quiltersmuse.com Blog

For those of you who are interested in mill history and factory history, please do not overlook the circumstances and results of the fire that occurred in the Triangle shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village on March 25, 1911. As on the 9-11-2001 day that has lived in infamy, workers could be seen jumping out of the building to their deaths … better than being burned alive?

David Von Drehle wrote a book titled, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. This book will reverberate with any reader who has immigrant factory workers in their family or who just loves the details of labor history and/or accounts with a human edge.

In all, 146 people lost their lives. You see, their workplace was on an upper level of a building, so high that the ladders of New York’s fire engines could not reach. Moreover, the workers had been “locked in” without knowing it.

Large mills in the U.S. seem to have waivered between a paternalistic attitude, initially, and a punitive one in light of labor disputes and strikes. The bottom line for any “agent” was to maximize profit for the mill owners. It was not until someone with a camera, Lewis Hines, began taking photos of children at work, and exhibiting them publicly, was awareness of the evils of child labor even noticed.

Children were a commodity on the farm … in the workplace. No matter that they died on a regular basis from emphysema, pneumonia, and cancer, after breathing in cotton linters in a completely enclosed, sealed work environment, like Slater Mill, the first industrialized cotton spinning center, set up by Samuel Slater in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The pretty yellow building on a fast-flowing river is deceptively appealing, not belying the human devastation wreaked within the walls of the mill.

Mill settings picked the most needy of society for their workers, those without a voice: children, women and immigrants. Not much changed from the earliest mill to the shirtwaist factory tragedy of the twentieth century as you shall readily see, if you read Von Drehle’s riveting account. I read this book when it was first published in 2003 and can recommend it, without reservation.

Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications

After walking into a quilt shop today that has fabrics that are bright, beautiful, large scale, for babies, or batiks, I was struck that I did not see one fabric that in any way simulates “old” designs.

I was looking for a fabric line of reproduction fabrics. Maybe I’ll have to resort to ordering what I’d like, online. Don’t get me wrong! It is a lovely shop and has beautiful items for sale and I’m sure I will return sometime when I’m in the mood to make something more contemporary.

Just yesterday, a friend reported that a book idea is not going to fly. The idea that was shot down by the publisher who was contacted, centers around Civil War era quilts. “Old” is not selling right now, the person was told. Is this a trend?

Personally, I love old designs, both geometric and appliqué. Many of the new designs seem to be a poor imitation that don’t show much creativity. With thousands of traditional quilt designs available already, why try to reinvent the wheel?

I have an answer for that, of course, in one word: Money. People want to have the latest. That idea extends beyond the quilt world. We all have to see the “latest movie,” the latest “hot off the press book,” even … the newborn baby. New is exciting. Old is not. That idea extends to people, as well.

Yet, in my personal experience, I have enjoyed friendships with older people who have a multitude of wrinkles, whose jaw sags a little more than it used to, who have a few more pounds than when they were younger. The wisdom of Age is chiseled into a face, I think. Happy lines appear on a face that smiles a lot, and scowl lines can reveal an unhappy soul. The value of those associations have been immeasurable to me and my growth as a human being.

We can look to our overall experiences in our society. How many people born after, say 1965, have any concept of a timeline of history? When did the Civil War occur? What does the term “19th century” mean, exactly? In what time period did the Great Depression happen? With no real sense of history, we become a shallow people.

Take the broad who was blocking our car today in a parking lot. She was attempting to stuff food into her mouth, talk on a cell phone, and turn her car around a corner, with one hand, all at the same time. Is there anywhere we can go that we, as a society, do not have to constantly “plugged in?”

We are becoming shallow intellectually, and that scares me, because the strength of society is in its accumulated knowledge. How can anyone make a decision, if the past is not referenced as to what worked … or didn’t? Are we doomed to make mistakes, again and again, just because no one is keeping watch on history and results?

Please tell me that it is not true that we do not care about the past anymore. The past has a lot to offer us. I revel in stories about times when life was hard but in many ways seemed less complicated. I’m sure there were “other” complications that we don’t have today. I guess it is simple fun to over-romanticize the past.

I miss the values that I associate with rural New England, as I perceive them to be, including faith in a Creator, a willingness to help a neighbor, the bartering of goods, a day’s pay for a day’s work, honesty, community spirit, and sense of place.

I will leave you with one question: What is so good about the present that makes it better than the past? Other than the fact that we live in the present, I’d have to say that the past was in many ways superior. I’d love to ride in a carriage, sleigh or train. I’d love to wear shoes and socks made by my mother and father. I’d love to go to a one room schoolhouse. I’d love to go to any school where emphasis was placed on getting the facts right, as well as the joy of discovery.

Yes, I am nostalgic for a different time, with different values, when money was not the be-all and end-all, and when we were less “developed” as a society. But then again, if I lived at an earlier time, I would not be able to share my thoughts with you, in this manner. To every experience, we can assign a plus or a minus.

Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications

When I think of myself, I often attach the self-appointed title of “Independent Scholar.” That is a designation for a researcher who works on discovering information, some of it never before analyzed or interpreted. Unlike academic scholars who are associated with an institution, my writings about my findings reach a very broad audience worldwide. In other words, they are not hidden in some obscure journal, or written in such high-falutin’ language that only a limited audience would understand or appreciate them. I like knowledge to be understood because I am forever and always a teacher.

More than 1 1/2 years ago, I embarked on a journey, one that would lead me to an intimate understanding of a woman whose life I have now written about, in detail. While researching the parameters of her 19th and 20th century life and its circumstances, I came to know her, her thoughts and feelings (as recorded in her letters and diaries), her family and their interests, anecdotes and origins.

It was fun to discover her living family members and have them visit me in my home, with ancestral quilts. It was absolute joy to be able to transcribe the notations on the mock-up quilt charts that she had made (that are now in a museum), and to discover that she’d written “McKim” and “LaGanke” and referred to other quilt historians of her time in notations that only I, as a quilt historian, would understand.

I would not have been able to learn anything about this extraordinary woman, had I not realized that her name had been misrepresented by a careless writer who worked at the museum that holds her priceless quilt charts. That mistake, unfortunately, has caused a lot of angst for a great number of people: museum officials who added the wrong name to other books they have printed; anger and angst for the family member(s) who knew about the mistake with the first publication of an article in 1997 that featured a few paragraphs about her and her work; and the mistake has caused shame to the scholar herself who misrepresented the name AND the two institutions who allowed her to present symposium papers under their jurisdiction.

For me, I have been frustrated beyond belief that this egregious error has not been admitted or rectified, but has been left to stand as truth. The International Quilt Study Center, a supposed bastion of the TRUTH and quilt scholarship, was notified early-on in my research that the abstract presented on their Symposium Papers page was wrong. Dead wrong. Besides the wrong name, the abstract contained other wrong information. The body of the abstract has changed a number of times. The name of the talk: “Patterns and Insights: Emily Webster” has not changed.

Ellen Emeline Hardy Webster is the New Hampshire woman who made the charts. She was a prominent woman of her day, involved in leading many clubs in her home town. Her husband was a dentist. She gave lectures in four different areas of interest, and after his death, she earned two degrees from Boston University and became an instructor at Wheaton College. She played organ and piano at the local church. Her life is extraordinary in every way and I wrote 355 pages to tell you about it, complete with 340 wonderful old photos and new photos of scenes and people from New Hampshire that figured into her life.

I have insisted on the TRUTH but have been met with a deaf ear. I don’t think that the fact that the “scholar” was vetted by a committee holds much weight. Committees have been known to be wrong, long before now. We don’t have to look too far back into U.S. History to discover that!

All I can promise you is that I will keep on repeating myself until the day I die. In fact, my dying words will probably be, “But, her name was never Emily. It was Ellen.”

Some people would not acknowledge truth if it was biting them in the butt. Of this I am sure, her name was Ellen Emeline Hardy Webster and of that I am 120% certain. The extra 20% accounts for my continued aggravation.

The scholar who made the mistake has admitted it. So … ????? Why not let the new myth stand in place, eh? Seems to be the trend!

September 24, 2009 – Patricia Cummings standing inside covered bridge in Campton, NH, former hometown of Dr. Clarendon P. Webster, Ellen’s husband.

Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications