By: Barbara Brackman
Before the nationwide influence of the periodical pattern column, American quilt styles and patterns were more likely to show regional trends as design ideas were passed hand to hand. To track the spread of styles and patterns in the mid-nineteenth century I compiled a computerized database of 250 date-inscribed album samplers and single-pattern friendship quilts made between 1839 and 1950, pictured in the quilt literature or unpublished. Many had states, towns, or counties inscribed and many of the uninscribed were attributed to specific states.
I mapped points of origin for these quilts and found several trends. The fashion for signature quilts began around 1840 in the Mid-Atlantic States and then spread to New England and the South. Between 1840 and 1844, 35 quilts were made in the states of NY, NJ, PA, DE, and MD. In the next five years, 40 were made in 12 states from Maine to South Carolina. Between 1850 and 1854, 34 were made in 11 states. The fad began to fade in the next five years with only nine dated examples from six states.
Only in the sixties did the signature quilt spread to the western states from Kentucky to the west coast, and by then the style had changed with the sampler album rare. Single-pattern friendship quilts were the standard signature quilts after the Civil War; embroidered samplers and crazy quilts were late nineteenth century variations of the style, influenced by periodicals. Some mid-nineteenth-century style characteristics, such as Broderie Perse and conventional appliqué, can also be tracked chronologically and geographically. A few individual patterns popular for signature quilts show distinctive origins and trends of regional popularity.