Harriet Powers Bible Quilt

[18thVirginia]

Came across this the other day and it's one of my favorite quilts ever. Harriet Powers was a former slave who lived in Georgia . The quilt is post ACW, but Mrs. Powers had lived through the years of slavery.

The original is in the Smithsonian and I was lucky enough to see it there when it was still exhibited--it's just special. It's applique, with special meanings for each patch. Sort of an 'Early Baltimore Album meets African in Rural Georgia' style.

Born in 1837 in Georgia, Powers created only 2 quilts which remain. She was selling them at a crafts fair near the small farm owned by Harriet and her husband in Winterville, Georgia. A southern white woman purchased them and this one currently resides in the Smithsonian in Washington, D. C. They combine African style applique and European storytelling techniques.

 

[18thVirginia]

The artist Harriet Powers.

 

[18thVirginia]

The other Powers quilt.

 

[18thVirginia]

A full description of Harriet Powers, her quilts and her life. She was born a slave near Athens, Georgia in 1837 and lived until 1910. She and her husband were able to own their own farm at some point after the Civil War.

 

[donna]

Great find. Thanks for sharing.

beautiful quilts

 

[chellers]

These are beautiful, 18th. What treasures! Thank you.

If no objections, I would love to show these in the quilt thread with a link to your post here. Please let me know. Thanks.

 

[18thVirginia]

Sure thing, as I wasn't trying to hijack your thread, chellers.

 

[chellers]

Sure thing, as I wasn't trying to hijack your thread, chellers.

Not at all, 18th. I wish everyone would post their quilts in that thread. It is everyone's thread, and was set up so all quilts could be found in one place. Thanks, 18th.

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Yes, I could see where some of these quilts should be highlighted in their own thread plus put in place in the quilt thread, you know? This is such a unique and powerful work, gosh- kept meaning to remember to comment on it. Had spent quite a bit of time trying to figure some of the blocks/panels out the other evening.

RobertP has a family quilt in a thread, from a couple years ago, wonder if a mod would mind moving it to the quilt thread?Sorry to be such a noodge about his quilt- it's just SO darn amazing, can't stop bringing it up! Tell you what, that quilt would make a SUPER children's book, a way to tell of the Red River Campaign from a child's perspective. Think I'll ' at' Robert. Wonder if he'd mind getting thrown under the bus here in Ladies Tea, asking about that quilt. Ok, it wouldn't 'at', have to go dig it up.


Thanks for the time, all these works of art. Harriet's is so indicative of folk art of the time, just flattens me- to pull it off in fabric? Forget it, she's amazing.

 

[18thVirginia]

Harriet Powers did give a description to the quilt buyer, Jennie Smith, of the meanings of the various blocks, many of which are biblical. Although one is based on a day of Canadian wildfire smoke in the atmosphere in the 1790s and another "The Stars Fell" on a meteor shower.

 

[18thVirginia]

Here's another quilt from slavery days, by Hannah and Emma Greenfield. Hannah was a slave in North Carolina when she pieced this cotton, wool, silk and velvet quilt. Her daughter Emma finished the backing in 1895.

..

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Harriet Powers did give a description to the quilt buyer, Jennie Smith, of the meanings of the various blocks, many of which are biblical. Although one is based on a day of Canadian wildfire smoke in the atmosphere in the 1790s and another "The Stars Fell" on a meteor shower.

Need to look that up- Nov, something? Must have been incredible, can't imagine. I think I know the block, was wondering what that one meant. Ah. November, 1833, and every 33 years afterwards the Leonid Meteor showers become extremely intense. Wonder if it's the 1833 or the later she's referring to although every November 13th is supposed to have increased activity? Winding down now. This scared an awful lot of people into doing some good- pretty cool to see the event in a quilt. Don't mean to turn your thread, sorry. Just really love her stories.

"Another story came from Samuel Rogers. "I heard one of the children cry out, in a voice expressive of alarm: 'Come to the door, father, the world is surely coming to an end.' Another exclaimed: 'See! The whole heavens are on fire! All the stars are falling!' These cries brought us all into the open yard, to gaze upon the grandest and most beautiful scene my eyes have ever beheld. It did appear as if every star had left its moorings, and was drifting rapidly in a westerly direction, leaving behind a track of light which remained visible for several seconds."

Amanda, a slave girl from Tennessee, also remembered this night. "Somebody in the quarters started yellin' in the middle of the night to come out and to look up at the sky. We went outside and there they was a fallin' everywhere! Big stars coming down real close to the groun' and just before they hit the ground they would burn up! We was all scared. Some o' the folks was screamin', and some was prayin'. We all made so much noise, the white folks came out to see what was happenin'. They looked up and then they got scared, too. "


"But then the white folks started callin' all the slaves together, and for no reason, they started tellin' some of the slaves who their mothers and fathers was, and who they'd been sold to and where. The old folks was so glad to hear where their people went. They made sure we all knew what happened, you see, they thought it was Judgment Day."

This event was first recorded in 902 A.D and Plato told of similar meteor showers in his writings. There have been other accounts of the Leonid meteor showers, but the 1833 shower was the most spectacular ever recorded. I wondered why 1833 was different and after some research I found the conditions were prefect and the meteor shower was closer to the earth than in other years.

Some day there may be a meteor shower as spectacular as the one in 1833, but we will know there is no reason to worry because it's not the end of the world.
http://www.richmond-dailynews.com/2012/12/in-1833-the-sky-fell-but-life-went-on/

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Here's another quilt from slavery days, by Hannah and Emma Greenfield. Hannah was a slave in North Carolina when she pieced this cotton, wool, silk and velvet quilt. Her daughter Emma finished the backing in 1895.View attachment 49250 ..

SO grateful any of the quilts made through these years survived. Our fellow citizens had such a tough time of it, gee whiz- while living as enslaved people had no resources other than thrift by which to create warm quilts for themselves. Post war only a few years of scant ' progress' before laws crushed and shoved them back down into poverty. If they'd ever gotten a foot squarely on a bottom rung. Some, sure, through work and good fortune. These lovely quilts saw much, much use or probably had to be sold. I'd have to guess not many survived inside families of origin.

Before anyone runs screaming to find exceptions, I'm also sure there are exceptions to that, thankfully. Bet not many. Little different, but Native American families get to see their family treasure in museums ( to this day ), still trying to point out these were ' liberated' from them during the awful years when our government disallowed them to own anything. You hate to see Heritage only reserved for those who can afford to own it, that's all. Or were/are permitted to.

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Another Harriet Powers quilt

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Isabella Chalmers, an enslaved woman, is the crafter who made this incredibly tedious for one's eyes piece, can't imagine!

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

There was no artist listed on this, rats, a woman who had obtained a normal condition for herself, no longer an enslaved person created this one. Something chipper about it!

 

[James B White]

Here's another quilt from slavery days, by Hannah and Emma Greenfield. Hannah was a slave in North Carolina when she pieced this cotton, wool, silk and velvet quilt. Her daughter Emma finished the backing in 1895.View attachment 49250 ..

So what do you think? That's a classic, if somewhat folksy, crazy quilt, right down to the inclusion of a mix of silk and velvet with cotton and wool, which is virtually unknown in earlier quilts. It would be extremely consistent with the 1895 date, when that style was incredibly popular for a brief decade or two. But did Hannah actually piece it pre-1865, anticipating the style a generation earlier?

I'm betting the mother pieced it, but not while she was enslaved, and the daughter added the backing, as the story said, and somehow it got conflated that the mother pieced it while a slave.

But that's based on old research. Has there been more work done lately on the origins of crazy quilts? When I looked into it a decade or so ago, there were literally two or three that supposedly had provenances earlier, which were disputed because they were such outliers, and the vast, vast majority were clustered in the late 19th Century crazy quilt era of obsession, or newer, but I don't know if that's still the consensus among quilt historians.

 

[18thVirginia]

James, I've taken a couple of days because I've looked at the quilt a couple of times and wanted to see how it hit me. The writing with it says that some of the fabrics were homespun cotton or wool, so I guess their thoughts that it was earlier than the crazy quilt era relate to this.

My guess would be that Hannah was a seamstress in her owner's household and that the fabrics were scraps of dresses, shirts. I'd guess that she pieced some parts of it, especially the small rectangular areas with numerous smaller pieces within them at an earlier age, perhaps during slavery times. And then later added more fabric as it became available.

It looks like she was playing with a variety of different patterns in individual blocks. I have some sampler blocks that I got a long time ago in Pennsylvania, where the person never completed the quilt or the blocks were way too complicated or difficult. I have some string blocks from much later with a Texas star pattern, again the person never completed a quilt.

I like the quilt a lot because of its strong color sense and pattern. Used to have a book of art quilts by early American women, which unfortunately I lost in a move. They all had this strong sense of color and amazing combination of color and pattern--but were finished by average women with average materials, but women with an obvious artistic bent and sense of color. I think Hannah falls into that group.

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Crazy quilts have to be my favorite- despite the incredible workmanship you see on other quilts, they just are. I came across one the other day from the south done by a woman who had been born an enslaved person, but she said she had def. done it later . Massive, too! That overgrown work of art made you smile, then want to go to bed with it and a book. I'd heard the crazy quilts had their origin in the African American population, did not know if that was true. You know me, found it crushing on the whole Santa thing- trying to be careful about what I " Golly Gee, Really? " over.

Thank goodness for the forum.

 

[James B White]

James, I've taken a couple of days because I've looked at the quilt a couple of times and wanted to see how it hit me. The writing with it says that some of the fabrics were homespun cotton or wool, so I guess their thoughts that it was earlier than the crazy quilt era relate to this.

The problem is that the age of the fabrics only puts an upper limit on the age of the quilt, but not a lower one. A quilt could be made in 1890 and include scraps from 1860--and in fact, it might, if the person was scrounging some of the fabric and it took 30 years for clothes to be worn out, torn into rags and patches, then the scraps from those saved until there were enough. But a quilt couldn't be made in 1860 of 1890 fabrics. So older fabrics make an older date possible, but given the frugal circumstances, I don't think that's necessarily conclusive.

There's a belief that the crazy quilt design was some sort of primitive quilt pattern because it was random in both shapes and fabrics, and then more organized quilts grew out of it, but I've seen no evidence that crazy quilts were in fact more common among older, poor, earlier and/or uneducated quilters, while others were making nine-patch, applique pictures, and more formal designs. On the contrary, those types of quilts show up first, with crazy quilts being the latecomer. One could say that all the poor people's quilts got worn out, but one doesn't even see images of crazy quilts in genre paintings or descriptions in the usual pre-1865 sources, where poor people had overshot coverlets, tied quilts, blankets, or traditional quilts.

So looking at the aesthetic of the quilt, I'd say it fits solidly in the crazy quilt genre, just as one could look at the Bible quilts and say they fit in the applique/Baltimore album genre, or the quilt in post#15 and say it fits in the log cabin genre, right down to the warmer central square.

The question then is, when did the crazy quilt genre start? Unless one thinks it was a primitive kind of quilt that had always been around and all other more organized quilts descended from it, and then the style could not be used for dating, but to me, there's a lack of evidence for that.

They all had this strong sense of color and amazing combination of color and pattern--but were finished by average women with average materials, but women with an obvious artistic bent and sense of color. I think Hannah falls into that group.

I don't disagree at all. In this case though, like most quilters, I think she was working within an established style.