Perfecting the Past: Colonial Revival Quilts

As the United States evolved into a modern, industrialized, and urbanized society in the late 1800s, Americans gazed with nostalgia toward the pre-industrial colonial era. For many Americans, the colonial era was the nation’s Golden Age, a period that experienced the fullest flowering of distinctive American culture and virtues. “Colonial” was defined loosely, encompassing anything pre-Victorian (pre-1840). Americans romanticized the past, imagining it held a simpler way of life and a more perfect society.

The Colonial Revival movement peaked during the years between 1880 and 1940. From white-columned porches to quilt patterns named after Martha Washington, Americans found the past endlessly inspirational for shaping their domestic interiors, architecture, and tastes.

Not surprisingly, the Colonial Revival sparked renewed interest in making “old-tyme” quilts. Quiltmaking allowed Americans to participate in a needle art supposedly practiced by their ancestors and, thus, to re-enact history itself.

The quilts in Perfecting the Past have been organized into five groups to show their diverse inspirations from the past. They demonstrate how designers, magazine publishers, and quiltmakers perfected the past by adapting it to reflect their modern sensibilities and identification with American values. The results are uniquely American-styled Colonial Revival quilts

Nineteenth-Century Quilt Patterns

Quiltmakers and designers turned to old patterns for inspiration. However, quiltmakers’ use of colors, fabrics, and interpretation of historical designs varied according to individual tastes.

The quilts in this group show the variety of nineteenth-century appliquéd and pieced patterns from which quiltmakers drew inspiration. The Wreath of Roses quilt is updated with solid twentieth-century colors and stylized floral appliqué. The Star of Bethlehem quilt, a bold design favored by several generations of earlier quiltmakers, uses green and orange tints popular in the 1930s. The Feathered Star quilt, made at
the turn of the twentieth century, does not differ markedly from early nineteenth-century design, but shows quilting and piecing skills admired in earlier quilts by Colonial Revival tastemakers.

Colonial History

Many decorative items, including quilts, made during the Colonial Revival era were loosely inspired by historical objects. At times, designers assigned names that evoked American history to entirely contemporary designs. This demonstrates how far people stretched the concept of “colonial” to serve their purposes.

The Colonial Belle quilt depicts women dressed more similarly to 1830s French fashion than to fashions worn by American women before the Revolution. The Covered Wagon States quilt recalls settlement and colonization of the Northern Great Plains by Euro-Americans, a mass continental migration pattern that continued more than 100 years after the end of the American Colonial era.

Needlework Traditions

Many needlework forms, such as embroidery, needlepoint, and crewelwork, surged in popularity during the Colonial Revival. These old needlework designs inspired quiltmakers.

The Diamond Field quilt resembles hexagon-mosaic quilts from 100 years earlier, in which fabric patches folded over paper templates were whip-stitched together to create precisely interlocking mosaic fields. Colonial Revival quiltmakers favored hexagon designs, but joined patches more quickly with running stitches. The French Wreath was adapted from needlepoint designs. The Embroidered quilt echoes early crewel motifs in updated twentieth-century colors. The Cottage Garden has its roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chintz appliqué traditions.

Four-Block Quilts

Four-block quilts, a traditional style popular in quiltmaking between 1850 and 1900, often featured floral motifs, stars, or eagles. Quiltmakers repeated a single motif in each of the four distinct blocks to make the quilt surface. Most nineteenth-century quiltmakers used the popular red-and-green color scheme on a white background.

Both quilts in this group use the tra- ditional layout of the four-block quilt, but the colors and design have been updated to meet modern trends. The English Rose variation incorporates a lighter green shade, yellow, and or- ange sateen fabrics, a scalloped border, and fanciful flowers and vines to show the maker’s modern and unique tastes. The Cherry Tree quilt, a modern quilt kit based on an old design, is an example of how pro- fessional designers and pattern com- panies standardized shapes.

Woven Coverlets

American households commonly included woven coverlets during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because weaving was a time-consuming and complicated process, individuals often employed professional weavers to produce these coverlets. Two-color schemes, most often blue and white, made possible a wide variety of woven geometric patterns. The geometric designs weavers created were easily adapted to pieced quilt designs. Burgoyne Surrounded and Double Nine Patch resemble patterns found in overshot or double-weave coverlets.

Works in the Exhibition

French Wreath
Maker unknown
Possibly made in Michigan, circa 1932
Hand pieced, hand quilted
Ardis and Robert James Collection, IQM 1997.007.0097

Women’s periodicals influenced the popularity of “colonial” styling for home decor in part through the needlework projects they offered. For example, Good Housekeeping magazine readers were primarily urban, affluent women with enough money and time to do decorative needlework. Anne Orr, the magazine’s needlework editor for more than 20 years initially designed traditional needlework patterns for crafts such as crochet and embroidery. As quilting’s popularity rose in the 1920s, she began to create designs for quilts.

Orr is best known for a series of innovative pieced quilts based on needlepoint designs. The French Wreath quilt pattern, published in 1932, is one design from the series. Although Orr’s quilt designs drew upon needlework of the nineteenth century, she typically used a contemporary palette of rose, blue, and green tones.

Wreath of Roses
Maker unknown
Possibly made in Coshocton County, Ohio, 1935-1945
Hand appliquéd, machine pieced, hand quilted Ardis and Robert James Collection, IQM 1997.007.0112

In the early twentieth century, patterns and kits featuring a wreath of roses motif appeared under a number of names including “Rose,” “Rose Wreath,” and “Dahlia Wreath.” A 1930s pattern catalog offered a project called “Kentucky Rose.” It claimed the pattern originated during the Revolutionary War. More likely, the pattern had early nineteenth-century origins. Here, Floral wreaths were modernized with a color palette different than the typical nineteenth-century red-and-green color scheme. The quilt may have been a kit; offering a pre-packaged pattern with color coordinated fabrics was an additional modern technique used to create a “colonial” look.

Feathered Star
Mary Caroline Robinson Olds
Dekalb County, Indiana, c. 1895
Hand pieced, hand quilted
Ardis and Robert James Collection, IQM 1997.007.0172

A new taste in decorating developed at the turn of the twentieth century, which called for interiors that were light, clean, and spacious—the direct opposite of dark and cluttered Victorian decor. The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1894 declared, “a revival of patchwork quilts is at hand,” and advised women to make quilts (if they did not have quilts their mothers or grandmothers made) to use for this new “colonial” style.

Research revealed that Mary Caroline Olds most likely created her Feathered Star quilt for her youngest son Arthur’s marriage in 1895. The blue-and-white color scheme is reminiscent of the woven coverlets often found in early nineteenth-century homes.

Star of Bethlehem
Christine Heide Sorensen, c. 1928-1930 Rockville, Nebraska
Machine pieced, hand quilted
Gift of Gladys Sorensen, IQM 1998.005.0001

Christine Heide Sorensen bought her vibrant yellow, orange, green, and print fabrics from the J.C. Penney store in Grand Island, Nebraska. The Ladies Aid Society at the local church helped her with the quilting on a frame set up in her home. Sorensen considered this quilt a showpiece and used it as a bedspread in her guest room.

The Lone Star, or Star of Bethlehem, pattern was a favorite design of Colonial Revival quiltmakers. An October 1894 article in the Ladies’ Home Journal featured a similar star pattern and advised, “I would not recommend any one to put nine stars on one quilt, but one star enlarged according to taste and either bordered or not as preferred, would make a pretty centerpiece.” The pattern remained popular throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

English Rose variation
Olive Emily McClure Cook
Anna, Illinois, dated 1939
Machine pieced, embroidered, hand quilted Ardis and Robert James Collection, IQM 1997.007.0669

Olive Emily McClure Cook was an accomplished seamstress who enjoyed knitting, embroidery, quilting, and sewing throughout her life. Like many other Americans during the Colonial Revival, she researched her ancestry to gain membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Cook created this modern interpretation of a traditional mid- nineteenth-century, four-block style quilt in 1939. She was widowed, living with her daughter, and in her late seventies at the time. Olive incorporated modern elements of design, including a scalloped border and bright sateen fabrics in shades of red, pink, yellow, and green. This quilt shows how Colonial Revival quiltmakers infused traditional elements of the past with modern tastes.

Double Nine Patch
Maker Unknown
Made in United States, 1890-1910
Hand pieced, hand quilted
Jonathan Holstein Collection, IQM 2003.003.0384E

The author of Sixteen Blue-Ribbon Quilts told her readers in the mid-1930s, “If you are planning an old-fashioned bedroom, the ‘coverlet’ pattern [quilt] will give that quaint touch that old- fashioned furniture needs.”

Double Nine Patch, which is sometimes called Single Irish Chain, illustrates the simple, clean look quiltmakers favored at the end of the nineteenth century. This pattern reminded quilters of the geometric designs found in woven coverlets. Colonial Revival quiltmakers admired the simple nature of the pattern—and also the visual impact it had in a two-color format.

Colonial Belle
Maker unknown
Possibly made in York County, Pennsylvania, 1935-1945
Hand appliquéd, hand quilted
Ardis and Robert James Collection, IQM 2006.043.0207

This quilt was created from a kit that included stamped fabrics for appliqué and embroidered details. The W. L. M. Clark Company designed the kit and marketed it under the name Grandmother Clark. Some commercial quilt designers and pattern companies adopted old-fashioned pseudonyms to give their customers the illusion they were purchasing from an authentic source for historical patterns.

Pattern designers also selected names for their designs to evoke the colonial era, even if the design was inspired by something more recent. Although this quilt is titled Colonial Belle, the ladies’ gowns and hats approximate styles worn during the 1830s. The fabrics supplied with the kit reflect the predominantly pastel palette of the 1930s.

Variations of the Colonial Lady were among the more popular designs of the 1930s, including the extremely popular Sunbonnet Sue design.

Rose Appliqué
Maker Unknown
Made in United States, 1890-1910
Hand appliquéd, hand quilted
Roger and Mary Ghormley Collection, IQM 2008.034.0280

The Rose Appliqué quilt may have its origins in a block from an uncompleted four-block-style quilt project. The khaki-colored fabric in this quilt likely was green when the quilt was made. Some synthetic green and red dyes from the 1890s were unreliable, fading quickly to beige or khaki. The faded fabrics assist in estimating these quilts’ age.

Covered Wagon States
Maker Unknown
Made in United States, 1940-1950 Embroidered, machine pieced, hand quilted Gift of Lindsey Miller-Lerman, IQM 2008.039.0001

Covered Wagon States is a “perfected” past because it presents interesting characters in Great Plains history, but omits the violence and hardships of the covered wagon years.
Americans from the Eastern states, former slaves, and recent European immigrants took advantage of free federal land offered under the Homestead Act of 1862. After the Civil War, settlement in the Great Plains expanded rapidly.

In opposition, Native American tribes struggled to maintain their tribal lands. The mixing of people on the Great Plains was, at times, violent, and names such as Sitting Bull, George Armstrong Custer, John Brown, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill Cody symbolized the history and legends of the region.

Covered Wagon States appeared as a syndicated pattern series in the Omaha World-Herald during 1939 and 1940 and in other newspapers around the country. The quilt blocks depict a western rather than colonial American past and offered the people from the heartland a regional variation of Colonial Revival design.

Cottage Garden
Maker unknown
Possibly made in Midwestern United States, 1930-1950
Hand appliquéd, hand quilted
Ardis and Robert James Collection, IQM 2009.039.0033

In contrast to simplified commercial quilt designs and pre-cut quilt kits, Cottage Garden represents careful reproduction of an old quilt design and demonstrates technical mastery with the needle. During the pre-industrial past, sewing was an essential skill for a homemaker. Some women took pride in their mastery of a broad range of needle skills, including intricate appliqué and fine hand quilting.

A number of American women made challenging floral medallion quilts, similar to Cottage Garden, during the 1930s and 1940s. These quilts were inspired by a nineteenth-century quilt made in rich reds, blues, and pink by Arsinoe Kelsey Bowen in 1857. Bowen’s quilt design grew from the heritage of chintz appliqué bedcoverings and their antecedents—printed and painted Indian palampores. The unknown maker of Cottage Garden preferred the subtler pastel tints of the 1930s and 1940s for her modern masterpiece.

Embroidered quilt
Emily Grace Doane Meitzke
Made in Loraine, Ohio, circa 1933-34
Embroidered, hand pieced, hand quilted Gift of Jane Ellen Meitzke MacDuff, IQM 2010.044.0002

Emily Grace Doane hand-embroidered, pieced, and quilted this quilt in her mid-twenties, a few years before her marriage in 1937 to Robert H. Meitzke. She earned a mathematics degree in about 1930 from Oberlin College, then taught at the Loraine, Ohio, High School until her marriage. She returned to teaching junior high school after her daughters entered high school.
The embroidered floral designs in this quilt echo eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crewelwork on bed-hangings and high-style women’s gowns. The consistent style of the forty-two floral designs probably indicates they were offered as a set of patterns or a pre- stamped kit.

Cherry Tree
Maker Unknown
Probably made in the United States, 1940-1950 Hand appliqué, machine pieced, hand quilted Gift of Pat Cox, IQM 2012.013.0041

A favorite American myth is that George Washington chopped down his father’s cherry tree, and then demonstrated his honest character by confessing the deed. When confronted, he said, “I cannot tell a lie.” Although unproven, the story and the values it represents endure in the American imagination through images of young Washington, hatchet in hand, beside the cherry tree.

The Cherry Tree quilt echoes the Washington myth through an updated and simplified design inspired by a circa 1850 four- block quilt in the collection of the Chicago Art Institute. The design became commercialized when Ladies’ Home Journal Pattern Catalog issued a Cherry Tree quilt pattern in 1924, and Good Housekeeping followed with this simplified kit in 1940.

Burgoyne Surrounded
Maker Unknown
Possibly made in West Virginia, 1935-1945
Machine pieced, hand quilted
Ardis and Robert James Collection, 1997.007.0177

Twentieth-century advertisers often chose names for quilt patterns to give them colonial-sounding origins. Burgoyne Surrounded commemorates British General John Burgoyne’s surrender to the large American force on October 17, 1777, after the Battle of Saratoga, New York. This decisive victory was a turning point of the American Revolution. The geometric design in each quilt block represents the battle in which American forces surrounded Burgoyne’s troops on the heights of Saratoga. The red, yellow, and blue-gray fabrics, typical of the late 1930s and 1940s, add to the visual appeal and vibrancy of the pattern.

The Burgoyne Surrounded design interprets historic weaving patterns found in coverlets woven during the early 1800s. Like quilts, these coverlets were highly desirable for furnishing a bedroom in the Colonial Revival style. For some Americans, antique-looking textiles served as symbols of their identification with American values and as antidotes to the stresses of modern-day life.

Works in the Exhibition

Featured Media

Gallery Photos

This exhibition was made possible through funding from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment. The Nebraska Arts Council, a state agency, has supported this exhibition through its matching grants program funded by the Nebraska Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment. Visit www.artscouncil.nebraska.gov for more information.

Past

Event Date

Friday, December 7, 2012 to Sunday, September 1, 2013