Quilts played key role in Civil War

(Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series about classes offered through the Winter/Spring Sauk Rapids-Rice Community Education Program.)

by Dennis Dalman

editor@thenewsleaders.com

For decades in the American South, female slaves did the lion’s share of work in white homes, including the sewing chores. But during the Civil War, many white women decided to learn sewing, and it was the slaves who taught them how to do it.

The reason white women – even some of the wealthy pampered “belles” in the ante-bellum plantations – wanted to learn sewing is so they could make quilts for soldiers away at the war fronts. It was all part of a charitable war effort, and similar efforts were undertaken in the North, as well.

Homemade quilts can tell the story of an historical era, said Corrine Lanz of Sauk Rapids. Lanz will teach a class entitled Reproduction Quilting: Quilts in the Civil War from 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, March 9 at Sauk Rapids-Rice Middle School, Door 1, Room 202. Class participants will learn about the importance of quilts in the Civil War, including in Minnesota, and they will have a chance to sew a quilt block based on a Civil-War quilt design. To register for the class, which costs $26, call 320-258-1577.

The quilting class is just one of many offerings in the Winter/Spring Sauk Rapids-Rice Community Education Program. For more about the program, see related story in today’s paper.

History/Sewing

Corrine Lanz became fascinated by homemade quilts and their connections to history during her work as a librarian at the Great River Regional Library in Waite Park , where she still works.

When she was challenged to come up with an educational class for adults, she decided to combine her sewing skills with history, a subject she’d always loved, and so she began to research the making of quilts throughout history, and she was astonished at what a wide-ranging, interesting and revealing place quilts have had throughout the world.

Lanz has taught variations of her quilt-history classes far and wide, mainly at libraries. Her brief but informative classes include Quilts in the Dust Bowl, Quilts During the Westward Migration and A History of Japanese Quilts.

Currently, Lanz is working on a class about Quilts in the Underground Railroad, and the two-word key to her class is that “They weren’t.” Contrary to popular belief, quilts were not used as cryptic signals to clue-in runaway slaves to the presence of safe hiding places during their attempts to escape to freedom in the North. “Underground Railroad” was a euphemism for a network of routes and places that helped runaway slaves avoid capture during their difficult and frightening journeys to the American North. However, quilts with certain patterns on them and hanging outside on clotheslines did not figure into the equation, Lanz noted. Her class will show why and how such a notion became such a myth.

Tough times

Generally speaking, quilt-making increased during tough times, according to Lanz. Such times included the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Civil War, especially in the South, which had become so impoverished due to the vast amount of resources poured into war and because of a punishing naval blockade imposed by the North that prevented goods from reaching the South.

In the war years, women – North and South – would often gather together and socialize while sewing quilts for home use, to raise funds for the war or to ship to soldiers desperately in need of them. Some quilts were riots of color with striking block patterns, but quilts made for soldiers were generally plain, brown, unadorned ones. However, they served their purposes; they helped keep soldiers warm and dry. Very few of those quilts survived after the war because they were worn out and thrown away or burned or – to cite a grim and sad reason – many were wrapped around dead soldiers when they were buried.

“Some Southern women did know how to do embroidery and cross-stitching,” Lanz said, “but quilting was done by slave women, and they had to teach white women how to sew for quilting. There were many social societies of women formed just to make quilts for soldiers – quick and basic quilts. Or they would make very fine quilts to raffle off to help (other war efforts).”

As the weary war dragged on, times – especially in the South – got tougher, and quilting materials were often hard to come by. In some cases, women began ripping apart mattresses or other fabrics and even making material with fibers to continue their quilting.

One of the most popular patterns of the Civil War Ear quilts was called “Grandmothers’ Flower Garden,” consisting of a series of interlocking hexagon patterns that mimicked a flower’s center surrounded by its petals. The most popular colors for quilt patterns in those days were Prussian Blue (similar to Navy blue), Turkey Red (a deep-hued red), Chrome yellow (a Cheddar-cheese golden yellow) and Poison Green (a kind of pea-soup green-yellow). All of those fabric colors were created through natural earth dyes.

There were also patterned fabrics, including paisleys and plaids, many of them imported from the North or from British textile mills, which used an enormous amount of Southern cotton, picked by slaves in the pre-Civil War Era. Geometric fancy patterned fabrics made in France were also popular.

Lanz

Corrine Lanz was born in historic Deadwood, S.D., the place where Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead in a saloon while playing poker and holding the “dead man’s hand.”

Is it any wonder why a sense of history was instilled in Lanz at an early age?

At St. Cloud State University, she studied history and other subjects and then earned a bachelor of elective studies.

“I was never a quilt-maker,” Lanz said, “but I’ve always known how to sew, ever since my mother taught me.”

Lanz and her husband, Gerald, a wastewater technician in Becker, have two grown children: Cole and Shane.

Besides her job as librarian, Lanz also works part-time at The Camera Shop in St. Cloud.