Mamie Ashford's Crazy Quilt

Dec 12

By Joel Rose

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. Also killed in the explosion were two of his sons, Pender and James.

Mamie was born in 1866, a year after her father returned from the war. A life-long resident of Clinton, she never married and taught school at the old Clinton Female Academy on College Street, near the Ashford home.

The quilt is known as a "crazy quilt," a style which is often used to refer to a specific kind of patchwork lacking repeating designs and with the seams and patches heavily embellished. A crazy quilt rarely has the internal layer of batting that is part of what defines quilting as a textile technique.

Crazy quilting rapidly became a national fashion amongst urban, upper-class women, who used the wide variety of fabrics that the newly industrialized 19th century textile industry offered to piece together single quilts from hundreds of different fabrics. Long after the style had fallen out of fashion amongst urban women, it continued in rural areas and small towns, whose quilters adopted the patterns of the urban quilts but employed sturdier, more practical fabrics, and dropped the earlier quilts' ornate embroidery and embellishment

The quilt is currently hanging on a wall in the Sampson County History Museum in Clinton. An Ashford descendant, Beth Stewart, recently visited the museum and pointed to a unique fabric that had been woven into the quilt. Pieces of Col. Ashford's hat band, which had once adorned his hat throughout the war, were sewn into the quilt at various places. The hat band was a Carolina blue in color, making the pieces easy to identify.

It is believed that Mamie began working on the quilt soon after her father's death.

Mamie died in 1955. Both she, her father and her brothers are buried in the Clinton Cemetery.