Making a Living Making Quilts: A Historical Perspective

Sunday, April 29, 2018

The Boyle Sisters: Professional Quiltmakers


In 1844 a fire swept through a neighborhood in Petersburg,Virginia,
burning the home of James Boyle. The fire hose was too short to save the house 
and outbuildings according to a newspaper account in the Richmond Enquirer.

This sounds like a disaster and if this is the James Boyle who had four seamstress daughters living at home quilt lovers can shudder at what was lost. Quilts? Chintz?

Quilt attributed to the Boyle Sisters of Petersburg #1991.644
Collection of Colonial Williamsburg

The Boyle sisters were professional seamstresses. One of their specialties was chintz appliqued quilts. There must have been many Southern women who made a living stitching chintz quilts but the Boyles are a rare example of professional quiltmakers whose story was handed down with the handwork. The account is in the cataloging data for a pair of quilts at Colonial Williamsburg.

The second of two Boyle Sisters' quilts, #1991.645,
Detail showing an inner border.
"According to family tradition, this quilt was made by the Misses Boyles for D'Arcy and Elizabeth Scrosby Cooke Paul of Petersburg, Virginia. The Boyles were unmarried sisters living on Pine Street who made their living making quilts and sewing.... Family tradition states that D’Arcy commissioned the quilts from two unmarried sisters named Boyle who made their living stitching and selling quilts."
#1991.645 is 116  x 115 inches, a large quilt.
The centerpiece is the popular fruit panel.

#1991.644 is another large quilt of unusual shape,
67 x 107 inches,
and features a different floral panel in the center.

Notice the large bouquet blocks are the same as the
 border bouquets in the other quilt.

The quilts descended in the Paul/Gilman/Roper family until 1991 when Colonial Williamsburg acquired them.


In the years 1830-1845 when the quilts were made Petersburg was a thriving town on the Appomattox River about 20 miles from Richmond.

Petersburg Courthouse
Mid-19th-century

The Paul family who commisioned the quilts was wealthy. A biography of D'Arcy Paul's great-grandson described them:
"old Anglo-Irish ... magnates and civic leaders in Northern Ireland, whose American branch had come to Virginia in the person of his great grandfather, D'Arcy Paul, founder of a bank and of notable charities in Petersburg."
The Boyles, a family of craftspeople, were not wealthy. They left few records but information at Colonial Williamsburg and other internet sites gives us a view. James and Jane Harding Boyle had six children, five girls and a boy, none of whom married. They appeared to live together supported at first by father James who was a candle and soap maker. He died in October, 1845 and is buried in Blandford Cemetery with the rest of the family. 

Burying ground at the Blandford Episcopal Church. No markers
are currently listed for the Boyles but several are listed in the records.

Brother Joseph John Boyle was a carpenter and also must have contributed to the family accounts. Five sisters lived at home: Hannah (about 37 when her father died), Emily (35), Melvina (31), Rosina (27) and Jane (about 22) 

From Colonial Williamsburg:
"Family tradition states that D’Arcy commissioned the quilts from two unmarried sisters named Boyle who made their living stitching and selling quilts."
 Which two sisters?
"Emily, Melvina, Rosina, and Jane were, at least at one point, mantua-makers, or dressmakers. Their oldest sister, Hannah, kept house." 
The quilts themselves give us no clue. Each is inked on the back:

“B. Roper / from her grandmother / E. S. Paul.” 

Bettie Roper (1846-1912) was probably named for her grandmother Elizabeth Cooke Paul (1794–1865) who commissioned the quilts.

Detail of #91.645 showing the beautiful buttonhole stitch that
secures the applique


"No other quilts have been identified as the work of the sisters, but the skill in the design and execution of these quilts strongly suggests that there must be more."


I visited Colonial Williamsburg several years ago and took detail photos of the Boyle quilts. I will be looking for more quilts in their style. The small floral bouquet is a clue, something I might be able to see in photographs.

UPDATE: I found two other quilts with the same floral as in the bouquet, both Philadelphia made and both in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here's one dated 1841: 
The white flowers look like dahlias and in the uncut version it's an arborescent print.
The Boyle Sisters' method of working seems obvious in this pair. They used a standard applique block cut from chintz plus showy imported furniture fabrics like the border on the square quilt.

From #1991.645
The Victoria and Albert Museum has a piece of the same print,

which they attribute to 1824 or 1830.

One could imagine a Boyle business model in which British chintzes were stockpiled and spare time spent appliqueing blocks that could be incorporated into various designs. Customers might choose size, fabrics and perhaps a favorite panel. 

If the story of the quilts' commissioning had not been handed down we would assume from the label that Elizabeth Paul made them.

 “B. Roper / from her grandmother / E. S. Paul.”

How many other women bought quilts from professional seamstresses and left them to their children and grandchildren with similar accurate yet quite confusing labels?

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Clara Staads Tillotson and Aunt Martha/Colonial Patterns

Booklet from Aunt Martha/Colonial Patterns
1933

Colonial Patterns in the River Market area of Kansas City
340 West 5th Street

I've written quite a bit about Kansas City's Aunt Martha pattern source over the years. In 1980 I interviewed company founders the Tillotson family and designer Marguerite Harrison Weaver for a paper "Midwestern Pattern Sources" at the American Quilt Study Group. 

Embroidery transfers remain the business's main product
but quilt kits and patterns have been important since they
began in 1930.

Aunt Martha is the company's public face,
a combination of colonial cachet and wise needleworking relative
but the woman who created the pattern empire
was 36-year old Anna Clara Staads Tillotson...
.
perhaps represented in this figure in the 1933 booklet cover.

The Staads Sanitarium about 1910

Clara Staads was born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1894 where her father German immigrant Soeren W. Staads ran the Hillside Sanitarium. 



Dr. Staads was successful enough to send Clara to the University of  Nebraska where she graduated in 1916. She married John E. Tillotson in 1922 and had two children Mary Elizabeth (Betty), born in 1922 and John E. II (Jack). Clara's husband was an advertising manager but in 1930 as the Great Depression deepened the Tillotsons needed money. They told me that Clara's first idea was to sell hand made quilts but she soon realized that was not practical.

Stamped pieces from a  later Aunt Martha quilt kit

She thought quilters might want kits of pre-cut fabric and the Colonial Ready Cut Quilt Block Company was born but in tough times a $3 kit was a luxury.

The 1933 booklet advertised kits for the 
French Bouquet (Hexagons), The Double Wedding Ring and the
 Lone Star for $3.25. A pattern for each was also available for 15 cents.


Her next idea was selling quilt patterns for a dime or 15 cents, a business model that proved quite effective. As I recall, she recommended this business model to me and I have followed it ever since.

The Tillotsons were not the only people selling quilt patterns during the depression but they were among the most successful. The company has been the longest lasting. Wilene Smith has done some research into company history and found that John and Clara Tillotson had a third partner. Ralph H. Patt is listed with Mrs. C.S. Tillotson as first proprietor of the Colonial Company in the 1935 Kansas City city directory.



The three of them came up with some innovative marketing ideas, working with newspapers to feature quilt pattern display ads like this one in the Hoosier Farmer from the Quilt Index. You could buy the pattern for 15 cents or the precut pieces for $3.98. You could also get a booklet with full-size  patterns for 15 cents. Orders went to the newspaper to be forwarded to the company.

Wilene found this clipping with the name Tillotson,
which may be the one that Jack Tillotson remembered.

The name Aunt Martha came about because, according to the Tillotsons, a newspaper editor attached the name Martha Tillotson to one of the ads. Clara didn't want her last name used so came up with Aunt Martha.

Feature as ad (or ad as feature) in Modern Woodman
a fraternal organization's periodical:
"My Favorite Quilt Pattern" by Aunt Martha.

Today's Aunt Martha

Their patterns appeared under other names: Aunt Matilda, Aunt Ellen and Betsy Ross.

During the early-20th-century fashion for 
Colonial Revival culture
Martha was, of course, a name with an
early American pedigree.

I'll point out the irony here in first-generation American Anna Clara Staads's adoption of a Colonial persona. But Clara was good at marketing. Stories about Germans in Iowa were not going to sell quilt designs in the 1930s. 
She and designer Marguerite Weaver were also good at designing and drafting quilt patterns, which contributed much to their success.

Marguerite Weaver (1917-2011) told me they worried about copyright in using traditional patterns so she modified old patterns like this Dresden Plate variation or designed her own.

They were aware of what the public wanted at the time and
provided many popular designs.



Quilt patterns and kits were only a small part
of the business.




The Tillotsons sold the pattern arm of the business in 1949 and it continues under a third owner. See their site here:

Clara Tillotson lived to be 97 years old, dying in 1991.
She inspired many quilts.

Palm Leaf

And still is.

The Tillotsons lived at 5716 Cherry in the 
Brookside neighborhood in 1935

See an early booklet from 1933 at Q is for Quilter
http://qisforquilter.com/2010/12/the-quilt-fair-comes-to-you-1933/

See Wilene Smith's post on Aunt Martha/Colonial Quilts here:


Sunday, April 1, 2018

Professional Quilters in Colonial Annapolis


"Quilting work of all kinds performed at the subscriber's house in Annapolis, in the best and newest Manner, as cheap as in London; by a Person from England brought up in the said Business."
Ad from Symon Duff,  May 24, 1745, Maryland Gazette

Quilted silk petticoat
1750-1799
Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Advertizes at this time that he has a person at his house who can do quilting."

Simon himself was a house builder, but he advertised that someone in his home was a quilter, who
performed one step in the process of making a bedquilt, the quilting. In Duff's day it was likely that the professional quilter did fancywork for petticoats and underskirts, vests and waistcoats and for furnishings like bed hangings and valences.

Toile valence or pelmet


Quilted items are recorded in earlier Maryland inventories. Henrietta Maria Lloyd of Talbot County died in 1697. Her inventory itemized one "mourning [morning] gown and quilted petticoat" and in her lodging room "1 bed and its furniture and vallences and a large quilt."

In the 1930s Melita Hoffman painted this watercolor of a gown
and quilted petticoat in the Metropolitan Museum's collection.

Quilted clothing and bedquilts were so fashionable in Annapolis in the 1740s that several professionals advertised their services. 
"Quilting, Plain or Figur'd, coarse or fine, perform'd by the Subscriber...Anne Griffith." December 27, 1749.

"Quilting of all Kinds, whether fine or coarse, such as Bed-Quilts, Gowns, Petticoats, &c. performed in the best and neatest Manner, by the Subscriber, at her House in Annapolis, as well as in England, and much cheaper."
Sarah Monro, July 26, 1745. Maryland Gazette.
Sarah seems to have had the services of an English quilter who had been sent to Maryland as a convict, an indentured servant. Said servant was apparently unhappy with that situation for in April, 1746 Sarah placed an advertisement for a runaway: 

"English convict Servant Woman named Elizabeth Crowder, by Trade a Quilter." 

Elizabeth was tall, if round shouldered, about 40 with gray hair. She seems to have recently cut her hair and might be wearing "a Tower," possibly artificial hair. She absconded in a "blue quilted Coat, "perhaps of her own making. 

Detail of a painting about 1750 
The New Song by Jan Jozef Horemans II
in the Netherlands

About 18 months later Elizabeth was working for herself and advertising quilting services under her own name.
"Elizabeth Crowder, Quilter (Who lately liv'd with Mrs. Carter)....performs all sorts of Quilting in the best Manner, and at the most reasonable Rates: Good Petticoats for Eight and Ten Shillings a Piece, and coarse Petticoats for Six Shillings."


I found much of this information in the MESDA (Museum of Southern Decorative Arts) Craftsman Database, searching for words like quilting and quilter.

A coarse petticoat?

They have digitized an index card file on early American craftspeople.




Detail of a bedquilt in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution