Quilt revival had Florida flair

The Palm Beach Post published
this quilt pattern in 1933.

Funny how lifestyle trends come and go. That applies to quiltmaking as much as to anything else. 

On  Feb. 14, 1928, the Miami Herald ran an article that noted "old fashioned quilts are coming back into vogue." Specialty stores were said to carry patchwork and bed covers common in "grandmothers' day." If you figure roughly 20 years per generation, then grandmothers' day would have been 40 or more years previous - the 1880s. 

The trend rippled across the country, not just in Miami. The Florida version included a tropical twist. The May 3, 1929, issue of the Miami Herald featured a column offering home decorating advice specific to the region's climate. The column by Grace Norman Tuttle recommended homemakers use family heirloom quilts as substitutes for then-popular Oriental wall hangings. 

The quilts were considered "mural decorations." In one Miami home, a quilt was attached to the wall behind a bed and served as a type of wall-decor headboard. The effect must have been dramatic, because the top of the quilt was placed where the wall met the ceiling. The quilts used in the featured home were family heirloom pieces. 

The Herald and other Florida newspapers also featured quilt patterns for sale on a regular basis, for people who wanted to create new quilts. This, too, was a national trend. Newspapers all over the country pounced on the popularity of the quilt revival and offered patterns. Readers would mail a few cents or a dollar and in return would receive a pattern or several patterns for making the featured items. 

One of my favorites was printed in the Dec. 27, 1933, edition of the Palm Beach Post. It's perfectly Floridian: it's based on palm leaves. The newspaper writer called Palm Pattern No. 469 as "a striking quilt pattern." I agree. You can see it in the photo at the top of this post.

The writer stated that the palm is a symbol of victory and a longtime decorative emblem. Perhaps that antiquity explains why the pattern that looks so Floridian is attributed to an unknown quiltmaker "of generations ago." 

An aside: I checked Barbara Brackman's BlockBase Plus database to see what I could find about the palm leaf pattern. She lists four published names for this pattern, with the earliest dating to 1922. It could have been an older pattern, just one that had been unpublished until then.

To get the pattern and instructions, a reader had to send 10 cents to the Palm Beach Post's Needlecraft Department. Which was, inexplicably, in New York City. Or maybe not inexplicably. Requests for patterns offered by newspapers nationwide probably funneled into a few clearinghouses. 

But I'm sold on the Florida look of this one. The pattern was said to be especially lovely when made with a green print on a white background. The quilt was supposed to be simple to make. I'm skeptical. Bias edges and multiple matching seam points don't make for a simple quilt. But quiltmakers generally don't back down from a sewing challenge. I'm game.

Moonlit night, full of mosquitoes

Look familiar? Not to me. The image from a
  Sun-Sentinel news feature shows Fort
 Lauderdale beach in the 1920s.

These days, fourteen hour of travel will take you more than halfway around the world. A hundred years ago, the full fourteen hours were needed just to get a person from North Florida to South Florida. 

In his autobiography, Gold Coast Pioneer (Exposition Press, 1953), M.A. Hortt describes the journey he took in 1910:

The train left Jacksonville at nine o'clock in the morning. It crawled along through the heat and mosquitoes almost at a snail's pace for fourteen long, weary hours, finally arriving in Fort Lauderdale at eleven o'clock that night. (100).

It was a beautiful moonlit night, he writes, during which he was almost devoured by mosquitoes.

The next morning, he discovered Fort Lauderdale's business district consisted of two stores. "There were no electric lights, telephones or paved streets" (101).

That wasn't the only surprise. Hortt was the designated representative sent to inspect land he and fellow Utah streetcar conductors had purchased west of Fort Lauderdale. He was to plant a test crop of tomatoes. When he got to Florida, he discovered the purchased land was underwater.

M.A. Hortt photo is
from his autobiography.

Conditions were blamed on the rainy season -- Hortt's visit was in June. Nonetheless, he soon turned his attention to real estate and went on to sell land in and around Fort Lauderdale for thirty years. He  served as the city's mayor in 1934-34. In his 1953 autobiography, he writes that he saw the area's potential right away:

"I thought I recognized great possibilities in Fort Lauderdale, with its beautiful waterways, sandy beaches, wonderful climate, bright sunshine, cooling ocean breezes and tropical verdure backed up by the fertile Everglades, and decided to take full advantage of this opportunity." (103-104)

If that sentence sounds promotional to you - it does to me! - keep in mind Hortt wrote those words decades after his 1910 arrival. Decades after successfully extolling the virtues of the area to would-be buyers.

Hortt did plant tomatoes, just not on swampland. His wife joined him in Fort Lauderdale and they bought a riverfront house on five acres. The garden tomatoes were a foot high, he writes, and growing alongside cucumbers, beans, cabbages, and squash when an October hurricane smashed  into the area, "raising havoc in general" (104) and raining for three days.

The Hortts evacuated to a hotel, where people fished from the front porch after the storm. The area had become one large lake. Hortt needed to use a boat to check on the family home. He found water lapping at the main floor, which was three feet above ground.

It's hard to imagine a rural Fort Lauderdale with five acres of riverfront land devoted to one homesite. Wikipedia says the city's population in 2017 was almost 200,000. 

It's also hard to imagine South Florida as outlaw country, but that's what it was back in the pioneer years. Hortt writes that he "grew up in the 'wild and wooly' West and thought all of the gangsters and bad men lived out there" (106). Once in Florida, he discovered the Ashley Gang. They were, he says, "as notorious as the Butch Cassidy gang out West" (106).

Something to think about next time I'm down in the giant metropolitan area Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale-Miami has become. 

WPA Guidebook Dishes Up Tasty Tidbits

This photo of men planting celery in Florida is from Florida,
A Guide to the Southernmost State. 
(Photo credit: Farm Security Administration)

Since we're in the season of celebratory eating, I have a good excuse for venturing into one of my favorite topics. Food! Today's post looks at some culinary and agricultural tidbits from mid-1930s Florida.

My source is Florida, A Guide to the Southernmost State. Published in 1939, it was a Works Project Administration initiative written by authors in the Federal Writers' Project. Briefly, both federal programs gave people the dignity of jobs during the Great Depression. 

The writers' project created guidebooks to the United States. In doing so, the authors captured - and preserved - portraits in time. I treasure my copy. It's a snapshot of Florida in the 1930s. Many modern residents and visitors wouldn't recognize the place. The book's foreward says Florida "is frequently referred to as the last American frontier." In the 1930s!

The book offers information on Florida history as well as then-modern culture. That makes it even more appealing to me.

These gleanings about food are mainly from the scenic driving tours the authors laid out for visitors.

• In 1918, farmers in tiny Hastings earned $20 a barrel for their potatoes because there was a potato scarcity in the North (355). That's the equivalent of about $350 in 2017. Fun fact: Hastings is still known as Florida's potato capital.
• In springtime, even yards of city houses were planted with celery and lettuce in Sanford, "capital of the Florida celery belt" (360). 
• 5,000 to 8,000 pounds of crystallized fruit peel were produced every week during the winter season in Davenport's Citrus Candy Factory (367). Let me say, if you've never tasted homemade or locally made crystallized citrus peel, you are missing a treat. I made some from tangerine peels before my Robinson tangerine tree succumbed to citrus greening. Yum. 
• Here's what was in typical lunch buckets of workers at a cypress mill in Sanderson: cornbread, black-eyed peas boiled with salt pork, and a jar of cane syrup. The worker poured the syrup into the lunch bucket's lid and sopped it up with the cornbread. Occasionally, the workers ate greens and bacon, pork chops and beans, biscuits, boiled sweet potatoes, and cowpeas (field peas) (423).
• An "All-Day Sing" was a big social event in Chipley. Winners were determined by popular acclaim ("volume and enthusiasm"). At noon, everyone stopped to eat the dinners they'd brought from home: fried chicken, rabbit, squirrel, vegetables, coffee, and "mounds of cornbread" (445).

Was anybody eating celery or white potatoes at the All-Day Sing? Peeling a tangerine? The different sections of Florida were somewhat isolated from one another, but still. I also don't get why entries about backwoods gatherings or work lunches, in this book or others, never seem to mention fresh citrus as a dessert. 

It's all enough to make me hungry. For food ... and for more social history.