Crazy Quilt: Material Objects as Autobiography

Crazy Quilt: Material Objects as Autobiography

BY MEGAN WEISS

In the basement of the Rio Grande Depot housed alongside the manuscript and photograph collections of the Utah State Historical Society (USHS) is an artifact collection of over 31,000 historical items. After a five-year inventory and reconciliation project, these items have been aligned with their appropriate provenance and have been uploaded to a searchable catalog accessed through the Utah State History library and collections website. As one of the curators responsible for cataloging the artifacts over a multi-year period, I highlight here a specific item in the collection that suggests the oft-connection between material object and autobiography. This object, the collection, and material culture more generally present compelling questions for researchers, scholars, and educators of material culture and women’s history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor Emerita at Harvard and member of the USHS artifacts collection review team, has shown that in the right interpretive hands material culture offers a fruitful historical source. For Ulrich, textiles and household items are as important in filling in the “gaps” of social and women’s history as the written word. In the essay “Of Pens and Needles: Sources in Early American Women’s History,” she argued that “sophisticated source criticism invites us to turn the problem of documentation on its head, taking the supposed paucity of evidence as a fruitful point of inquiry rather than as a damper to research.” Stitchery, quilts, furniture, diaries, and other ordinary objects offer unconventional means of gaining insight into “class divisions, education, technology and commerce, family relations, attitudes toward the body, work and leisure, marriage and death.” 1 Furthermore, as the historian Alan Taylor noted in a review of The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, Ulrich showed how “through the transmission of names and objects women created lineages that sometimes paralleled, but often crosscut, the more conspicuous and official patrilineal system.” 2 In Ulrich’s work, material culture holds a certain power that runs parallel to the written word as source material, especially when considering the generational connections between women. Everyday objects are glimpses into the past that empower the telling of women’s stories that may have previously gone unnoticed or unstudied.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these themes of historical inquiry also arise when applied to the USHS’s own collection of historical artifacts. Consider a quilt in the collection created by the actress, seamstress, and Mormon pioneer Emma Green Bull in 1893. An intricate and unique piece made of randomly shaped fabrics from velvet to brocade and elaborately detailed embroidery, this “crazy quilt” represents a style fairly common in the late nineteenth century. Initially inspired by Japanese asymmetrical art, the first “crazy quilts” appeared at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and were subsequently appropriated by women elsewhere in the country, including Utah Territory. 3 Wealthy women displayed them as symbols of luxury and class. Not only were they a way to use scraps of valuable fabrics, the intricate herringbone and feather embroidery techniques required hours of labor and implied to the viewer that the quilter enjoyed a wealth of free time and great expertise. 4 Crazy quilts often incorporated common symbols: a natural “fairyland” theme of flowers, butterflies, and birds, or the spiderweb, a symbol of good luck. The most important symbols of crazy quilts, however, are those that are unique to the maker and tell a story of their life.

Emma Bull’s quilt combined many of these common themes alongside visual representations of her life as a Mormon pioneer woman. Created for display at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition Women’s Building, Bull revealed her identity as an immigrant from England with symbols: the British Union Jack, a gold harp, an anchor. Bull was the only member of her family to leave England for Utah; her solo journey on the Jersey in 1853 marked a transition from an English woman to a Mormon Utah pioneer. 5 Once in Utah, Emma married Joseph Bull in 1854 and raised three children. For a time she acted for the Dramatic Association at Salt Lake’s Social Hall. Primarily, though, she was a seamstress, and the crazy quilt’s elaborate herringbone and feather embroidery reflect her elevated skill with her craft.

In the quilt, Bull’s inclusion of Utah’s natural landscape in the stitching of local flora such as the sego lily speak to her adapted sense of place. She also incorporated symbols to represent her pride as a Utah resident: the skep beehive, LDS Temple, and Eagle Gate. Especially interesting is a detailed embroidery panel reading “HOME – 1847” and depicting a log cabin. It is unclear if this is a depiction of Bull’s own log cabin, built in 1847, or if it is a representation of the collective pioneer experience symbolized in the Duel cabin, still standing on West Temple. Another compelling symbol embroidered in the quilt is that of the mason’s tool, perhaps signaling to earlier ties between the LDS church and Stonemasons society or to her own family’s connection to the masonry craft. Other elements of this detailed quilt that remain to be solved are the “1847 Pioneer Press” embroidery and the dancing deer. Perhaps connection to a local business or an older English family crest could explain the inclusion of these elements.

After being exhibited in 1893, Bull’s crazy quilt came to the state historical society as an early acquisition sometime before 1960. For scholars and other observers, Bull’s quilt provides insight into the development of innovative textile crafts, millenarian religions, and migration trends. It is an example of an unconventional historical source that with some source criticism reveals insight into the history of textile crafting and folk art, nineteenth-century wealth and leisure, and Utah pioneer women. Similar to other autobiographical sources like a journal, this crazy quilt offers a “microhistory,” a historical frame that in the words of John Tosh “fills out in small-scale and human detail some of the social and cultural features that are otherwise known only as generalizations.” 6

Annette Weiner observed that history can be “concentrated in an object that, in its material substance, defies destruction. . . . [K]eeping an object defined as inalienable adds to the value of one’s past, making the past a powerful resource for the present and the future.” 7 As a source of historical understanding, artifacts are indispensable. Even when stripped of their temporal context, historic artifacts tell their

own story and hold their own meaning—tangible traces of our communal connection to the past. The historical society is proud to house a rich and varied collection of artifacts.

Notes

1 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Of Pens and Needles: Sources in Early American Women’s History,” Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (1990): 202, 205.

2 Alan Taylor, “Threads of History: Review of The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,” New Republic 226, no. 8/9 (2002): 41.

3 Beverly Gordon, “A Fairyland of Fabrics: The Victorian Crazy Quilt,” The International Quilt Study Center & Museum, University of Nebraska, accessed February 14, 2018, http://www.quiltstudy.org/exhibitions/ online_exhibitions/Fairyland/.

4 These observations come from Darcy Damstedt, a certified AQS Appraiser since 2008 who reviewed the Bull quilt in August 2015.

5 Orson Ferguson Whitney, History of Utah, Vol. 4 (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1904), 345.

6 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 5th ed. (Dorchester: Pearson Education Limited, 2010), 82.

7 Annette Weiner, “Inalienable Wealth,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 2 (1985): 2

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