Author Weaves a Tale of Quilts

Little did Linda Lipsett realize that a trip to the Rose Bowl Flea Market one day in 1972 would be the beginning of a journey back into 19th-Century America. Her ticket back in time was a friendship quilt made in 1854 for Ellen Spaulding of Vermont.

Friendship quilts, Lipsett explained, are distinguished by the inked or cross-stitched signatures within their quilted squares. The quilts, sometimes called album quilts, commonly were made in America between 1840 and 1860.

“I started wanting to know who the people were on that quilt,” said Lipsett, 38, who is a violist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Her curiosity about the signatures on the quilt and more than 100 others Lipsett has since collected led her to spend summers sleuthing through graveyards, churches, town halls, museums, libraries and historic homes throughout the country tracking down descendants and the stories connected with the quilts.

Compiles Quilt Stories

Although Lipsett keeps her quilts on the beds of her Northridge home, “friendship quilts were made for the very special purpose of remembrance” rather than for actual use, she explained. She has compiled the stories of eight such quilts in a poignant book published last October, titled “Remember Me: Women and Their Friendship Quilts.” It is illustrated with photographs taken by the author and is published by the Quilt Digest Press, San Francisco.

Between Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra performances, Lipsett works as a studio musician. As a result, it took seven summers to complete the genealogical research for her painstakingly documented but engaging book, the first of several volumes on quilts that she hopes to publish.

Lipsett often begins her research by tracing the masculine names on her quilts, since women’s names usually do not appear in public records of the period. She has located the living descendants of many of the quilt owners and has formed close relationships with many of them.

“Ellen’s families are my families,” Lipsett said with emotion as she described how she “went to every town where Ellen lived.”

It was Ellen’s story that prompted Lipsett to begin writing her book in 1978. Nineteen-year-old Ella-Elizabeth Spaulding (called Ellen), the well-bred daughter of a prosperous Ludlow, Vt., family, married her first cousin, Willard Reed, 21, in 1854. According to Lipsett, most young men starting out then had little opportunity to prosper in New England.

“A boy had to either rent land or inherit a parcel of his father’s,” she said. Since Willard Reed had no prospects for doing either, his plan was to seek his fortune in the “Far West”--that is, Wisconsin, which was then touted as the land of opportunity.

Collection of Letters

Before they left Vermont, however, Ellen’s sister gave her the quilt now owned by Lipsett as a remembrance of the family and friends Ellen was leaving behind. From the same dealer who sold her the quilt, Lipsett obtained a complete collection of letters written home by Ellen from Wisconsin, starting with a letter written on her gold-edged wedding stationery six days after her marriage to Willard.

In anticipation of a fine life style out West, Ellen took only good silk dresses with her. Disillusioned and lonely in Wisconsin, Ellen wrote:

“We have got a little thing such as they call a house out here but it is very small, one room on the ground and one chamber, you think you are crouded (sic) to death almost.”

Ellen soon developed a “hard cough” that did not respond to the common remedy of the day, Wisters Balsom of Wild Cherry. They had little to eat and the situation grew worse as the depression of 1857 set in.

Eventually, in a letter to her parents, she revealed the gravity of her sickness.

“You need not think it is the seven nor nine months consumption (tuberculosis) that ails me either, if you do you are mistaken.”

Ellen died just before her 23rd birthday in July, 1858. She had expressed a deathbed wish to be buried at home in Ludlow. Her parents, who had been visiting when she died, complied by temporarily burying her remains in Wisconsin until the summer heat ended.

The following winter they exhumed her body and moved it the 1,500 miles by “train, stage and wagon” to Vermont, where it was put in cold storage until the ground thawed in the spring when she finally could be buried, nine months after her death.

Linda Lipsett says she wept when she found Ellen’s gravestone in Ludlow. The engraved stone does not carry her married name because, Lipsett speculated, Ellen’s father was upset that Ellen’s husband so quickly married the 19-year-old girl who had taken care of his daughter during her illness.”

Other stories Lipsett discovered in her quilt research are equally heart wrenching. There is the Civil War-related story of Betsey Wright and Abner Lee of Woodstock, Conn. Despite being the father of five children, Abner, 35, was recruited into the Union Army in 1863, along with all other “able-bodied male citizens between 20 and 45.”

Sixteen months later, Abner died in Georgia’s Andersonville prison, which was notorious for its inhumane conditions. Betsey endured, raising her children by working in a shoe factory in Putnam, Conn., when a government pension of $8 a month, plus $2 a month for each of her children under 16 years of age, proved inadequate. During this period, Betsey’s youngest child, Hattie, died of scarlet fever.

Betsey had been collecting the signed blocks for her quilt since before her marriage, starting with one her brother had given her that said, “Betsey! I wish you a Merry Christmas: Remember Me.” That message inspired the title of Lipsett’s book as well as the chapter about Betsey’s quilt.

Betsey did not find time to stitch her individual blocks into a heirloom quilt until after her three surviving children were grown and she was in her 50s.

While doing summer research in New England, Lipsett came across Betsey’s will that bequeathed her album quilt to a daughter. She discovered that the will was “one of the most exciting things to happen in my research,” Lipsett said. Although she is a reserved woman, Lipsett said she “started yelling inside the town hall.”

Her dedication as a quilt historian has earned her national respect and a regular spot on the quilt lovers’ convention circuit. Recently, she was a featured speaker at both the Vermont and Houston quilt festivals. Lipsett also collects period dresses similar to those worn by Ellen, Betsey and the other women in her book. She wears them--complete with matching bonnets--when speaking at quilt conventions.

Despite their previous popularity, friendship quilts now are harder to find and rarer than most unsigned quilts collected today, according to Lipsett.

Most dealers don’t carry them, she said, because “they’re not what people consider very graphic for hanging because of the ink on them.” She buys almost all of her quilts through the mail from certain dealers who know she is collecting.

There is no fixed price for friendship quilts, but the highly prized Baltimore album quilts may go for as much as $15,000. The Baltimore album quilts, which were made by wealthier and more cosmopolitan women, are not typical of the period. Friendship quilts of humbler fabric and design fetch no more than $2,000, and most are much less, Lipsett said.

She would like to collect quilts from the South that reveal women’s stories during the Civil War from the Southern point of view. Until Lipsett started collecting quilts, “I did not realize that each of these women in the middle of the 19th Century would be so affected by the war in such a tragic way. I’ve never lived through a war,” said Lipsett, who was born “right after World War II.”

At the urging of her publisher, Lipsett is writing a biographical novel of Ellen’s life, based on the letters and ledgers written by Ellen and her family.

“I hope these stories are only the beginning. I hope there will be a sequel to each of these stories,” Lipsett said. “When you dig, amazing things happen to you.”