I am so pleased to present this beautiful essay researched and written for us by Dr. Mary Murphy. Mary has been a long-time friend of Stix, and in addition to enjoying her lovely presence on this earth, I am in awe of her ability to discover delightful nuggets of information in historical records. Please enjoy!
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Quilt-makers have a long tradition of gift-giving. Women (mostly) made quilts to give to friends, family, and community members to mark important life events: birthdays, christenings, graduations, marriages, anniversaries, retirements, departures. These prized gifts were made to be mementos.
Today the word “memento” often refers to a souvenir or trinket that reminds us of a pleasant occasion or vacation. “Memento” is a Latin word, the imperative form of meminisse, a verb that means “to remember.” So, “memento” is a command, and in the context of quilts given as gifts, it demands: “Remember me.”
In the nineteenth century, Ohio seamstress Susan Newcomer embroidered this command on a beautiful, appliqued quilt that she gave to her apprentice Amanda Adams. Amanda carried it when she married, when she was widowed, when she hopscotched her way West with her children, and when--elderly and ill--she lived with her daughter Dr. Hazel Freed in Grass Range, Montana. Hazel passed the quilt to her sister Martha, who gave it to her daughter Kathryn, who in turn gave it to her sister Annabel, who donated it to the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. It carried with it a wealth of family memories.
"Remember Me" quilt
"Remember Me" quilt inscription
Montana has two major historic quilt collections. The Montana Historical Society protects about fifty historic quilts in its collection. The Marlene Saccoccia Quilt Collection at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman keeps over 100 quilts made from around 1775 to 2015. Images of all the quilts in that collection are available on the Montana History Portal. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/12940
In addition to these repositories, local museums across the state preserve quilts important to the history of their communities. That is where the Big Sky Blanket project turned for inspiration, to our own Gallatin History Museum in Bozeman. https://www.gallatinhistorymuseum.org
When Tracy invited me to help the Big Sky Blanket project by providing some history about Montana quilts, I was delighted. I had written an essay about Montana women and their quilts years ago for the book Border to Border: Historic Quilts and Quiltmakers, but relished the chance to revisit these beautiful textiles. Like many historic artifacts, quilts are often orphans—objects that have lost their origin stories with the passage of time. One day, I asked Pat Hamlin, a volunteer at the Gallatin History Museum and a talented fiber artist, if the museum had any quilts with stories. She said, “we have stories that will break your heart.”
With that hook, Pat reeled us in. One morning, Tracy and I met her and Rachel Phillips, the museum’s Research Director for a tour of the museum’s quilts. Some were on display, but most were stored in archival boxes in the basement. It was like Christmas morning. As we opened box after box, we were dazzled by the artistry, imagination, and skill of Montana quilters.
But one quilt was like no other. First, it was made of silk. The pattern is a four-pointed star within a four-pointed star. Each star is made from different fabric combinations. Each piece of every star is edged with hand-embroidered decorative stitches, and, most remarkable, in the diamond-shaped spaces between each star are embroidered quotations.
Star-in-a-Star
Full silk quilt
“Inscribed” quilts emerged in the 1840s and reflected the Romantic philosophy of the time, which included expressions of sentimentality and individuality. For example, a quilt made in Massachusetts in 1847 includes the inscription:
“When you look on this, oh think of the friend/ To whose lonely hours your Pleasure did lend/ Whose best wish attends you/ Whereever you may be/ Who cannot forget you/ Who says think of me.”
The most common inscribed quilts were “friendship” or “album” quilts. At first, women would use indelible ink to inscribe their name in a space in a quilt block and then sew the blocks together. The resulting quilt would be given to a friend or family member, often on the occasion of a wedding or a move—frequently when people left to head West. Other purposes for inscribed quilts were for “presentation” gifts when a member of a community, sometimes a clergyman or a teacher, was to be honored.
Inscribed quilts were also used as fundraisers. Donors would pay a sum to have the quiltmakers include their names on a quilt that would frequently be auctioned to raise money for a particular cause. Such quilts were popular projects to raise money for the Red Cross during World War I. A women’s club in Cascade County, Montana, made one such quilt that garnered $1,060.80 when it was auctioned [photo]. The Gallatin History Museum holds a gorgeous inscribed crazy quilt signed by Bozeman’s movers and shakers and the phrase, “Bozeman for Capital” and the date, “1892.” It was part of the [failed] campaign to make Bozeman the state capital.
"Bozeman for Capital" crazy quilt
Examples of signatures
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, embroidery supplanted ink as the method of inscription as was the case in the Museum’s silk quilt. There is only one name on the quilt: “S J Reichman. Sedan Mont. 1907.” Sarah Johnston Reichman was the quiltmaker.
S. J. Reichman signature
What makes the Gallatin History Museum silk quilt unique is the nature of the forty-nine embroidered quotations. It was not rare for an occasional Bible verse to appear on a quilt, but Sarah Johnston Reichman included far more than verses from Proverbs. She inscribed phrases from Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Lord Byron, American poets, William Cullen Bryant and Celia Thaxter, and many others. Sarah also included a good sprinkling of aphorisms from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac.
Example of amorphisms-1
Example of amorphisms-2
Sarah Johnston Reichman may have been exceedingly well-read. She almost certainly owned a Bible, and it could be that her family had a copy of the widely popular Barlett’s Familiar Quotations. John Bartlettt published the first version of his book in 1855. It went through multiple editions in the 19th Century and was a staple in many middle-class homes.
One of the many stunning attributes of Sarah’s quilt was the evenness of the embroidery. It was puzzling. At first glance, we thought, what extraordinary stitching skill! We couldn’t see the back of the embroidered pieces which were covered by the quilt backing so we lacked that perspective. I just could not get the impossibility of that level of regularity in hand embroidery out of my brain. So, I went back to the museum for another look--and left just as perplexed.
One day, working on an entirely different project, I was in the Special Collections and Archives at Montana State University looking at the Alderson family papers. The Aldersons were early settlers in the Gallatin Valley, arriving in the 1860s. William W. Alderson, the patriarch of the family, had his name inscribed on the Bozeman for Capital quilt. Many family members kept intermittent diaries, letters, and odd pieces of writing that ended up in the Archives. In one folder were a few pieces of brittle, yellowed paper, titled “Personal Recollections of Early Days.” In pencil and sprawling penmanship, Matthew Alderson, eldest son of the family, had jotted down a few stories. I’m sure I let out a gasp when I came across these two sentences:
“Among the things which my mother brought up the [Missouri] river with her was a Willcox & Gibbs sewing machine. It did not have a shuttle, as machines of the same make have today, but it made a chain stitch, from a single thread. “(my emphasis).
Matt Alderson's recollections
William and Frances Alderson had nine children. Matt and a younger brother “were pressed into service” sewing clothing on this machine: “I have made dozens of garments of different kinds on this machine and if they didn’t fit why all we had to do was unlock the stitch, pull on the thread and the seam was ripped.” Matt also used the Willcox & Gibbs machine to make hundreds of flour sacks for the local Gallatin flour mills.
Willcox & Gibbs sewing machine
Chain stitch embroidery
James Gibbs of Virginia invented the sewing machine that made a single thread chain stitch in 1855. No other machines on the market successfully produced a chain stitch. Gibbs patented his original features and then went to Philadelphia to look for someone to help him get the machine into production. He met James W. Willcox, “a dealer in new notions and inventions.” James’ son, Charles, helped Gibbs create a patent model machine, and in 1857 Gibbs was awarded patent number 17,427. Willcox and Gibbs formed a company, found a manufacturer in Rhode Island, opened an office in New York City, and put the machines on the market in 1859.
Willcox & Gibbs manual
The journal Scientific American praised the machine’s quality and quiet, noting the “entire absence of all noise, even when it is running at the rate of two-thousand stitches and upwards per minute." It was a great success: an elegant machine, and cheaper than other sewing machines of the time. Singer came out with a chain-stitch machine in the 1890s but it was always overshadowed by Willcox & Gibbs’ model.
We don’t know what kind of machine Sarah Johnston Reichman had, but we can now safely say, that wondrous embroidery was machine made.
Who was Sarah Johnston Reichman and how did she come to make this quilt?
Sarah Jane Johnston was born in Pennsylvania on February 20, 1855. In 1875, she married George Harry Reichman, a widower with two children. Sarah, Harry, and extended family came to Montana by oxen-drawn covered wagon in 1879. Early on Harry helped organize the district school because he was determined that his children would have a better education than he had.
Sarah and Harry Reichman family
The first of Reichman’s children to be born in Montana was Lester, in Gallatin County in 1880. Lester married Zelpha Jeff Pitts on April 7, 1907. Their son Louis, who was born in Sedan, Montana on January 14, 1908, married Dorothy Kienholz in 1931. Dorothy became the keeper of the Reichman family history.
In 1985, Dorothy brought Sarah’s silk quilt to a meeting of the Central Park (MT) Homemakers Club. While on a trip, she had seen “The Quilters,” a play about settler women based on the book, The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art, and reported on it to the club. As the newspaper wrote, “Then came the gem of the evening.” Dorothy displayed a quilt, pieced from “the material left from the wedding dresses and wedding ties of the members of her family.” The ladies were so entranced, “all parliamentary procedure was lost in our eagerness to read and to feel the beautiful old fabrics.”
In 1983 at a Johnston family reunion, another of Sarah’s quilts was displayed. This one was composed of thirty-two fans set in pink silk. The fans had embroidered edges and forty-eight “slogans” in pink chain stitch.
Sarah Johnston Reichman had presented each of her children with a silk quilt when they married. She used the aphorisms she embroidered on the quilt to pass on advice to her newly wedded children. Many adages spoke to industriousness and to navigating relationships. Here are just a few examples:
“Be not simply good--be good for something.”—Henry David Thoreau
“Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home.”--John Howard Paine, lyrics to the song “Home Sweet Home,” the most popular song in 19thC English speaking world
“A soft answer turneth away wrath.”—Proverbs 15:1
“Habit is a web we weave a thread of it every day, and at last, it becomes so strong we cannot break it.”—Horace Mann
“Ere thou remark another’s sin Bid thine own conscience look within.”—Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac
“Something accomplished, something done has earned a night’s repose.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Blessed are they who expect nothing They will not be disappointed.”—Alexander Pope
Zelpha was only eighteen at the time she wed Lester. Her letters to her new sister-in-law, Lester’s sister, Josephine (Josie) Cady, reveal both her happiness and a bit of anxiety about finding her place as a wife and a new member of the Reichman family. In June 1907, she wrote to thank Josie for her wedding gift of table linens, and ended, “this being my first attempt to write to my new sister you may think it is quite a blunder but I will try to do better next time. This leaving us well and enjoying a happy life.”
Zelpha Pitts portrait
Lester Reichman portrait
Sarah Reichman, Josie & Lewis Cady
In September Zelpha wrote to Josie with news about the farm: Lester had cut the rye and barley; she had put up some currant jellie [sic]. They were coming up on the six-month anniversary of their wedding, “there never was a happier six months than the last.” Lester, filling the back page of Zelpha’s letter, wrote, “I think if all married couples were as happy and contented as we are there would be a lot of divorce lawyers hunting a new business.”
Lester& Zelpha's wedding portrait
It was often the case that couples received wedding gifts months after the wedding itself. Sarah had not finished the silk quilt in time for Lester and Zelpha’s wedding but completed it in time for them to receive it for Christmas, 1907. Zelpha wrote to Josie on January 10, “that every one that sees it thinks it is the nicest thing they ever saw and I think so too.” While Zelpha and Lester wrote about crops, homemaking, and seeing other family members, they did not write about the fact that Zelpha was pregnant.
Louis, an eight-pound “bright healthy boy with dark curly hair dark blue eyes” was born on January 14, 1908. Josie wrote a letter of congratulations, which Lester received on the 24th. But Lester’s response was full of heartbreak. Zelpha, who had been “getting along fine” for a few days, took turn on Sunday night, January19th, and was delirious by Monday morning. She remained in that condition all week. Lester confided, “Oh, Josie, we have been so happy and have looked forward with so much pleasure to the birth of the baby that it seems like it will kill me to give her up now.”
Lester called in two doctors to see her and a trained nurse to tend her, but Zelpha died on January 25. Her death certificate named the cause of death as puerperal sepsis, also known as puerperal fever. Puerperal fever was a bacterial infection, a leading cause of maternal death. It had no effective treatment until the development of antibiotics decades later.
Zelpha was just a month shy of her twentieth birthday when she died. “I have cried until the tears will not come and my eyes burn like fire,” wrote Lester to Josie. “When I think of the long weary years that I may have to pass through without her I feel as though I would like to be laid to rest beside her and be through with the care and strife of this life.” Sarah, a widow herself--Harry having died in 1904--moved in with Lester to help raise Louis.
Lester's letter to Josie
Lester and Louis on a horse
Zelpha had very little time to enjoy the quilt Sarah had made for her and Lester, but certainly time to read all its messages, to enjoy the smooth, lustrous silk, to admire the colors and beautiful hand-embroidered edges. She would have felt welcomed into the Reichman family. Zelpha would also have appreciated Sarah’s skill as she, too, was a quilter. She made a lovely Lone Star quilt, now on display in the Gallatin History Museum.
Zelpha's Lone Star quilt
Lester never did remarry. He carefully preserved the quilt after Sarah’s death in 1924. We don’t know if Lester passed the wedding quilt to Louis when he married Dorothy, or if it remained with Lester until his death. But we have several generations of Sarah’s family to thank for its preservation and the stories attached to it.
Louis and Dorothy Reichman and children
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Mary Murphy is an American historian who began teaching at Montana State University in 1990. She received her MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taught at the University of Wyoming before coming to MSU. Along with colleagues Molly Kruckenberg, Zoe Ann Stoltz, and Jan Zauha, she is writing a culinary history of Montana.
Dr. Murphy taught courses in in the history of gender, the North American West, and the history of food at the undergraduate and graduate level. Among her books are Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936-1942; Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41; and Like a Family, The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. She has served as co-director and director of the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the American West and was the Michael P. Malone Professor of History from 2005-2010. In 2013 she was named a Distinguished Professor in the College of Letters and Science. Mary has won numerous prizes and fellowships for her research, teaching, and mentoring, and received the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award in 2013.
For more information:
Carolyn Ducey & Jordan Gregory. What’s in a Name: Inscribed Quilts. International Quilt Study Center & Museum, 2012.
Annie Hanshew, Border to Border: Historic Quilts & Quiltmakers of Montana. Montana Historical Society Press, 2009.
On friendship quilts:
https://worldquilts.quiltstudy.org/americanstory/engagement/friendship
On the Willcox Gibbs sewing machine:
https://ismacs.net/willcoxandgibbs/home.html
The Alderson Family papers, MSU Archives and Special Collections
The Reichman Family papers at the Gallatin History Museum