Album Quilts of Ohio's Miami Valley (review)

In Album Quilts of Ohio's Miami Valley, Sue C. Cummings provides a readable and informative analysis of a unique slice of Americana. She approaches her subject, album quilts, from a perspective different from most works in this genre. In her preface she accurately suggests that most quilt studies done in reference to Ohio have focused on the ideological constructs—such as race, ethnicity, and religion—that bind the makers together. Cummings, however, describes a localized folk tradition and follows its ebbs and flows.

Cummings's study encompasses the period from 1888 through the beginning of the 1920s. She concentrates on the products of a small community of quilters from Darke, Miami, and Montgomery Counties in southwestern Ohio. Focusing on a handful of characteristic motifs—the appliquéd tulip, the appliquéd love apple, the schoolhouse, and, most significant, a distinctive spread eagle—Cummings argues that these Miami Valley album quilts created by individuals who were friends, relatives, and neighbors "show characteristics that set them apart from quilts made elsewhere … and provide stunning proof of a community-based, regional quilt style" (xiii).

Sue Cummings's approach is novel; she combines the genealogies of her subjects with those of the quilts that they produced. Perhaps more important, although her focus is narrow, the methods she employs are transferable to collections elsewhere or to larger groupings of similar artifacts. She creates a grammar for her quilts and traces its evolution and dissemination across southwestern Ohio. In moving beyond the artifacts themselves, Cummings weaves the artifacts into the fabric of the community that produced them. For example, using an album quilt composed of irregular blocks produced and signed by members of the community as a starting point, the author pieced together the complex social networks that bound the community. Her supplemental research included information gleaned from census documents, tax maps, local histories, and personal interviews, which allowed her to establish personal relationships between the quilt makers as well as the similarities in their creations. What she discovers is a network of relationships that transcends conventional boundaries. Cummings's quilts "represent both genders, all age groups and several different religious affiliations," as well as a variety of ethnic origins (108).

The only deficiency in this work is the lack of a general conclusion. Her discussion of the spread eagle motif is an important one but not, perhaps, the end of the story. Why, for example, did the tradition fade? Did the families and individuals just stop making quilts or simply move away from this particular tradition? Cummings does excellent work in uncovering the origins of the Miami Valley folk motifs and the motivations for their use but stops short of explaining why they disappear.

That said, her text is clear, straightforward, and accessible to the general audience for which it was intended. The illustrations are beautiful and add to the richness of the text. Also, she makes excellent use of a variety of graphs and charts to map out the complex social and physical networks of her quilt makers. The reader is left with a sense of the creators as well as of the quilts.