Commercial Quiltmaking in Connecticut

Ad for a machine made quilt 1940

In 1895 several newspapers ran a lengthy story about commercial quiltmaking in Connecticut, which began with a tale about cottage industries where local women quilted for an entrepreneur who peddled their needlework to retail and wholesale customers. Industry histories always treat the facts loosely but this sounds reasonable---if vague.

"About 1874 this business originated....quilt materials were stored, to be distributed among the farmers' wives of the vicinity, who occupied their leisure hours between the regular 12 o'clock dinner and 6 o'clock tea, as well as the long winter evenings, in quilting for the manufacturers, who repaid their labor by the munificent sum of 12-1/2 cents for each finished quilt."

Were the women workers hand quilting or machine quilting?

"When a sufficient number of quilts were completed the manufacturer started upon the road with his stock, peddling his goods alike to house and store keepers. As his trade increased, quarters were prepared for the workers within the storehouse, which then really became a factory, where eventually the quilts began to run by ordinary sewing machines. A year or two later the business had increased...a large stone factory was built, power machines superseded the old-style ones...and three or four hundred boxes and bales of a dozen quilts each were shipped....700 quilts daily."

The article goes on to talk about production.

"The quilting machines are tended by girls, who are paid two and a half cents for each quilt, and forty quilts are considered an average day's work. Some of the girls make $7 a week....
In 1884 a new machine for quilting was invented...The quilt is stretched in a wooden frame and stitched in the most intricate designs by power....The designs are frequently interlaced, mingled, and multiplied upon the same surface until the result is an arabesque of great regularity and attractiveness."

I would guess that the unnamed factory was one of the Palmer Brothers Bedquilt Manufacturers in Fitchville, New London or Montville, Connecticut. From a late-20th-century Fitchville history:

"Edward and Elisha Palmer copied the designs from the beautiful quilts Elisha's daughter was making....George Palmer originally designed and patented the machines that were used to sew the quilts. The quilts were made in many different designs and colors. The Palmers became world famous for these unique heavy warm quilts."

Elisha had two daughters, Arabelle Palmer Latimer (1849-1928) and Mary Alice Palmer Mitchell (1847-?). (Mary Alice's DAR number is 66475.)

The Palmer Brothers purchased a mill in Fitchville, New London

in 1886. This complex burned in the 1960s and '70s.

The Palmer mills continued manufacturing quilts well into the 20th century.

Library of Congress

When the housing was photographed in the 1930s the

factory was making comforters for the army. 

Giant quilting machines

In 1941 you could buy Palmer Patch Bedquilts at Quackenbush's in Paterson, New Jersey.

Or at Snellenburg's in Bristol, Pennsylvania in December, 1942.

We get a clue to as one kind of Palmer Bros. bedquilt:

Wholecloth sateen with wool batting?

The company disbanded in 1948.

Read more about those Connecticut quilt mills in Jon B. Chase's book Montville. See a Google Preview here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=jC2sBmp3xqsC&pg=PA51&dq=palmer+brothers+quilt&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj0yJjPiYznAhXJWc0KHdtXBuYQ6AEwAnoECAQQAg#v=onepage&q=palmer%20brothers%20quilt&f=false

Mabel Obenchain: Famous Features

Mabel Elizabeth Schmitz Obenchain (1903-2001)

Mabel Schmitz Obenchain was a 20th-century version of a "gentlewoman in reduced circumstances," the term used for once-well-to-do women forced to seek employment outside the home. The daughter of  a prosperous family in Evanston, Illinois (her father was Weigh Master at Chicago's Board of Trade) she graduated from Northwestern University in 1924 and soon after married a handsome Evanston lawyer named Ralph Riley Obenchain.  After three children and fifteen years of marriage Ralph died rather suddenly in 1939.

Ralph Riley Obenchain (1890-1939)

About the time Mabel married him

The Great Depression was almost over but Mabel had no assets. As her daughter has written at the Find A Grave site:

"When Mabel was growing up in the early part of the 20th century, young women were never expected to work outside the home. But in 1939 Ralph died leaving her with three young children to support. Although a graduate of Northwestern University, as a widow with no income, circumstances forced her to attend night school in order to learn shorthand and typing. She secured a job working in the steno pool at Esquire magazine."

Smart enough to move up the journalism ladder, she found a job with the Famous Features Syndicate where she edited, wrote and publicized features for women, including quilts. Mabel wrote several quilt pattern booklets. 

Her booklets published in the 1970s & '80s 

must have sold many copies in dimestores around the country.

You can find them on Ebay and Etsy.

According to her Find-A-Grave obituary she joined with Louise Roote, editor of Capper's Weekly in Topeka, to write her first quilt book, All-Time Quilt Favorites in 1971.

The design and the quilts reflect that Bicentennial era when

quilts were once-again popular.

The artist was Vera Lengel (1932-1997) whose spare modern style

defined the Famous Features booklets.

Mabel worked for Famous Features from 1943 until the 1980s, continuing to contribute quilting ideas after she retired to Rogers, Arkansas, where she was a founding member of the guild. She died in 2001 at the age of 97. Mabel who never remarried was buried next to Ralph in Indiana. Ralph must have been something, a "man in a million."

Madalynne Donna Connor Obenchain (1893- )

Any search for Ralph's name reveals that he was a famous feature himself in the 1920s. His first wife Madalynne Obenchain was a femme fatale flapper, accused of conspiring with one boyfriend to murder another boyfriend in Los Angeles in August, 1921.

Wedding announcement in the Northwestern alumni magazine

By that time she and Ralph had divorced after a short marriage in 1919 lasting four days before she told him she was in love with someone else. She was tried three (?) times for John Belton Kennedy's murder but never convicted. 

Ex-husband Ralph was on her legal team during her first trial after quitting his job in Chicago to help her out. He paid for the lawyer for the second.

From a recent book on Madalynne's trials:

"Ralph Obenchain, handsome, athletic, and charismatic, gallantly turned up in court as a witness to defend her name and reputation...[He] became America's hero; even Madalynne's love letters to [the victim], read in court and causing Ralph to sink his head in his hand, did not shake his loyal assertion of her innocence. Few in court knew that his purpose in acting the forgiving husband was to pave the way for a film on the case in which he appeared...."

Madalynne called the loyal ex-husband and incipient film star "a man in a million," a name that stuck. The movie starring Ralph as himself was A Man In a Million produced by Charles R. Seeling, which left few impressions. Apparently L.A. theaters refused to show it as too sensational. No word on Evanston movie houses.

The Obenchain case influenced another film. Cecil B. DeMille's 1922 Manslaughter starred Leatrice Joy who said she based her character on Madalynne Obenchain after observing in court during the many trials. 

His film career on hold, Ralph returned to Evanston, where he married again in 1924.

Both women's names are spelled wrong in this 1924 article.

You have to hand it to Mabel. Not only did she manage to raise their children well in Evanston on what she could earn herself, she kept that scandalous name until no one remembered Madalynne or Ralph and she was the only Obenchain in the newspapers.

Read about Ralph's first wife here:

Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press By Gordon Morris Bakken & Brenda Farrington:

https://books.google.com/books?id=53KMAtUfTCEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Women+Who+Kill+Men:&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiy1Zrd-PHmAhUSCc0KHTB1DA0QuwUwAXoECAUQBw#v=onepage&q=Women%20Who%20Kill%20Men%3A&f=false

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/132361442/mabel-elizabeth-obenchain