On this day in 1834, Catherine “Kate” Furbish, the first botanic artist in the “Garden of Maine,” was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. Furbish lived to be 97 years old and in her lifetime she collected over 4,000 sheets of dried plants and ferns she discovered around the state of Maine. The collection is now housed in Harvard University’s Gray Herbarium.

A unnamed quilter hand pieced this Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt around 1875 in Maine. The current owners documented the quilt in 1986 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as part of the North Carolina Quilt Project. They purchased the quilt when they lived in Maine and although they do not know the name of the quiltmaker, they know that she was a neighbor of a woman named Clara Bowen.

View this quilt on The Quilt Index to find out! Read more about its history, design and construction. Be sure to use the zoom tool for a detailed view or click the “See full record” link to see a larger image and all the data entered about that quilt.

Source:
http://maineanencyclopedia.com/furbish-catherine-kate/

Posted by Amy E. Milne
Executive Director, Quilt Alliance
amy.milne@quiltalliance.org