by Kit Jeans Mounger
Contributed by Richard Paddock
From Quilting Newsletter Magazine
April 1996
pp. 26-27
Heirlooms vary. Some families pass on old letters, jewelry, books, snuff boxes. Or silver. Our family treasures needle work. My sister Helen and I, both quilters and descendants of generations of Tennessee needlewomen, have had passed on to us the delicate crocheted and knitted afghans of our Grandmother, the original needlepoint and hooked rugs of our mother, and best of all, all of our great-grandmother’s quilts. But one very important family heirloom had eluded us; Polly’s Rose Quilt.
We grew up with the tales of Polly’s quilt. But we had never seen it. We weren’t even sure it still existed; it hadn’t been seen in decades and might well have slipped through the cracks of time. We did not doubt, however, that it had existed. We grew up steeped in a rich oral and written history, and our great-grandmother, and grandmother, in whose house we were raised, had intrigued us with stories of Polly and her family since we were small children.
In December of 1779, the coldest in memory, Colonel John Donelson gathered together a group of families to float down various uncharted inland rivers from settlements in east Tennessee, bound for the Great Salt Lick on the Cumberland River in middle Tennessee. On his own boat, the Adventure, were his wife, his 13-year old daughter, Rachel (Who would one day marry Andrew Jackson), his daughter, Catherine, her husband, Captain Thomas Hutchings, and their five-year old daughter Mary, called Polly by her Father. They would encounter shoals, Sandbars, cold, ice, and Indians. It suffices to say that Polly and her family survived and, in 1797, she would marry Daniel Small, who had also come down the Cumberland in Colonel Donelson’s party as a seven-year-old.
In 1821, the Smalls moved further west to a large farm in Henderson County near a place called Pleasant Exchange. It was here that Polly made her rose quilt. She not only fashioned a quilt; the cotton was grown and woven on the farm, and the wool yarn used in the stems was homegrown.
The Smalls had a hard life on the frontier. Many of their children did not survive childhood and were buried in a small cemetery nearby. In 1838, Daniel went down the Natchez Trace on a business trip and was never seen again. Still, Polly managed her farm under the watchful eye of her son, Alexander, who had his own farm and growing family close by: his wife Phoeba, and children Alexander, Jr., Mary, Louisa, and Willis. Shortly before her death in 1846, Polly entrusted her favorite rose quilt to her daughter-in-law and made Phoeba promise to pass it on to their eldest daughter, Polly’s namesake Mary.
The Civil War devastated families, and the Smalls and Timberlakes (Louisa Small’s in-laws) were not spared. Alexander Small Jr. was killed in the battle of Atlanta. The family had hardly assimilated this news when word came that Willis lay languishing in a primitive field hospital in Vicksburg.
This was too much for Mary. Gritty and determined, she gathered provisions, a feather mattress, and her grandmother’s rose quilt, and put them into a wagon. All the horses at Timberlake had been commandeered by General Forrest, leaving Mary with one mule and a cow to pull her wagon. But that didn’t stop her. She enlisted old Joe Timberlake, one of the freedmen who served as houseman, and set off for Vicksburg-some 500 miles to the south-to bring her brother home.
There were no road maps, of course, ands no inns. Most roads were little more than dirt tracks, and dangerous ones at that. The farm people she met along the way were not much better off that she. At one point, she spent the night with a family who had a new baby. The were overjoyed to swap Mary a mule for her cow, and Mary could now make much better time with a team of mules. It was a long, arduous journey, filled with horror and comedy, tales too numerous to recount here. But against all odds, Mary and Joe finally reached Vicksburg. They found Willis still alive and nursed him until he was strong enough to travel, at which point they wrapped him in his grandmother’s rose quilt and brought him home to Timberlake.
Some 20 years after the Civil War ended, the rose quilt, still spotted with small bloodstains, was given by Mary to her niece, Addie Timberlake McCall (her sister Louisa’s oldest daughter). Addie took her responsibility seriously. She cleaned the rose quilt as best she could and lovingly repaired the tattered scalloped edges. She then made her own version of it and carefully stored the original away.
This much we knew from our family history. But Addie McCall died in 1950, her daughter, Eddie McCall Priest, in 1963, and no one else seemed to have known what happened to the rose quilt.
Eddie’s daughter, Louise Priest Luten, our Mother, died in late July 1993. Her death was a devastating loss. She was our link to a ling line of strong Tennessee matriarchs, a repository of family history and a loving, wise parent. Even blind, bedridden, and in her 80s, Mother was for her family the center of the universe and still very much in control.
After her death, our family gathered to set about going through her things. Mother had left very detailed instructions about who was to receive what. She had left me an old blanket chest. Which had stood forever in the corner of her room covered with her collection bisque birds, a tiffany bowl, and family pictures. It was not a piece of furniture we had paid much attention to. Since I had no idea what it contained-Mother had a habit of squirreling things away and forgetting about them-we decided to begin sorting there. Out came Mother’s gold silk comforter (“It’s much to good to go on my bed...”), linens from our 1930s sojourn in Panama, and some vintage clothes from the 1920s. After I removed these from the chest while assembled children and grandchildren giggled and guffawed, I sucked in my breath. My reaction couldn’t have brought my sister out of the kitchen faster if I’d dropped the tiffany bowl. She peered into the chest and gripped my shoulder. “Do you suppose that’s Polly’s quilt? Is it?” Mother had never quilted so this could not have been hers; it was one we had never seen before, and it was very, very old.
As we gently unfolded it, Helen’s guess was confirmed. We were actually seeing Polly’s quilt, its identity clearly visible in beautifully embroidered letters: “Made by Mary Hutchings Small Before 1846. Do not Use.” We just stood there, shaking heads in wonder at its fine condition. Our children were rather baffled at our uncharacteristic awe. My daughter, Gaye, was puzzled. “Surely,” she said, “the lady didn’t embroider that on her own quilt...”
“No,” I replied, “She wouldn’t. I’m sure that was Mimi’s doing. Mimi labeled everything, adding who, what, when and why. And that admonition ‘Do Not Use’ removes any doubt from my mind. That sounds just like her.”
Mimi (our great-grandmother, Addie Timberlake McCall) was accustomed to giving orders. And the quilt she had so lovingly helped preserve served to launch Helen and me into family history our offspring hadn’t shown much interest in as children. Now, however, they were reverently silent.
My granddaughter, Elizabeth, worried about the wounded soldier. “Did Willis survive 500 miles in the back of a wagon?” she asked, her eyes large with concern. I held up a photograph I had also unearthed from the blanket chest, which was proving to be a real treasure trove. It showed a distinguished white-bearded, white suited gentleman who could have been a slender version of Colonel Sanders. Sitting on his knees were a pair of smiling little boys. On the back in Mimi'’ handwriting, was the comment: “Uncle Willis Small and his grandsons.” I handed the photo to Elizabeth. “Okay?” I asked. She smiled in relief and turned her attention back to the quilt.
So did I. Here was a quilt made by my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother, a beautiful, tangible link to family stretching back almost two hundred years. The unusual silence in the room brought me back to the present. Nine young descendants of middle Tennessee’s first settlers stared quietly at the quilt spread out before them on the floor.
Elizabeth drew the rose quilt to her, hugged it to her face and then said softly, “Thank you, Granny-granny-granny...”
There was no doubt in my mind who expected to be the next custodian of Polly’s quilt. Or whose turn it was to make another interpretation of it...
