Quilting the Civil War: Part 1

the how & why of inspiration

By the end of summer, the Clara Barton quilt was complete. It came together effortlessly. All of the fabrics in the quilt had been in my collection for years, just waiting for this moment. It was a moment suspended in time thanks to the Covid lockdown that began on March 15, 2020.

Suddenly my schedule was open for an unforeseeable future. I realized how lucky I was to have flown home on February 28 after filming three episodes of Creative Living at the KENM PBS station in Portales, New Mexico. I was more than thankful that I was permitted to be present in the eerily empty and quiet halls of the hospital for the birth of my granddaughter, Olivia, on March 6th. I never did get a refund, nor would my travel insurance cover the airfare expenditure for the canceled Fibre Arts Australia teaching opportunity in April. I was upset, of course, but having been to Australia three times, and all things considered, I accepted it rather easily.

March on the mountain is bleak when you must stay home. I quickly comforted myself by hauling three containers of fabric down from my studio to the mental and emotional comfort of the kitchen. I would make Fragments. And I did. Hundreds of them, that I renamed Fabric Poems because they did not have a photograph and quote like my original Fragments did. The poems were my love letters and connection to the outer world, mailing them across the US to fabric lovers and patrons of the fiber arts.

The inspiration for the Clara Barton quilt and the 15 others in the series was my gift from Covid. It was just one of the positive outcomes stemming from what many consider, the worst period of our lives. Walking down the driveway to get the mail in the early days of lockdown, it suddenly hit me - the many similarities between what we were experiencing and what the country had experienced during the Civil War: fear; major disruptions to daily living; separation; isolation from families; food and supply shortages; mass confusion, distrust, fear and worry; political strife; illness; a lack of medical knowledge and solutions; and tragic deaths. And we had something the Civil War era did not - phones, FaceTime, Zoom, television news, and endless entertainment streaming.

I wanted to acknowledge and honor the work of civilians during the Civil War the way we were acknowledging the front-line medical workers. For so many it’s been a page, a chapter if you’re lucky, in our history books with an occasional black and white photo. How could I draw attention to a “history repeats itself” situation? How could I make people see what I observed?

Since the advent of the affordable home color printer in the late 90s, I have been using photographs to illustrate quotes and tell stories. At the same time, the Library of Congress was putting our history online with documents, photographs, stories, and more. I had already been searching for old, public-domain photos to use in my art. When I discovered the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War photographs, I fell down a delightful rabbit-hole of fantastic photographs, fascinating people, and often, their stories, stories I was compelled to tell through their photos and my fabric. I researched primary sources, and bought way too many Civil War history, bios and social study books. The more I knew, the more I was inspired and the more I wanted to know. I thrived on the details.

I spent 53 years living 2.5 miles from the house Clara Barton built to house the American Red Cross and briefly attended a college less than a mile from the Fredericksburg battlefield. You can’t go far in and outside of the Washington, DC metropolitan area without encountering Civil War history. We did the touristy day-trip thing to Gettysburg when I was a child. Visiting Jenny Wade’s house left, to this day, the biggest impression on me. Jenny was the only civilian casualty during the Gettysburg battle. While kneading bread at her sister’s house, she was shot and killed by one of the 150 stray bullets that hit the house. I saw the deadly bullet hole in the door. At the time, I had an eerie feeling that I was her in a past life. Now, my greatest Gettysburg impression comes from Elizabeth Thorn, who, at 7 months pregnant in the July heat, single-handedly buried 103 war casualties after the battle, while her husband, the cemetery caretaker, was away fighting with the 138th Pennsylvania Infantry. It’s stories like this that drew me in. They needed to be told.

To gain more insight and a sense of the reality of it all, we visited Covid-safe places.

Battlefields: Antietam, Balls Bluff, Monocacy, Manassas, Brandy Station, South Mountain, Shepherdstown, Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg (of course) and Monterey Mountain pass near Blue Ridge Summit which was the site of a skirmish just 1.7 miles from my present home.

Museums: National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD and the Graffiti House in Brandy Station, VA, so named because of the graffiti created by the signatures and drawings of soldiers who passed through or spent time there.

1. Antietam Bridge, 2 & 3. Graffiti House, 4. CW Medical Museum, 5. Jenny Wade, 6. Elizabeth Thorn

I hope you’ll return for Part 2 next week to discover which stories I ended up telling and why. I’ll share my difficulties turning stories into quilts, the impetus to complete the series, lessons learned, insight gained, and the other gifts that resulted from this Covid-inspired creative endeavor.

Clara Barton

Quotes of the Week

Though it is little that one woman can do, still I crave the privilege of doing it.
Clara Barton in a Letter to I.W. Denney, seeking permission to go to the front, March 30, 1862

When I reached [home], and looked in the mirror, my face was still the color of gunpowder, a deep blue. Oh yes I went to the front!–Clara Barton, writing about returning home from Antietam