On a May Saturday more than 100 years ago, friends and family gathered at the home of Willis Willocks of Friendsville, Tennessee, to celebrate his 35th birthday. After enjoying a three-course noon meal and presenting Willocks with his gifts, the guests spent the afternoon sewing quilt squares, “making him [Willocks] a real nice quilt, each square bearing the name of the giver,” The Maryville Times reported in its May 12, 1920, edition.
The archives of this and other regional newspapers are full of similar snippets: a December 1919 meeting of the Ladies Aid and Missionary Society in Waynesville, North Carolina, where an all-day “quilting” yielded six quilts for the Baulfour Orphanage; a “fine day” in April 1890 where the men gathered to work at John Shuler’s place in Deep Creek, while their wives spent the day quilting; a young people’s social near Maryville, Tennessee, in February 1894 where, after spending the day quilting with the older women, the girls invited the young men to “help shake the cat” — a tradition in which a cat was placed in the center of the quilt as the girls shake its edges. The direction of the cat’s jump was said to indicate which girl would be the next to be married.
Communal quilting
Quilts, commonly associated with the self-sufficiency and frugality that have long characterized Appalachian life, represented far more to the people living here than a warm nighttime covering.
“Quilts convey comfort and love,” said quilt historian Merikay Waldvogel. A resident of Knoxville, Tennessee, since 1977, she’s been enamored with quilts since the mismatched blocks of a North Carolina Lily pattern caught her eye in the window of an Illinois antique shop in 1974. “They’re precious, and every quilt is one-of-a-kind. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in making a quilt.”
Often in Appalachia, that work was shared within communities. Women might sew their quilt patches together during quiet moments at home, but quilting the decorative top layer with the backing and insulative cotton batting frequently became a social event.
“It offered the women that were doing it an opportunity to be creative, and it offered them an opportunity also to socialize,” said Park Ranger Jeanine Ferrence. “That’s something that’s really common in Appalachian communities is taking work and making it into a social event. You see that not just with quilts, but with agricultural work like threshing together or a barn raising.”
In an era when most written documents focused on the lives of men, quilts served as a lasting testament to the artistry, thriftiness, industriousness and social connectedness of women. Taken together, the fabrics, threads, stitching and block patterns in each quilt tell a story. Sometimes, they even reveal the names of their makers, as is the case with so-called friendship quilts like the one Willocks received.
“They would put their names on each block, either in ink or embroidered,” Waldvogel said. “They were meant as gifts, and they are really important historical documents, because women rarely make it into any history book, but they made their mark often on quilts.”
Pride in provision
Though quilting is often thought of as synonymous with Appalachian culture, the technique of stitching multiple layers of fabric into a padded textile originated millennia ago on the other side of the world. Medieval Europeans later used quilting to make armor padding, clothing and bed covers, and these quilting and needlework traditions crossed the Atlantic with their descendants during the colonial era. In the Appalachians, European settlers, Native Americans and free and enslaved Africans all developed unique aesthetics and cultural traditions around quilting.
However, for the first part of America’s national history, quilt-making was not nearly as widespread as it later became. Cutting up laboriously hand-woven fabrics just to sew them back together was an unnecessarily complicated way to make a blanket, and, especially in the Smokies, most people were still weaving their own fabric until the mid-1800s. That’s when the Industrial Revolution that originated in Great Britain during the 1760s finally began blossoming in America. The advent of machine-woven cloth made quilting much more practical, and therefore popular. But even in the pre-industrial era, Appalachian women were expressing their artistic talents through quilting.
“Weaving is a really core part of quilt-making in the Appalachians,” Waldvogel said.
During the Civil War in particular, there was a “renewed interest” in handweaving when wartime blockades cut off the commercial fabric trade.
“They felt pride in being able to produce something from their own hands, their own farms,” Waldvogel said. “They were overcoming the hardships of the Civil War by going back to weaving.”
One of her favorite stories concerns a quilt made of homespun linsey, a coarse fabric of wool and cotton. Waldvogel interviewed the quilt’s owner, Willie Ellen Atchley, in the early 1980s and heard how, as a child in the 1910s, she would sleep with her sister in the attic of their Sevier County cabin under a pile of quilts. The heavy, handwoven linsey quilt sat on top, holding the other quilts down. Even on mornings when they woke to find snow on top of the linsey quilt, the children stayed warm.
The Walker Sisters, who lived in their cabin at Little Greenbrier until the last of them died in 1966, also had a linsey quilt among their impressive trove of patchwork.
In addition to weaving their own fabric, some families produced their own cotton batting. Waldvogel once spoke with a woman named Georgia Mize who said that during the 1930s, her mother would grow a row of cotton in their Sevier County garden every summer, harvesting the cotton bolls to dry by the fire during wintertime. The children would be tasked with separating out the seeds so their mother could card and comb the fibers. At first Waldvogel thought it was a one-off tale, “and then I began to hear that story from other people too,” she said.
A national pastime
Store-bought fabric was the more common quilting material, especially after the Civil War. Cotton print fabric became easy to get, as did women’s magazines featuring quilt block patterns.
The block is the pattern in which fabric patches are sewn together. Joining multiple blocks forms the decorative top side of the quilt. These blocks were often given names that reveal something about the lives, values and beliefs of the people who used them. The Churn Dash block, for example, refers to a tool farming families used to make their own butter, the Bear Paw to the footprint of the mountains’ most iconic residents and the Crown of Thorns to the crucifixion of Christ.
concluded in 1958. Credit: GSMNP Archives photo
“People reflected in the names they gave to blocks what was important to them in their everyday life,” Ferrence said.
Often, quilt patterns blended frugality with artistry. In the Smokies, there was a specific type of “crazy quilt” — a quilt made from scraps of fabric sewn together with no particular block pattern — that, rather than the more typical silk or satin, used lightweight wool fabric and woolen thread embroidery. Similarly, the string quilt was made of cotton scrap materials such as bits of fabric left over from other projects, or intact scraps cut from worn-out clothes. During the 20th century, through the 1960s, many families made quilts and clothing from feed sack fabric. Mountain people “just did not want to throw things away,” Waldvogel said.
Throughout America’s history, moments of national celebration have spurred renewed interest in quilting. The centennial in 1876 saw an explosion of blankets featuring eagles, flags and patriotic color schemes. Another spike in interest came 100 years later during the bicentennial. Quilting has become something of a national pastime — but with unique expression in the Smokies.
“Quilts represent hard work, generosity, good will, doing the right thing,” said Waldvogel. “That’s what we want in our country. Those are the traditions that we all want as humans.”
Learn more about the Smokies’ quilting tradition through the Fabric of Appalachia, a national quilt-along hosted by Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Each week, a tutorial on how to create a traditional quilt block —and its connections to American and Appalachian history — will be posted. In addition, the park is holding in-person stitching bees from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 22, at Sugarlands Training Room (beside the visitor center), and Saturday, Sept. 19, on the Oconaluftee Visitor Center porch.
Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. Learn more at SmokiesLife.org, or reach the author at hollyk@smokieslife.org.