Walk into the Florence Griswold Museum galleries, and you are surrounded by rich textiles and elaborate needlework. A vibrant orange-red quilted petticoat is embroidered with such whimsical designs as a mermaid holding a mirror. A deep blue bed rug features central floral images and curling vines. White quilts boast polka dot backgrounds, with quilted and stuffed motifs.

These were all made in the late 1700s or early 1800s by women in New London County — and the region was where some of America’s most noteworthy items of textile folk art were created during that era, according to a new exhibition.

“New London County Quilts & Bed Covers, 1750-1825” at the Florence Griswold Museum was curated by costume and textile historian Lynne Zacek Bassett. It showcases quilted petticoats, bed rugs and quilts, many on loan from institutions around the country.

“This exhibition brings together for the first time two important groups of these lauded textiles: petticoats uniquely quilted with an array of animals and maritime motifs, and embroidered bed rugs. Masterful stuffed whitework and appliquéd bed covers demonstrate the continuation into the early 19th century of this region’s extraordinary needlework heritage and the family connections that nurtured them,” the exhibition text notes. “High-style European design filtered down to colonial New England through pattern books referenced by craftsmen and through imported goods, such as lining papers, ceramics, silver, and lace, inspiring regional interpretations in various decorative art.”

Bassett says she’d like visitors to the exhibition “to be excited by the beautiful art these women created, but I also want people to see that there’s a way of understanding women’s history through these works by thinking about how women collaborated in neighborhoods and families and the importance of social connections and what brilliant needleworkers and designers they were. This exhibition, I think, is a terrific showcase of American folk art.”

Among the many pieces are a quilted petticoat made by Sarah Halsey of Stonington in 1758; a bed rug by Mary Hinckley West of Bozrah in 1763; and a bed rug by an unidentified maker from the Geer family of Groton in 1764.

Different sections of the show are devoted to, for instance, “Montville Bed Covers” and “Lyme Whitework Quilts.”

But why New London County?

Why was this area such a hotbed of quilting and bed-rug-making? Bassett believes there was a confluence of several important factors. It was an area with relative economic stability and higher-than-average household income during that era, thanks to work on the seas and in farming.

These women had to have help in their homes in order to have time to devote to creating quilts and bed rugs. They had enslaved people, indentured servants or family members to do some of the household work. Bassett notes that this was the region in Connecticut with the highest proportion of enslavement at the time.

But, Bassett says, “I think it really comes down to a few just incredibly talented individuals who conceived these ideas, and the family connections that I’m finding between these needleworks are really important to consider.”

She says the patterns were often passed down family lines and even among neighbors. 

Bassett has been employed on and off by the Connecticut Historical Society for about 38 years, and she was adjunct curator for costumes and textiles at the Wadsworth Atheneum for a decade but is now a freelancer.

Over the years at various venues, Bassett had noticed a lot of interesting items that had come out of New London County. She thought the quilts were an interesting story, as were the petticoats, and no one had yet put those together and considered why this amazing work was happening in New London County.

‘Captivated my imagination’

Bassett, who lives in Massachusetts, visited the Flo Gris in 2019 to study the museum’s whitework quilt by Emily Jewett of Haddam. She had found other quilts that seemed made to the same pattern and wanted to compare tracings of those quilts to the Jewett one. (Experts use tracings to determine if quilts came from the same pattern; they look at how they’re made, the number of stitches per inch, the quality of the stitching and so on.)

Turns out, the Jewett quilt was part of that same group, all from an as-yet unidentified pattern maker.

Amy Kurtz Lansing, who is Florence Griswold Museum curator, recalls that Bassett “was telling us about the extraordinary tradition of New London needlework into which this quilt fit, and I just thought: This sounds like an exhibition. I’m fascinated by what she’s telling me, and I’d love to see these petticoats she’s telling us about that have mermaids and fully rigged ships — that captivated my imagination, the idea that they’re making these embroideries that really included elements of the world around them as well as these whimsical beasts and things like that.”

Lansing loves the fanciful elements and elegance of the petticoats. She mentions one embroidered image of a man using a stick to knock a pear off a tree, while a dog waits underneath.

“It feels like a connection to another moment of time. I mean, whose dog doesn’t patiently wait for food to fall?” she says.

Another interesting facet: Fashion changed in the early 1800s, and the new popularity of slim and sheer fashions meant that quilted petticoats couldn’t be worn underneath. So people began using them as bed quilts instead.

A big discovery

The women who made these quilted petticoats needed the training and the knowledge of design sources in order to create them. A big discovery Bassett made that is highlighted in the exhibition is she identified a specific school in Newport as the source of at least 15 petticoats from the mid-1700s that feature an unusual spaced back stitch and a consistency of motifs.

Lansing says, “She’s identified the teacher who trained these students. They did have to go (somewhere) to learn these techniques.” 

The teacher was Sarah Osborn, who offered “reading, writing, plain work, embroidering, tent stitch, samplers, &c. on reasonable terms,” per a 1758 edition of the Newport Mercury.

“Osborn’s correspondence with the father of one of the petticoat makers indicates that she drew needlework patterns herself; she would have used images gleaned from embroidery pattern books or picture books of animals published in the previous century for inspiration,” according to the exhibition.

Rugs not for the floor

As for the bed rugs showcased at the Flo Gris, they aren’t rugs as we think of the word now but rather are blankets that were put on top of beds. They aren’t hooked rugs — where thread pieces are forced through fabric — but were embroidered with a needle, Lansing notes.

These rugs were the most common type of bed covering in colonial America, and the ones made here were more visually dynamic than the ones brought in from Europe.

“New London County was a particular center for the domestic production of bed rugs. In an inventory of every known American embroidered bed rug (totaling 63), 35 originated in Connecticut — 31 from eastern Connecticut (New London, Tolland, and Windham Counties). Twenty-three can be placed in New London County with a reasonable degree of confidence, including the earliest examples,” the exhibition text states.

Runs in the family

The show also offers interesting peeks into the families who populated this area during that time.

The bed rugs from the Foote (sometimes written as Foot) family of Colchester, for instance, are among the most renowned group of rugs here. Four about-to-wed women made bed rugs “as another demonstration of their bonds of affection” to their fiances, according to the exhibition. The four couples — each of whom had one person who was in or related to the Foote family — married in the same ceremony on the same day: Nov. 5, 1778. The couples were: Elizabeth Foote and the Rev. David Huntington; Elizabeth’s sister Mary Foote and Nathaniel Otis; Nathaniel’s sister Sarah Otis and Israel Foote, Jr., who was Elizabeth and Mary’s brother; and Martin Kellogg and Hannah Otis, who was Nathaniel and Sarah’s sister.

Meanwhile, the Bradford family was associated with Montville appliquéd bed covers. Those bed covers boast unique design and needlework, with one calico print on a white background. Black cross-stitched phrases are embroidered in banners or medallions.

Research indicates that of four bed covers of these bed covers, made between 1805 and 1808, at least three were tied to the Bradfords who lived in Montville. The fourth, found at the Tennessee State Museum, is similar enough that the theory is it must have been inspired by a common source.

“How the idea travelled may never be known, but women often described their needlework projects and sent patterns in letters to faraway loved ones,” according to the exhibition.

Lansing says, “As somebody who loves stories tucked away in history, I feel like it would be great to even be able to take this further and try to pull together more about, you know, these women of the Bradford family in Montville, how did they develop this special kind of textile? … Lynne has pulled so much about that, even figuring out who these families and women were. It’s very hard work, women’s history, because you have to find the information about women and their lives tucked way inside the historical documentation of the men in the family.”

Larger world

Although the show is about this region of Connecticut, Lansing was impressed by the global nature of it all.

“One of the things that really struck me is the way that all of these designs and the themes in them and the materials the women are drawing on — all those things show this region’s connection to a larger global world,” she says, mentioning, too, the Triangle Trade and people bringing to the region indigo to dye fabrics. “There are design sources from Europe, and some of those even filtered from farther afield. These are not people just living on quiet farms out in the Connecticut countryside. They’re part of what was already a globally connected world.”

Discoveries are ongoing

Lansing says that ever since the show opened, “Lynne has been finding and hearing from people about other textiles that relate to this, so already the knowledge of these New London textiles is growing, and she is working on a book that’s going to come from that exhibition … so the discoveries are still active.”

If you go

What: "New London County Quilts & Bed Covers, 1750‒1825"

Where: Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme St., Old Lyme

When: Through May 1; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tues.-Sun. through March; then hours become 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun.

Admission: $10 adults, $9 seniors, $8 students, free for ages 12 and under

Required: Masks required indoors for everyone regardless of vaccination status

Contact: (860) 434-5542, florencegriswoldmuseum.org