A Great Quilting Find

We have been cleaning out an old store building and found some beautiful quilt tops, and quilts that I know some of you would love to see.

As a quilter, I was so thrilled to find these fantastic examples of early 20th century patchwork. They are all hand pieced and the finished pieces are all hand quilted.

The makers of the quilts are unknown, but we found them in the belongings of three sisters who lived in the Highland Community until about 1965. Two never married, and one did; but only for about two weeks! Then she came back home, to live with her sisters, run a general store and live for the rest of her days.



They were, "the Gardner girls." Their names were Artie Gardner, Oceania Gardner(pronounced O-CEE-NEE), and Maudie Gardner Epps (she was the one who was married, briefly).
The quality of the fabrics is remarkable, I believe. I've found other quilts made by the women in this community, and they are mostly utilitarian, and by the time I've found them, super soft with use. They used mostly feed sacks, or men's clothing scraps. They usually have handmade batting, with some seeds still evident in the cotton.
But these quilts, especially the tops, are made of finer fabrics. There are very few heavy fabrics in the ones that were in condition suitable to save - but the well-used ones did have more of those.
The fabrics in these unfinished tops is a nicer quality than I have seen in the quilts in this community. While they are still patchwork, with lots of different scraps, they definitely were made with more color matching, and a bit of artistry.

I have a quilt from my New England great grandmother, from around 1900, and it features fabrics similar to the ones in these tops. The colors are bright, and vivid, and remind me of fabrics modern quilters call "from the Mills," meaning from the textile mills of the Northeast in the post-Civil War era.
I'm no expert, but I find few fabrics newer than 1945, or so.
I think that the Gardner girls, as owners of a store where mail order service was in evidence, were able to acquire finer fabrics for their handwork than the local families could.
The makers also took care with details like matching sashings, and cornerstones - quite common for modern quilters who sew for the art, and not usually because they NEED quilts. But the quilts of the farm families I have seen around here seldom have evidence of much more than the very basic design details - they needed quilts, and lots of them in their homes, and they needed them to be finished, and warm! Homes were heated with wood heat until the 1970s, for the most part.
The quiltmakers would have also been farmers, as was everyone around here, but I think they did a bit better than most folks.
The tops are in remarkable shape, except for some pest soiling. They were stored in a wooden quilt box (not that I think it was made for that, but it was full of quilts and tops). Tops are usually in better shape than quilts, I have found. I'm sure this is because they were never in actual use.
One of the quilts is a bit wonky - the others are quite square for hand piecework. Perhaps a child helped? Or perhaps it was taken in trade.

I imagine that some of these may have been taken in trade, too. Maudie's records show that lots of people were allowed credit purchases. Maybe these were given to them? But the work is overall, except for the wonky log cabin, very uniform.

I plan to display the quilts in the store building, which were are attempting to restore to some manner of historical accuracy.
I even washed three of the tops, and aside from a few hours of worry when the water in the tub turned DARK GREEN, from the dyes of the obviously unwashed fabrics used in the sashing. It actually didn't bleed over to the pretty white background fabric, though!

And, by the way, see this dog?

Do not harbor kind thoughts about her. She is only waiting until my back is turned so that she can drag one, off the line if necessary, down to the barn to sleep on it! She is the enemy!