Community Quilt Days: Place, Culture, Stories and Quilts!

Quilt Alliance staff are hitting the road again today with camera equipment, quilt stands, a coffee urn, a fresh batch of Deb Josephs’ tasty homemade cookies and a cue card that reads: “Hi, my name is ____ and I’m telling my quilt story at the McKinney Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee and today is Saturday, May 13, 2023.” Jonesborough is Tennessee’s oldest town, and home to the International Storytelling Festival. You’ll find Tennessee Quilts, a shop and retreat center co-owned by Linda Crouch-McCreadie in the historic downtown. Linda and fellow Tennessean, quilt historian and longtime Quilt Alliance board member, Merikay Waldvogel, were featured last Saturday on the first day of our Community Quilt Days event in Jonesborough.

Linda (pictured top right with her first quilt) was interviewed for the QSOS oral history project, and Merikay (pictured bottom right) gave a fascinating lecture on Tennessee quilts. She told the story of Margaret Hays, a Jonesborough woman who designed quilt patterns for Mountain Mist batting in the late 1920’s and early ‘30’s. Rebecca Proffitt, director of the nearby Reece Museum at Eastern Tennessee State University, brought an example of one of Hays’ designs along with another contemporary quilt in the Reece collection by artist Marge Gregg, made in the 1960’s and 2010’s. We’ll resume the quilt sharing and documentation activities today at the beautiful McKinney Center, a renovated 1940 school that was once the grade-school for Black students in Jonesborough until integration in 1964.

Another renovated school, the Sandy Mush Community Center, served as our event site on April 23 and 30 when we documented quilts, quilters and community history in Leicester, North Carolina, a hilly Appalachian farm community about 18 miles northwest of Asheville. One of the 30 quilts documented was a special collaborative quilt titled “A Celebration of Sandy Mush.” It was made in 1986 by over 40 women in the community determined to show developers planning to build a high-level nuclear waste site in Sandy Mush just how special and  beloved their community was. The community’s unprecedented opposition to the dump site caused developers to cancel their plans later that year.

The group quilt and other quilts made by Sandy Mush residents hang along the perimeter of the community center’s gymnatorium space. Artist Norma Bradley, a former Sandy Mush resident, and artist and quilt appraiser Connie Brown, played important roles in planning the presentation for this site. Norma and other makers of the collaborative quilt were invited to tell the story of their block and the experience of making the quilt to protect Sandy Mush. One of the makers came with her son and together they shared quilts made by four generations of family members.