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Extracted from articles written by
Mary
Kate Jordan for the Monterey News
Several
quilt documenters and a corps of other volunteers gathered in Sheffield
on the last Saturday in April, 2001 to welcome the first Berkshire
County museums and residents to participate in the Massachusetts Quilt
Documentation Project, with the Berkshire Quilt Guild as the local
sponsor. Sixteen of the 38 quilts documented that day were from
Monterey. Fifteen make up part of the textiles collection at The Bidwell
House Museum; one is a McAllester family heirloom. This article, the
first of three, will focus on The Carlson Quilt, a gift to the Bidwell
House from Betty Lee Carlson. |
A
letter accompanying the gift states that Mrs. Carlson’s great
grandmother, Matilda Oldfield Gerber, made “The Carlson Quilt”. The
family, originally from Vermont, had migrated to Richland County, Ohio,
many years before Matilda was born in 1828. She married David Gerber in
1849 and they had eleven children. Matilda died in 1915, nine years
after the death of her husband, who had been a Civil War Veteran. The
quilt was handed down from mother to daughter until Mrs. Carlson donated
it to the museum. |
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According to Marjorie Childers, who documented the quilt’s history, it is
constructed with rows of cotton nine-patch and solid cotton squares, laid
diagonally, or ‘on point’. |
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The smallest squares -- the ones which are lined up three by three to make
the nine-patch blocks, measure two and one quarter inches along each side.
Hand pieced and hand quilted, the multicolored quilt measures sixty four
and one-half by seventy two and three quarters inches overall. |
The binding is made from pieces of the same fabric used to create the
pattern on the top of the quilt. Ms.
Childers estimates that it was made around 1850, so it is possible to
speculate that it may have been made as a wedding quilt or, more likely,
early in Matilda’s marriage.
“The Carlson Quilt”, she also noted, is structurally sound,
in excellent condition, with only a bit of fading on the front and
staining on the back to show for its age. |
Click
here for part two, featuring "whole cloth" quilts in the
collection |
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