Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life.

Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life. By Laurel Horton. Foreword by Michael Owen Jones. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. xxvi, 184. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-57003-610-1; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-609-8.)

Historians who are unaccustomed to using artifacts as primary sources might find this book particularly instructive. In this insightful narrative, Laurel Horton reads and interprets a collection of sixteen quilts that belonged to one South Carolina family over six generations. As it turns out, fabric choices, construction techniques, dyes, patterns, and stitching styles can tell us much about quilts and their makers' values and intentions. Horton surrounds the material culture evidence with research in written secondary and primary sources to produce a rich social history rooted in the particulars of family and place that spans three centuries. Illustrated with numerous photographs and thirty-two color plates, Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life is a handsome book.

This project began when workers at the Mary Black Foundation asked Horton, a folklorist who is an authority on quilts and quilt making, to research a set of family heirlooms preserved by the philanthropy's namesake. Born in 1860, Mary Louisa Snoddy Black grew up in a prosperous South Carolina family and left a legacy of generosity in Spartanburg, where she and her husband, a physician, ultimately made their home. Before she died in 1927, Black wrote brief but telling descriptions of the quilts as she entrusted them to her two daughters. These labels, sewn on to the quilts, offer the initial clues as Horton begins her painstaking detective work.

To understand Mary Black and the evolving meanings of the quilts, Horton traces her origins to Scots-Irish ancestors who emigrated to the South Carolina backcountry in the 1770s. The family thrived as members invested in land and slaves who made it productive and profitable. In the opening chapter, Horton offers a primer on eighteenth-century textiles and points to continuities between Irish and American quilting styles. By the time Mary came along, piecework quilting was well established among the women in her family, and it was a tradition that she and other female kin maintained until the early twentieth century.

Horton debunks time-honored assumptions about quilts and quilt making. Rather than serving as warm bedcovers, the quilts that nineteenth-century women made more often stood as symbols of female generosity and family bonds. The quilts in the Black collection, for example, showed no signs of having ever been used. In addition, in the early nineteenth century, quilt making was largely an activity practiced by affluent women who could afford the fine fabrics favored for piecework quilts and the time to invest in textile arts. As cheaper cotton cloth and sewing machines became commonplace after 1850 and the popularity of quilt making spread among middle-class and poorer women, the status of the quilts declined and the quality of the workmanship suffered---although today many people revere these very objects.

Much of this book's delight is in the details. Horton analyzes fabric choices to infer connections between quilts that Mary Black made and her pious values of humility and thrift. When embedded in the context of other sources, an unattractive crazy quilt that Mary's sister gave her may have subtly signaled a fraught relationship between the two women. In small ways and large, Mary Black's descendants and Laurel Horton have insured that a set of quilts will have memory and meaning for years to come.

LU ANN JONES

University of South Florida