by Shelley Anderson, long-time volunteer and supporter of the TRC, with a special interest in textile crafts, including  American quilts. She was born in the USA, and now lives in the Netherlands. 1 May 2024.

Hamilton, Missouri, is a typical small town in the American Midwest. This means a small population (in Hamilton’s case, around1,600 people), and a much smaller pool of local jobs.

At least that was the case until 15 years ago, when a passionate quilter named Jenny Doan opened the Missouri Star Quilt Company on the town’s small main street. Today, the company runs quilting shops in 35 of the town’s buildings. Some of the shops are pop-ups, selling , for example, only Halloween- or Christmas-themed fabrics during these holidays. The business now makes about US$ 20 million a year. An estimated 8,000 people visit Hamilton every month to shop for quilt-related materials, especially fabrics; to take quilting classes; and to tour the large murals of quilts painted on the town’s buildings.

Quilt with an appliqué design of large, stylised flowers and leaves in various materials. USA, 1850s-1860s (TRC 2019.2402).

They also come to visit the Missouri Quilt Museum (MQM). That’s why I was in Hamilton, along with my 82-year-old sister, who is a quilter. MQM is considered one of the top three quilting collections in the United States (after the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky and the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska). The MQ, opened in 2018, houses an ever increasing selection of over 600 quilts. The collection emphasizes quilts made in North America. The oldest quilt—a Rhombus Cube paper pieced quilt--is from 1834. It’s a precise date based on several letters from 1834 that were found inside the quilt. The letters were used as paper piecing, and left inside to provide more insulation. I immediately thought of the TRC’s own pre-Civil War (1860-1865) quilt, dated to c. 1850, with its finely appliquéd motif of flowers and berries (TRC 2019.2402).

Crazy quilt made from a variety of materials, as well as embroidered panels, painted panels and ribbons from various Republican political rallies. USA, 1890s (TRC 2019.2925).

The museum is housed on three floors of the town’s old High School. This means some 30,000 feet of storage and exhibition space, which made me rather envious, thinking of the TRC’s need for more space. The school’s basketball court now exhibits modern quilts.

There are also whole class rooms devoted to certain types of quilts, including crazy quilts, flour sack quilts and a small collection of kanthas from India. There are also classrooms exhibiting quilting-related tools, including industrial sewing equipment, like a CONSEW sewing machine, used by the US military to sew parachutes. One room holds some of the over 600 toy sewing machines in the collection, while another displays hundreds of thimbles, many of them from the 1930s-1950s, given away to advertise various businesses. (The current thimble collection is over 7,000. The MQM is actively trying to top the current Guinness World Record of 8,000 thimbles, and has supporters around the US collecting for them.)

Quilt made from feedsacks. The design is made up of large and small squares of patterned cotton alternating with white cloth (flour sacks). USA, 1930s, 2011 (TRC 2017.4292).

I learned a lot about American quilting from this museum. But what I value the most about the visit to MQM was more personal. Seeing some of the displays brought back many memories for my older sister, and I learned more about our family history. She smiled when she recognized a black Singer treadle sewing machine—the same model our grandmother used when she gave my sister her first sewing lessons, when my sister was six. At another display she talked about the pinafore (sadly, long gone) that our grandmother had made for her from a flour sack (you can see many examples of American flour sack clothing in the TRC’s digital exhibit “For a Few Sacks More”).

Postage stamp showing a kantha-style quilt. Bangladesh, 1973 (TRC 2017.0026).One large quilt from the 1930s evoked a sadder memory. Skilfully made from scraps of old fabric, every other block in this quilt forms a swastika. I was shocked, wondering if it had been made by a Nazi sympathizer, but the information board explained that it the late 1800s and early 1900s the swastika, a motif found in several Native American cultures, and elsewhere around the world, had been a popular design. Most quilts with this design were destroyed at the onset of World War II, as a protest against Hitler; this particular quilt was a rare survivor.

My sister nodded her head as we read the text together. “Granny Bessie had made a quilt like this,” she said, explaining sadly that our grandmother burnt the quilt after receiving the news that her youngest son, an uncle I never knew, had been killed in the war.

I left the MQM with a renewed sense of the importance of textiles. Textiles, specifically quilting, has revitalized Hamilton’s economy. But on a more intimate level, we celebrate birth and mourn death with cloth. Our family histories are deeply entwined in their fibres.

For more information on the Missouri Quilt Museum see www.missouriquiltmuseum.com