftsmen of all nationalities with models from which to work, and thus German designs began to be assimilated into the mainstream of Pennsylvania arts and crafts.(3)

Pennsylvania Germans continued their migration into Maryland in the eighteenth century, establishing themselves in Baltimore, Frederick, and Washington Counties,(4) where the soil and landscape were similar to those of southeastern Pennsylvania. Small market towns grew up around local churches,(5) and German customs and traditions were retained along with the German language.(6)

By 1818 the Cumberland Road (later called the National Road), which ultimately stretched from Cumberland, Maryland, to Saint Louis, Missouri, ran through the middle of western Maryland, opening new lands to settlers. Towns sprang up along the road, and as the German population intermingled with the English and Scots-Irish, German traditions and customs "began to crumble. Baptismal sponsorship died out as did the use of the German language in church services and records."(7)

The migration pattern of many Maryland Germans is exemplified by that of Christian Eby (c. 1723-1802), the father of Mary Eby, who made the quilt shown in Plate V. Lured by entrepreneurs promoting settlement in the Colonies, he came to America with his parents during the great wave of German immigration in the 1740s. The Eby family arrived in Philadelphia, and shortly thereafter moved to southeastern Pennsylvania, where they stayed for several decades. Christian married Catherine Wohlfort (c. 1720-c. 1802) and continued working the family's small farm and gristmill, but as land became more populated and expensive he moved on to western Maryland, settling in Frederick County, which had the largest population of Germans in the state.

Mary Eby's quilt is similar to those made in the mid-Atlantic region by Germans and non-Germans alike, showing that she had absorbed the traditions of other cultures besides her own. Flower baskets such as the one in the center of her quilt are found on furniture [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. IV OMITTED], stoneware, textiles, and illuminated manuscripts made in Pennsylvania and Maryland by craftsmen of German, French, and English ancestry.

Catherine Whisner Specht of Frederick County probably stitched the quilt shown in Plate III about 1810, using a combination of German folk motifs and the more widely-disseminated elements of the classical style. The two birds set within the central design and the appliqued open-work basket of flowers surrounded by a saw-toothed border are some of the most recognizable motifs in the German folk tradition [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. X OMITTED]. The whole is surrounded by an appliqued wavy vine in the German style, which is similar to the wavy lines painted on a slip-decorated bowl made by Peter Bell, a potter of German descent living in nearby Hagerstown (Pl. II). However, the birds are cut from an English-style chintz, and the quilt is backed with a fashionable English Gothic architectural print.

One of the oldest German folk designs found on Maryland quilts is the fylfot, or pinwheel motif, which is thought to represent good and evil [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. VIII OMITTED]. It was probably Deborah Wilson of Baltimore who used a variation of the fylfot as the central motif of the appliqued quilt of 1783 shown in Plate VII, and it continued to be seen with some frequency on western Maryland quilts until the Civil War [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. IX OMITTED]. A fylfot is the central motif on the elegant, all-white quilted and stuffed bedcover shown in Plate VI, which was made in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, probably by Elizabeth Schultz Shriver. The daughter of John Schultz (1766-1839), a respected and wealthy Baltimore leather merchant,(8) Elizabeth married Andrew Shriver (1762-1847) of Little Pipe Creek, Maryland, in 1786. The Shrivers spent a brief period in Littlestown, Pennsylvania, and then in 1797 bought property along Big Pipe Creek in what is now Carroll County, near the Pennsylvania borden Shriver built a log house and gristmill, and he and his brother built and operated a tannery and cooper's shop. The Shrivers' property, which was called Union Mills Homestead,(9) became a way station on the Reisterstown turnpike between Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Thus, Elizabeth had direct access to goods coming from Baltimore while living in this largely German community, and the quilt attributed to her illustrates the two major design influences on the decorative arts of western Maryland between 1800 and 1850 - the German epitomized by the central fylfot and the classical represented by the meandering grapevine.