This quilt was made by Mary Faison "Mamie" Ashford of Clinton, sometime in the 1890s. Mamie was the daughter of Col. John Ashford, a veteran who had fought many battles during the war only to lose his life in a boiler explosion in 1889.

During the late 1800s, itinerant photographers traveled across North Carolina in wagons, bringing along tents, cameras, and equipment, and faced people who rarely, if ever, had their photographs made. If your family was from Sampson County and you own some of these turn-of-the-century pictures, chances are that they were taken by a man by the name of Claude Orville Brown, the renowned photographer from Mount Olive.