Sewing for a Living in Antebellum Georgia

Women poor enough to have to sew for a living rarely left any written records of their work but the better-educated, richer women they sewed for sometimes did. Here are glimpses by two Georgia women:

Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas of the planter elite in Augusta, Georgia wrote of a cousin Mary Ann Cooper, a "poor creature" who supported herself and her invalid husband by sewing clothing.

Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas 1834-1907

If ear bobs are a measure of wealth the Thomases were rich.

The Clanton Vason-Coleman House, 503 Greene Street, Augusta

photographed by Lawrence Bradley in 1936. Library of Congress.

"March 30, 1856
The merchants are beginning to receive their new goods. I have bought me a very pretty blue silk and had it made by cousin Mary Ann Cooper. Poor creature. She appears to have a hard time of it. She is nursing Jim Cooper and sewing for a means of subsistence. He has had rheumatism...has been constantly confined to his bed...I had rather I believe work for a sick husband than an idle trifling one like Mr Blalock. There is Sarah, sewing hard all the while and he, although in the enjoyment of health and strength, doing nothing. Standing idle while his wife---a woman---is sewing for the bread she eats."

Sarah Blalock is listed as a dressmaker in the Augusta census in 1880. Augustus Blalock is "at home." Things hadn't changed at the Blalocks over 25 years.

Gertrude Thomas mentioned her own sewing. Like many plantation mistresses she had the duty of cutting out clothing for the slaves. She may have also sewed these clothes but that job was often delegated to others, free and slave. Her sewing may also have included embroidery and decorative needlework for her own clothing.

"May 12, 1856
I stayed in town...[sewing and conversing at Ma's] We were speaking of the virtues of men. I admitted their general depravity, but considered that there were some noble exceptions. Among those I class my own husband.

May 26, 1856
Today I have been quite busy in finishing cutting out the pants for the men on the plantation."

Maria Bryan Harford Connell (1808-1844)

Maria Bryan grew up at Mount Zion plantation near Sparta, Georgia and married William Harford. Letters to her older sister Julia Bryan Cumming (1803-1879) are full of detail about her life in the 1820s and '30s. As her editor Carol Rothrock Bleser wrote: Maria "successfully captured in her correspondence a vanished civilization in miniature exactness."

The Quilting Party, 1849

"January 1825- I was at a quilting at Mrs. Norton's the other day and the girls began to plague Nancy Robertson about Butch Lyons.
December 1829 - Aunt Wales & Catherine have been with us this afternoon assisting us to quilt."

Maria is buried in the Mount Zion Presbyterian Church cemetery.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/55734887/marie-martha_a-connell

Mrs. Matthews, a fellow church member at the Presbyterian Church, seems to have been quilting for Julia Cumming.

"December 29 1836 - Mrs. Matthews has commenced the quilt; she sent for thread which was furnished her & for cotton, & sent the lining to have it shrunk, so I suppose she is at work upon it, but I never see her nowadays but at church. I sent her word to come and look at a quilt here which I thought was done in a very pretty pattern, but she said you had told her how you wished it done. 

January 5, 1837 - I went to see Mrs. Matthews a few evenings ago. She was quilting and I really felt sorry for her in that cold, open house sitting alone at work, and she has laid it off so thickly that it will take her a long time, I think, to finish it. I should go and help her quilt at least one day, if it were not for leaving Ma entirely alone."

By April the quilt was finished:

"April 17, 1837 - Uncle Jacob left home today for August. He took your red trunk, containing the bedquilt.

August 9 1837 - Mrs. Matthews has spent two or three night with me since I have been alone, but not a day, and indeed seems very much indisposed to leaving home. She is now very busily engaged in quilting and I presume I shall not see her until that is finished for whatever she has to do she does it with her might. Do you ever hear of a friend who has work to put out? It would be a great act of charity to secure such things for her if you could do it."

Julia Bryan Cumming and daughter Emily Cumming Hammond

 in the late 1830s

Three years later Julia had at least two tops to be quilted. The first took about a month and cost $5.

"October 3 1840 - Mrs. Matthews will do your quilt as soon as you send it up, and any other work that you wish, for, as she tells Mrs. Rossiter, Heaven only knows what is to become of her, for she can get nothing to do. She must incur some expenses, and does not make on average $2 a month. I pity her with all my heart. Don't forget the lining and thread for we cannot get these things on near as good terms as in Augusta. 

November, 1840 - Mrs. Matthews has finished the quilt, and I have paid her what she asked $5.00. She wants to let her know how you want the other quilted. 

November 23, 1843 -  Cornelia wanted much to go home with Elizabeth but Mrs Smith always has so much for her to  do and is now so crazy in her preparations for going to housekeeping that poor Cornelia does nothing but work and quilt, etc. and has not time for visiting or reading or music or anything else. Mrs. Rossiter from the great delight she takes in Mrs. Smith, has made her a bed quilt with her own hands and this of a very elaborate kind in stars, and last week they spent at her house quilting it."

This entry is a little confusing. Cornelia might be a slave but slaves didn't get to visit or read, etc. She might be a relative. Someone is going to housekeeping (moving into her own home), probably Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Rossiter, however, has clearly made an elaborate star quilt for her friend Mrs. Smith.

Perhaps like this one from an online auction

The Bryans and the Cummings left family papers now in the South Caroliniana collection at the University of South Carolina ( Hammond-Bryan-Cumming collection.) Historian Carol Rothrock Bleser did much to preserve the documents in published form. 

Extra Reading:

Maria Bryan Harford Connell's letters: Tokens of Affection: The Letters of a Planter's Daughter in the Old South edited by Carol K. Bleser

The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848-1889. Edited by Virginia Ingraham Burr

Eleanor Beard Studios

Ginger Rogers in Top Hat 1935.

Bedrooms couldn't be any more fashionable than this one.

Where'd she get that quilt?

Among the most successful of the 20th-century entrepreneurs to build a business in quilts was Eleanor Beard of Kentucky. At one time she reportedly had a thousand employees stitching quilts and

other items sold in shops from Madison Avenue in New York to Santa Barbara.

Eleanor Robertson Beard (1888 - 1951)

Eleanor Robertson was born in Covington, Kentucky to Benjamin and Anna Collins Robertson. Her father was apparently in the paint manufacturing business and moved to Louisville, a center of the industry. 

Louisville, Kentucky's largest city,  in 1906

In 1917 when 29 Eleanor married widower Marvin Beard, who owned a store in Hardinsburg, about 70 miles southwest of Louisville. Marvin had two teen-aged sons (two daughters had died) and twelve years after their marriage Eleanor gave birth to their only child Barbara Ann in 1929.

Hardinsburg's main street in the 1870s. 

The Beard family was in the retail business. See the store on the left.

Cuesta Benberry's paper on "Cottage Industries" for Uncoverings describes how during the 1920s when Kentucky farmers were suffering from low commodity prices Marvin accepted wool as payment for goods.

Center of a typical Eleanor Beard wholecloth quilt

Eleanor decided to make use of the wool by creating whole cloth quilts of satin in the style of the boudoir quilts described by Virginia Gunn in her AQSG paper "Quilts for Milady’s Boudoir:"

"Boudoir quilts, comforts or puffs cold be either hand quilted, machine quilted or tied. The best...featured luxurious or soft outer fabrics like velvet, satin, taffeta, or crepe de Chine."

Eleanor Beard quilt in the collection of the

International Quilt Study Center and Museum

68" x 80"

http://worldquilts.quiltstudy.org/americanstory/node/5955

In the 1920s these satin or taffeta quilts with wool batts retailed for $20, according to Benberry.

Metropolitan Museum curator Amelia Peck traces Beard's Hedgelands Studio to 1921 and the earliest ad I've found is a classified notice in a November, 1922 issue of House and Garden magazine. 

"HAND QUILTED COMFORTERS. padded with pure lamb's wool. Charming designs, straight or scalloped edges. Exquisite materials. Write for samples and booklet. Eleanor Beard. Hardinsbury, Ky."

The post office undoubtedly delivered the letters addressed to the misspelled Hardinsbury to the correct address. By the next year the ad was correct and larger:

"Quilts and Comforters. Hand quilted in charming designs with scalloped edges. Lightly padded for summer use with thin sheet of lamb's wool or quilting cotton in finest tub fabrics or silks. No patchwork or appliqued designs. Price example--- $17.50 for double bed size quilt in English sateen."

She seems to have learned some practical lessons. Scalloped edges were selling and customers wanted "tub fabrics", washable rayon satins, probably. Do note she did not sell patchwork designs, just wholecloth. And she was using the name "Hedgelands."

The following year the Washington D.C. Evening Star advertised a trunk show of "hand-quilted silk robes and comforts" from Eleanor Beard, handled by Mrs. Ruth A. Waddell. Like other cottage industries at the time, the Beard Studios had sales reps who traveled to department stores.

In 1931 Waddell was still doing Washington trunk shows, selling "Eleanor Beard's Hand Quilted Things" which probably included bath robes and bed jackets, pillows and other boudoir items.

That same year upscale Los Angeles department

store Bullocks Wilshire advertised "a lovely eleanor beard robe."

From the Indiana project and the Quilt Index

Like many other bedcovers made commercially, this one has been passed down in the family with the story it was made by an Indiana mother for her daughter. It looks like one of Eleanor Beard's designs. Beard, a master at marketing, included a label on the reverse of her quilts.

Here's one from the 1940s on an unlikely quilt.

In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Apparently Beard would make chintz sampler quilts to order

of antique prints and new chintzes.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/13871

At some point Beard must have decided there was a market for appliqued

quilts and she began a line of chintz bedcovers.

But most of them were modernized with a look that 

wouldn't be confused with an 1850s album. The Met's

quilt raises questions about how many other chintz reproduction

quilts the Beard Studios made.

One of a pair of twin bed quilts from Karen Alexander's blog

They also did conventional applique as in this

auction quilt with a Beard label on the reverse.

The business was enormous for its type. Beard employed many women in the small town of Hardinsburg and then she moved to Louisville. One gets a good description of the company's operations in a lawsuit the U.S. Department of Labor filed against Eleanor and Marvin Beard, American Needlecrafts, Inc., Regina Inc. and Miller Bros & Company in 1942.

The suit describes the whole production system in great detail. At issue was the fact that the needlewomen, called homeworkers, worked long hours for little pay (the age-old problem with sewing for a living.)

The Department of Labor seems to have thought the women should get a raise but the "Court holds that the homeworkers are independent contractors rather than employees of the defendant and are not subject to the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Acts of 1938." 

"No raise for you."

The case was appealed the following year:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/139/60/1568082/

But nothing seems to have changed.

Do read the brief here for more details about the Eleanor Beard Studios worked. 

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/46/16/1555051/

A summary:

"The defendant American Needlecrafts, Inc., is a New York corporation with its principal office in New York City. It has four branch offices or studios in Kentucky which are located at Elizabethtown, Hardinsburg, Greensburg and Columbia. These branch offices employ approximately forty employees in the studios and deal with approximately 500 workers who perform services for the studios. ....The company manufactures, sells and distributes in interstate commerce comforters, bed spreads, pillow slips, robes, crib covers, house coats, monogrammed articles and other articles of a kindred nature, which have been produced in part by appliqueing, quilting and needle work on the part of the homeworkers. The articles are produced for and sold in the luxury trade....The Elizabethtown studio specializes in appliqueing and the Hardinsburg studio in quilting some comforters are appliqued in Greensburg, bound in Elizabethtown and quilted at Hardinsburg."

In 1934 Mildred Potter Lissauer had Louisville's Regina Quilt Shop,

an arm of the Beard company, quilt her "Godey Quilt." The caption at

Western Kentucky University says three women spent six months on it.

https://westernkentuckyuniversity.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/A08F82DD-2A50-446D-8B1C-955329231029

Eleanor died in her early sixties in 1951. Daughter Barbara Beard Castleman took over the business and most recently Jane Scott Hodges of Leontine Linens bought the Eleanor Beard Studios in 2002.
http://eleanorbeard.com/

Read Virginia Gunn's "Quilts for Milady’s Boudoir" in Uncoverings 1989 at the Quilt Index.

http://www.quiltindex.org/journals/article.php?Akid=2-B-A7

Tell Ginger NOT to wash that quilt! The satin may be "tub-fast" but the wool batting will shrink in hot water and the dryer.

Un-repairable.