Roberta McKern
A call came to the East Linn Museum a while back. Would we be interested in a quilt made by a ladies’ club east of Foster for a young lady turning 16 in 1942?
“Another friendship quilt?” the few volunteers wondered. The museum already had several.
“It’s from the right area,” a volunteer offered.
Generally, we aim to keep things from the East Linn vicinity. But the quilt was a little young, under 100! In fact, two volunteers had been born around the time of its production.
The museum hosted the usual debate. Some volunteers hold that the museum needs fewer things to look at; too many confuse viewers. Others like it crowded. “If people feel they’ve not seen it all, they can come back again. The entrance fee is cheap.” Nothing, in other words, but donations are welcomed.
“We can always take a look at the quilt,” a volunteer temporized.
“There was something about pieces and a cat,” another supplied. (Not all volunteers are at the museum simultaneously, and messages get mixed up on occasion.)
But a sense of expectation had been set. In due course, two white boxes appeared on the workroom table. It was time for trepidation. Would the quilt live up to expectations?
And what about the cat?
Opening the smaller box, a bobcat rug was revealed. Well-presented, it was said to date back just short of a century. We’ll look for a place to put it later.
The quilt, in 1940s vernacular, was swell. More importantly, it came with maps of the area where its makers and the birthday girl lived, plus biographical details on each person whose name appeared on an embroidered block. True, there was a time frame: May 1, 1941, to May 31, 1942, the year in which the Chinquapin Club’s ladies embroidered blocks to make the gift for Jeanne Cosgrove commemorating her 16th birthday.
These dates have great significance. On May 1, the Cosgrove home burned down, along with the family’s possessions. The quilt would give young Jeanne a keepsake. However, there would be a hitch. Although Jeanne received embroidered quilt blocks and strips of milky green cloth and peach squares intended to separate the different blocks, not all of them were ready. Promises were made, and Jeanne placed the unfinished quilt in her hope chest.
Seventy-five years later, after Jeanne attended Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University), married, reared a family and prepared to downsize for a move into assisted living, the quilt pieces came out of a cedar chest and her daughter-in-law, Connie Myers, the family’s only quilter, finished it in time for Jeanne Cosgrove Myers-Brown’s 91st birthday. It was lovingly done, Connie Myers wrote.
From the museum’s point of view, best yet is the history of the quilt’s makers and the snapshot of the Quartzville Creek and Sunnyside school areas during that one year, especially since Jeanne’s memories of some of these people is invaluable. Her oldest son, Michael, and his wife, Connie, researched various sources, including digitized copies of the 1941 New Era, and this article depends upon their findings. They also included a chart of the names that appeared on the quilt blocks and maps of the Big Bottom, Quartzville Creek and Sunnyside vicinities, showing where various families lived before Green Peter Reservoir inundated many homes, including the Cosgroves’.
In the early 1940s, this area was known as the Roberts community to New Era readers. Two Roberts lived there. John Roberts, an elderly prospector who settled there in the 1880s, likely gave his name to this district. But there was also Bob Roberts, who operated the store that supplied its residents.
Mike and Kitty Cosgrove, with their son, Pat, and daughter, Jeanne, actually resided in the old Whitcomb place at Big Bottom. We might recall that George Whitcomb, the original settler, had once been very active in the mining and prospecting interest of Quartzville’s 19th century gold-rush days. At various times he ran a pack horse train to the mining camp upstream, operated an inn for those traveling in that direction, and had a post office with his name attached: Whitcomb. He also operated a short stage line. One of the things Mike Cosgrove did when he bought the place was to burn the stage.
At one time, Whitcomb acted as a co-owner of a mine he’d discovered, the Pay-Well. Copper was its mineral, and Whitcomb foresaw a great future in copper-mining. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, and Whitcomb and his ventures were generally forgotten by the time of Jeanne’s quilt.
When the Cosgrove house burned in 1941, it was the second house on the property lost to fire, as the first Whitcomb residence had already burned. Such are the perils of living in the country.
When we look at what Jeanne remembers of her father and mother, we see how Mike, like George Whitcomb, turned his hand to the occupations supplied by Big Bottom’s location. “My parents were older,” Jeanne said. “Daddy Mike did lots of different jobs. He worked in the woods as a timber cruiser. He hauled supplies with our horses, Barney and Tommy, to the Quartzville mines for the placer mines. He worked in the woods when they were logging around us. In the summertime he was the fire warden for our area for the state of Oregon.”
As fire warden, Mike used a pickup for a daily nine-mile trip up the road and back, looking for fires. But fire actually struck at home. As Jeanne recalled, “It was a weekday when the house burned down, and by the weekend the lumber had already been delivered to the house, and the community had a house-raising. They got a lot done in the weekend. People kept coming when they could to get the house completed.”
The quilt contains an embroidered outline picture of the house, red with a green roof and black chimney, along with “Mike.”
Of her mother, Jeanne said, “Mom was 5-foot-3 and red-headed with long hair to her hips. She wore it braided and wound around her head. She was a stay-at-home mom. She was smart and played the piano and pump organ, read her Bible, liked to sing and loved to dance. She liked to cook and was a good cook. She was a fun mom and a happy person.”
We might guess Jeanne was the same. Kitty was an instigator in making the quilt. Looking at the biographies of community members whose names appear on different blocks, we see that many of the men worked in the timber industry and most of the moms stayed at home. Kitty’s block depicts an open fan decorated with a house and a tree.
Most of the blocks, when we look at their images, can seem ordinary. When it comes to the embroidery, the outline stitch has general use, and there are some French knots and daisy stitches and satin stitches. We can envision them being sewn by the Chinquapin Club ladies as they met once a month at each other’s homes to visit and catch up on the local news. Some of the chosen patterns were likely what different members had on hand, but others may have had Jeanne and her 16th birthday in mind. This may account for the appearance of old-fashioned girls in full, long skirts with bonnets or parasols. Sweets to the sweet 16, so to speak.
South of the border, down Mexico way, is also represented. Mostly, this means a big sombrero and cactuses with a man in between, but two girls also are shown. Most birds have blue outlines, but one is done in purple. He wears an orange sailor hat, and the block bears the label “Mail Man.” One block shows a large cat face in a cap or bonnet, it’s not certain which. On another, a possible rat or puppy looks from a receptacle at what might be spilt milk. Were these images meant for tea towels, pillow cases or table runners, we might ask. And there are plenty of flowers involved too.
Each block features one or two names and as many as three people from a family have separate blocks. The Walkers, for example, were represented by 14-year-old Alpha, 11-year-old David and 13-year-old Marie. The Hughes family included 40-year-old mother Gene (Eugenia), plus 12-year-old George and 17-year-old Maxine.
We don’t expect the children to have embroidered the pictures on their blocks, although they may have chosen them. Older sisters may have made some, but maybe more came from the club ladies while they discussed the Roberts community’s romances and tragedies.
The Myers research shows at least one romance and some tragedies augmented by what Jeanne remembered from more than 75 years ago. During the quilt’s production, Alice Roberts married Gwynne Rogers. She had been Rob Roberts’ daughter-in-law and was the mother of two children. Her block featured an old-fashioned girl. Of Alice, Jeanne observed, “She was a neat, neat, neat lady. She was the cutest thing and she made all kinds of little things. She was clever with the crafts, things they did in those days like building a doorstop out of a Sears catalog.”
Gwynne Rogers’ block contains red tulips. According to the biographical note, he lived at home until his marriage, so maybe his mother did the stitching.
Jeanne’s brother, Pat, and his best friend, Darrell Howe, or “Dopey,” were represented by two singing birds, happy birds, in trapezes. But the memory they evoked for Jeanne was not happy. It represented the change that altered the world: the arrival of war.
“Pat was working in the woods as a logger in 1941 and soon after Pearl Harbor enlisted in the Navy,” she recalled. “Dopey lived in Sweet Home. I had a crush on him, but I was the little sister. Darrell joined the Navy soon after graduation and was killed on the USS Arizona when it exploded during the Pearl Harbor raid, December 7, 1941.”
With this in mind, the image on the block feels ironic. Two Japanese lanterns appear, along with the words “Chinquapin Friendship.” Perhaps they were just considered pretty paper lanterns, or maybe the block was finished before the Day of Infamy. Some Americans, it is said, hacked out their Japanese maple trees because of their name.
Another tragedy had taken place earlier in 1941. The mail man of the little bird in an orange hat had died of pneumonia. Bill Emerson had handled star route two out of Foster.
When Connie Myers completed the birthday quilt for Jeanne’s 91st birthday, she respectfully tried to make it look like it came from that timeline of May 1, 1941 to May 21, 1942. She matched the milky green of the intended strapping with a backing material of tiny white flower pots, with flowers on the green field. Some may recognize this shade, which was so popular in the 1930s that it became known as “Depression” green. It would have been a familiar color to the Chinquapin Club ladies.
They would have also approved of the large block Connie improvised for a quilt corner left vacant for the lack of four never-completed blocks. Using an appliqued block Jeanne had actually made in high school as a centerpiece, Connie embroidered a scroll work pattern of leaves and “Jeanne Cosgrove, May 31, 1942” as a surround. At last Jeanne received the quilt promised to her when she turned 16.
The quilt has already brought pleasure to those of us at the East Linn Museum who have seen it.
Those embroidery patterns from the 1940s are what we remember from our youth, when ladies embroidered such things on tea towels, pillow cases and table runners. Those still embroidering can appreciate the workmanship involved.
But for those of us who’ve looked at the history Mike and Connie Myers compiled for Jeanne’s quilt, the real wonder lies in the glimpses we get of the Roberts community as it was before the waters of Green Peter Reservoir obliterated the low-lying areas, including Big Bottom.
In other parts of the country, a “bottom,” when used geographically, refers to the lowland along rivers and streams, the flood plains. And so where the Cosgroves once lived, and earlier the George Whitcomb family, is now underwater. Before the Cosgroves’ new house was inundated in the 1960s, Pat, Jeanne’s brother, dismantled it for salvage.
We at the museum thank the Myers family for the quilt and maybe more so for the history they put together for it. Sometimes we miss what is lost when the past is literally obliterated to make improvements for the present and future by a dam site.
The museum will still be closed until February, the first Thursday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will again continue our usual hours, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, providing we have enough volunteers to host visitors.