Making a Living Making Quilts: A Historical Perspective

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Colonial Confusion: The Nuttings

Quilt attributed to Johanna Christiana Miller (1762-1826)
Savannah, Georgia,  88" x 92"

Hannah Miller's Tree of Life from the Georgia Quilts Book

We can imagine Hannah in her twenties perhaps, stitching
this chintz quilt in Savannah during the American Revolution.

In fact, I can almost see her stitching all those frugal pieces of
chintz together in the standard interpretation of early chintz quilts.



Working by candlelight, creating beauty from scraps.

With a a toile table cover and a colonial braided oval rug on the floor.

A Patchwork Siesta, Wallace Nutting Print

Images come from Wallace Nutting's staged photographs of an imagined colonial past, which were extremely influential in American mythmaking.


DON'T FALL FOR IT. IT'S A SCAM.

There were no braided rugs in Colonial or Revolutionary America. A search through museums with an early American focus like Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village brings up not one 18th-century braided rug. In The Braided Rug Book: Creating Your Own American Folk Art by Norma M. Sturges, & Elizabeth J. Sturges tell us "The earliest braided rugs date from the 1820s in New England."

Wallace Nutting and wife would not have wanted to read that.

Wallace Nutting: "After careful inquiry the author is unable to find any authority to inform
us when braided and drawn-in rugs were first made....We shall probably
never know how early braid was worked into rugs."

Translation: "I want braided rugs to date very early; that's my
story and I'm sticking to it."

Nutting Photo: The Quilting Party, 1920

The facts about braided rugs are surprising because they are such a staple of Early American decorating, considered the perfect floor covering for one's Colonial Revival decorating scheme a hundred years ago. 

1924 decorating suggestions show the trickle-down effect of 
Nutting prints

Making a Rag Rug, Nutting Photograph

She is holding a braided rug but Nutting rugs of this type were often called hooked rugs. Today (when we are fussier about accuracy in terms such as colonial and pilgrim) a "hooked rug" is not braided but looped on a canvas.

The New Cape Bonnet
The rug by the door looks like what we'd call a hooked rug.

Advertising card for Wallace Nutting Studio in Framingham, Massachusetts
where one could buy "Hooked rugs...original patterns," possibly the braided rugs in the photos.

The Rug Maker
But we are not here to nitpick about inaccurate histories
of braided rugs, as much fun as that may be.

Nostalgic photograph from Carlie Sexton  pattern catalog

The important point is how influential the Nutting images were on our historical idea of women's work. The Wallace Nutting Studios were not the only people to do set-up photographs but they were certainly the most successful.

The Joseph Webb House, Wethersfield, Connecticut

In the early 20th century Wallace Nutting began photographing staged scenes of models posing in Colonial houses. He bought several buildings including the Webb House, built in 1752 and used by George Washington as headquarters during the Revolution, which made it quite important to the antiquarians at the time. Preservation practice changes and this is what the house looks like today. Nutting opened the Webb House to the public in 1916 for a 25-cent fee but World War I put an end to tourism.

Huge semi-historic murals were painted on the walls under
Nutting supervision. This tea party is staged in what he called The 
Yorktown Room in the Webb House.

Sewing basket atop a complex braided rug.

Mariet Griswold Caswell Nutting  (1853-1944) in the 1930s

Nutting's wife Mariet was the art director for the interior photos, placing the models and props, possibly supervising the making or purchasing of  period clothing and period textiles. The rugs were not antiques, but pieces she designed, some quite elaborate.

Wallace Nutting also opened a furniture factory in an old woolen mill in Saugus, Massachusetts, producing reproduction designs....

with craftsmen who did such a good job that is easy to be fooled by the later period pieces.

Branded label after 1924

"Furniture of the Pilgrim Century"
Colonial/Pilgrim: a mish-mash of periods.


Mid-19th century quilt on a early 18th-century bed.



The Nutting combination of inexpensive photographic prints, expensive period furniture and the craze for braided rugs seems a brilliant business model, described by Thomas Andrew Denenberg as "an endlessly self-referential business empire that catered to the culturally conservative needs of middle-class America....a soothing idealized American history."

It's estimated that 200 people worked at the Framingham studios producing the lucrative photographs. Printers, framers, colorists, salesmen turned out hundreds of thousands of them, available in classy department stores and five & dimes across the country. Nutting enterprises also employed the furniture makers and somewhere the rug makers.

"more...than you ever dreamed could be seen in Omaha"
including "Wallace Nutting Colored Platinums"


Most of the hand-colored photographs printed on platinum paper
were landscapes but there were dozens of different interior set-up shots sold by the thousands.

Mother with Cradle detail
Models created idealized views of women's roles:
mothering, sewing, cooking, primping and visiting.

Wallace Nutting (1861-1941)

The dapper Nutting had been a Congregationalist minister in his youth
until he found the job too stressful. After a breakdown he took up photography.

Dedication of Furniture of the Pilgrim Century
Design = Character?

Mending the Quilt

In a 1989 article in Old House Journal Jeff Wilkinson summarized the problems:
"It is in his role as Pilgrim evangelist that he has attracted harshest criticism....He was responsible for much of America's perceptions of [colonial] times. Though the scenes appear authentic, they are very much Nutting's personal impressions. He was closer to the archaeologist who arranges things as he digs them up to fit in with his idea of how he wants the thing to  look."

Historic New England owns many of the original photos

Another important point is that Wallace gets all the credit (or blame) despite his wife's role in a partnership.

Mariet's role from Thomas Andrew Dennenberg's
Wallace Nutting and the Invention of America

 As we have seen in this blog over the past months, that was the convention of the times. Mariet Nutting wanted no publicity and no credit. The script: "an old fashioned minister's wife...in a time of social change."  

"Counterpane owned by Mrs. Wallace Nutting"
from Furniture of the Pilgrim Century

She took a more active role after Nutting's death during World War II when she was near 90. They never had children and when she died in 1944 she willed most of her estate to Berea College in Kentucky.  Berea had been producing furniture and may have also done her rugs over the years. The inheritance included the rights to the Wallace Nutting name.

1953 Drexel ad

Berea sold the name, furniture factory artifacts, patterns and tools to Drexel Furniture Company.

The Goose Chase 1915
Lone Star quilt on the bed

Props reappear, possibly in photos taken the same day.

Two versions of women quilting. This one "The Quilting Party"

You and I know there was no photography in Colonial or Revolutionary days.
yet somehow we retain an inaccurate image highly influenced by these pictures.

This one "The Quilting"



The Goose Chase

Indelible images.

Thursday, September 12, 2019

Myrtle Dunn---Scissors-Cut Quilt Kits


The book by the California project, Ho for California! includes this hexagon medallion by Myrtle Grace Hibbard Dunn, attributed to the years 1930-1935.

79" x 85"
Made in Stockton, California
The quilt won Myrtle a ribbon at a depression-era state fair although
she could not afford a ticket to see the display


Myrtle's story of how she came to make this quilt during the Great Depression adds to our information about women who supported their families by making quilts.

About 1933, during the depths of the economic downturn, Myrtle and Phil Dunn heard about a giveway of factory cutaways from a San Francisco garment maker. They drove a pick-up from Stockton and took home a ton of fabric---a literal ton she recalled--- a stash of dress scraps that required several trips.


Honeycomb Quilt by Elizabeth Van Horne Clarkson (1771–1852)


Myrtle's inspiration was this 19th-century quilt in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
pictured in Ruth Finley's 1929 book Old Patchwork Quilts.

Myrtle Hibbard Dunn & Phil S. Dunn
from Ho for California!
She was about 30 during the depression; he about ten years older.
They had a daughter and a son.

Myrtle and her husband, an out-of-work building contractor, cut the fabric and cardboard patterns and packaged them as kits. They offered pre-cut pieces ---cut four at a time with a scissors---or just the fabric scraps with a pattern. Her patterns included Wedding Rings, Log Cabins, some applique and probably hexagons as in her prize-winning quilt above.

She must have sold finished quilts too as the medallion was described as the only quilt she had left to show the documentors in 1983. She kept this one at her children's' urging.

 1940 census in Stockton
Myrtle was a California native, descended from Pennsylvanians.

Her quilt business seems to have been advertised by word of mouth. I can't find any ads or mentions of a pattern business in Stockton, so her interview with the California project is the only record of a clever and industrious woman's quilt enterprise.

Bertha Stenge's version from the Illinois State Museum

See a post about other quilters inspired to make the hexagon medallion:
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2016/07/tessellations-hexagons-elizabeth.html