Quilts that inspire

This New York Beauty heirloom quilt was made
 in the 1860s and is featured on Page 60
of the book Florida Quilts.

I'm fresh from a visit to the American Quilter's Society Daytona Beach Quilt Week. I saw beautiful examples of fiber arts - both traditional piecework and art quilts - got inspired, and also got thinking about the threads of continuity that bind quilters.

The fiber arts today are a hobby for most enthusiasts and a career for some. I'm an experienced seamstress but a novice quilter, with one quilt, one star-themed block for the NASA quilt, and one table runner to my credit. (2022 update: I've reached intermediate quilt status, with several more done since I first wrote this post!) 

For women on the Florida frontier, quiltmaking was a necessity. Homemakers crafted bedcovers for family members and young women stitched quilts for their trousseaus. One such person was Sarah Asberry Brown Anderson.

Sarah's story is told in the 1992 book Florida Quilts, by Charlotte Allen Williams (University Press of Florida). Sarah lived in Wakulla County in North Florida when she started making the New York Beauty quilt pictured with this blog post. She was 12, and she dyed her homespun cotton fabric with tree bark solutions before cutting the pieces and hand-sewing the quilt. Sarah began the quilt in 1865 and finished it in 1869.

Williams writes that New York Beauty was a popular pattern in the late 1800s. Other designs popular in the late 19th century included:

• Friendship quilts that included embroidered signatures

• Log Cabin

• Irish Chain

• Album block quilts

• Crazy quilts

• Applique quilts that featured stylized flower designs

Sarah's descendants reported that she was proud of her New York Beauty quilt and preserved it through the years. One look at the photo and the level of craftsmanship is obvious. I'd be proud, too, if I'd cut and sewn together those hundreds of pieces into a beautiful finished whole. Having experimented with natural dyes, I can also attest to the quality of the fabric's colors.

The care given the New York Beauty is why it survived long enough to be documented in Florida Quilts. The book profiles some of the women and quilts uncovered during the Florida Quilt Heritage Project. That project, which I've written about before, did a remarkable job of bringing many women's lost stories back to life through their quilts.

Today, quiltmakers receive their just due and are credited for their work. The fiber arts are celebrated. This post is to pay homage to all the unsung needlewomen of the past.

View the Florida Quilt Project digital collection at The Quilt Index website. The Quilt Index is an open access digital repository.

Colorful names all that remain

Early Floridians weren't growing Costoluto Genovese
tomatoes like these, one of today's popular heirloom
tomato varieties. Many of the cultivars grown in pioneer
days are hard to find now.  (Photo by Gerri Bauer)

A year ago, I wrote about heirloom vegetables and fruits and promised to follow up with a post about heirloom tomato cultivars. Finally, here it is.

I'm both excited and perplexed by what I found about tomatoes in the pages of Florida newspapers dated 1901-1919. Excited because there were more named varieties in ads and articles than I expected to find. Perplexed because only two were familiar to me: Ponderosa and Spark's Earliana, and the latter is a variation of a name known to me.

I've grown a number of heirloom tomato varieties in my garden over the years. They've included a couple believed to have been grown in Florida until as late as the 1920s and 1930s: June Pink and Earliana -  probably shortened from Spark's Earliana. The June Pink didn't show up in my (admittedly unscientific and limited) research. Nor did Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Eva Purple Ball, Riesentraube, Costoloto Genovese, or Arkansas Traveler. All have produced tasty tomatoes in my Florida yard. As for Ponderosa - it was a fail in my garden the one time I tried to grow it.

So what did Florida pioneers grow when they set out their tomato seeds? My earliest find was also the most comprehensive. A December 1901 issue of the New Enterprise newspaper of Madison had a Farm and Garden article that addressed "newer introductions" of tomatoes. The names are great: Best of All, Dwarf Golden Champion, Early Nuby, Freedom, Fordhook Fancy, Improved Trophy, Lemon Yellow, Matchless, New Combination, State Fair, World's Fair.

A couple of other references made note of a tomato variously named Stone, Dwarf Stone, New Stone, and Livingston's Stone or Livingston's Globe. An October 1911 issue of the Pensacola Journal highlighted Stone as a "general favorite" for shipping purposes. Other tomatoes said to ship well were Beauty and Perfection.

The Ocala Seed Store in 1913 highlighted six types of tomato seeds for sale, according to a February 1913 issue of the Ocala Evening Star: Dwarf Champion, Early Detroit, Livingston's Globe, New Stone, Redfield Beauty, and Spark's Earliana. Seed cost $2 per pound.

Although the types of heirloom tomato varieties available to us has changed through the decades, one gardening caveat from the past remains true now. As the Pensacola Journal advised readers in 1911, "There are a great many seedsmen in this country, and very little attention should be paid to the many glowing descriptions given in catalogs."

Newspaper references in this blog post are from the Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website of the Library of Congress.