They now survive mostly as folk-art treasures among family heirlooms, antique shops and museum collections like that at the DuPage County Historical Museum in Wheaton.
But in the 19th Century, coverlets offered warmth and a certain pizazz as fixtures in the generally austere American bedroom. Between 1820 and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the craft of coverlet-weaving flourished from New York and Pennsylvania through the heartland of Ohio and Indiana to Illinois.
And yet while coverlet collecting began getting serious in the 1920s, with a wave of interest in early Americana, weavers remained a largely unknown lot because their handiwork was often unsigned.
Now, Clarita Anderson, a textile scholar at the University of Maryland and former resident of Libertyville, Ill., has conducted a pioneering study of coverlet designs and makers, providing insights into their evolution and demise, and commentary on American mores and interests.
Since 1986 she has been feeding information into a computer database at the university that lists 8,000 coverlets by the weaver’s name; origins, including home state, county and township; the design; the date of completion; and the current owner.
The purpose of the database–which has recorded the major collections such as those in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., and the DuPage museum–is to give scholars a comprehensive tool to evaluate coverlets, which were used as bedspreads, in a broad social and cultural context.
In her quest for information, Anderson enlisted the help of her husband, David, a scientist for the Environmental Protection Agency, to take pictures of the coverlets so she could focus on what the owners had to say about them.
Anderson is the curator of a major exhibition featuring 80 coverlets in “figured and fancy” designs at the Columbus Museum of Art, which runs through Aug. 6. The Ohio museum has the nation’s largest collection of more than 362 pieces, which was donated by Jean Stuck Monger of Lancaster, Ohio, in memory of her late husband, industrialist Don Stuck. Anderson has written the book accompanying the show, “Weaving a Legacy” (published by the museum and distributed by Henry N. Abrams Inc.), about the Stuck collection.
Coverlets serve as a cultural roadmap of evolving national tastes. Increasingly, Anderson says, Americans’ pursuit of prosperity meant dressing up their stark domestic interiors by choosing busier, more opulent coverlet designs.
Inspired by many sources
Before 1840, floral patterns, especially roses and cabbage roses, were popular. But after 1840, more elegant flowers such as lilies, violets, heather and ferns appeared on coverlets, as did such cosmopolitan elements as urban rows of buildings, Gothic architectural details and rococo scrolls.
Although the designs often suggest the weaver’s ethnic origins in Germany and the British Isles, there are noticeable American touches such as the American eagle, George Washington on horseback, and Andrew Jackson on horseback with drawn sword.
Among the many standouts in the show is a coverlet, attributed to Samuel Snider, dated 1856, inscribed “New Paris, Elkart County, Ind.” Two of its borders depict what appear to be row houses in a densely built area, which Anderson points out seems out of place for a town that even today has a population of only 1,300.
Anderson believes the design may reflect the widespread fascination with architecture in the 19th Century. “Young architects often traveled abroad to finish their training,” she says. “Their sketches were often published in newspapers, and this could have been the possible source of inspiration for the weaver.”
Another elaborate coverlet, of unknown origin, features alternating rows of Chinese and Western-style buildings and structures. Interspersed with these are rows of ships: three-masted and full-rigged, paddle-wheeled, and Chinese junks. The piece no doubt recalls the thriving trade with China that so enriched the seaports of the Northeast.
Anderson says the earliest dated coverlet of the figured and fancy variety comes from Long Island, N.Y. Dated 1817, it is signed by Sally Loper, whose background remains a mystery, and is now in the Smithsonian Institution.
“Coverlet weaving probably began in New Jersey and New York and then went to Pennsylvania,” Anderson says. “I have a feelng it moved through Pennnsylvania and down to Maryland, but I don’t have the evidence.”
From there, coverlet weavers trod the familiar paths of other migrants–and potential customers–across Ohio and Indiana to Illinois, Michigan and Kentucky. The University of Maryland’s database so far has recorded the largest number of coverlets from Pennsylvania.
Anderson notes, however, that Pennsylvania weavers seem to have been in business an average of only five years, whereas in states such as Ohio and Indiana they sometimes continued to work at their craft as long as 30 years.
After the Civil War, hand-made coverlets fell out of fashion, despite a brief revival of interest at the time of the nation’s centennial in 1876. Anderson thinks the reason was more a matter of changing tastes than the increased industrialization of textile production.
Anderson emphasizes that coverlets were “the artifacts of the middle class in small towns and farm communities.” This culture, she says, was affected by the new styles–increasingly cosmopolitan and mass-produced–of the cities that arose along the rivers, lakes and canals.
Study yields surprises
For a long time the conventional wisdom was that coverlets were made by men for women. “But in doing my Ohio research,” says Anderson, “I found an extraordinary number were made by men for men.”
The only documented female weaver of figured and fancy coverlets, according to Anderson, is Sarah LaTourette, who worked with her father in Covington, Ind., until he died in 1849. Afterwards she and a younger brother, Henry, carried on the business, which produced the family’s last known piece in 1871.
In the Columbus show are rare pattern cards, which were used by the LaTourettes in their weaving and are on loan from the DuPage museum, which is the repository for the collection of 107 coverlets amassed by the Colonial Coverlet Guild of America, which was founded in Chicago in 1926 and has a nationwide membership.
Illinois was the last stop for many of the 19th Century weavers, who often had worked in Ohio and Indiana. Typical of the state’s weavers was John Philip Seewald (1808-1902), a native of Bavaria who came to St. Clair County in the 1830s after stopovers in Philadelphia and Ohio.
A signed and dated Seewald coverlet, which is displayed in the Ohio show, has an unusual variation on the familiar double roses and sunburst designs. Mixing these motifs as Seewald does in the coverlet was an Ohio practice.
Anderson’s interest with coverlets began in the 1970s when she was living in Libertyville. At a weaving class taught by Else Regensteiner, a designer with the original Bauhaus in Germany and later the New Bauhaus in Chicago, she became curious about a weaving style used by coverlet makers known as Beiderwand.
Anderson was so attracted to geometric-design coverlets that she decided to write a book on the subject with two acquaintances. “Well, that got to be difficult because you couldn’t pin anything down,” she says, “so we eventually wrote a monograph–it was privately published–about these coverlets and another monograph about Beiderwand.”
When she moved to Maryland in 1978, she resumed her studies for a doctoral degree in historic textiles and costumes at the university. Earlier the Evansville, Ind., native had dropped out of graduate school at the University of Minnesota while her husband studied for his doctoral degree.
Her dissertation was on Maryland coverlets and their weavers, who were concentrated in an area near the Pennsylvania border. The experience taught her to be skeptical of sweeping generalizations about coverlets. What we see today, she emphasizes, is the remnant of the past, and there are no complete records to fill in the blanks about what was actually produced.
According to Anderson, previous studies stated that Maryland coverlets always had a distinctive brown binding thread. But she found only two coverlets with such brown threads, and concluded that the other examples were simply the product of age and fading.
Despite her expertise, Anderson has never collected coverlets.
“I abide with the American Association of Museums (ethical) rules,” she says, which caution against using your knowledge of collections to promote individual financial gain. “I couldn’t afford them anyway. Many of the dealers, and friends I’ve made through coverlets, cannot understand when I tell them I only collect information and pictures.”
