Wednesday, March 28, 2012
The weekend-long symposium featured local and area speakers and exhibits.
A reception featuring Fort Scottian Bernita Hill kicked off the event on Thursday evening and was attended by 75 people.
Visitors to the exhibit on Saturday, mainly women and a few husbands, ranged from experienced quilters to those who were just trying to get more information to possibly become one.
Fort Scott resident Twila Earll was one such resident.
Earll said Jean Warren and her program, “19th Century Quilts and Quilting,” was the main reason she came out on Saturday. Earll said Warren displayed some original quilts and photographs from the era during her presentation.
“What I thought was the most interesting was when she said, ‘If you made the quilt, you named it,'” Earll said. “I thought that was very interesting.”
Described as the “photo albums of the day,” speakers Becky Bruce, Nevada, Mo., and Warren of Liberty, Mo., even dated quilts for visitors and took questions regarding their care and construction.
Presentations throughout the day touched on everything from “Women and Their Civil War Quilts” to “Influences and Inspirations” and even “Stories from the Quilts” that included local women and their quilt tales.
Jan Hedges, of Fort Scott, holds up one end of her "Generation Quilt" as she tells an audience of about 15 on Saturday that she was the third generation of women in her family to work on the covering. Hedges spoke during the "Stories From the Quilts" portion of the weekend-long bi-annual quilt symposium held at Fort Scott National Historic Site.(Angelique McNaughton/Tribune)
Jan Hedges, of Fort Scott, told her quilt’s story to an audience of about 15.
The squares on her large baby-blue and white quilt were given to her grandmother sometime during the 60s, she said.
“She started embroidering them and then her eyesight got bad so we put them in a box and then she passed away,” Hedges said. “And then my mother picked them up and wanted to work on some of the squares and then her eyes went bad.”
About 10 years ago, Hedges said she and her four sisters spent a weekend helping her mom clean and came across the squares packed away in a box that was stuffed in a closet.
“They had stains on them and my mom said, ‘I think we’ll just have to throw those away,’ and I thought, ‘oh my gosh, no, you can’t throw those away,’ she said. “So I took them, and I was just learning to quilt — my great-grandmother and my grandmother and my mother were all quilters — and I thought, ‘I need to learn how to quilt.’
“I had taken a really simple class to learn and my grandmother, she thought machine quilting was sinful, so I had to learn how to hand quilt. I decided to put this together and my mom had the fabric to go with it already.”
Hedges explained shortly after she took on the task of completing the quilt that two generations prior to her had started, her mother was moved to a nursing home.
“They were having a quilt showing and my mom said, ‘You think you can get that finished?'” Hedges said. “I thought, ‘OK.’ So I hurried and I did. I got it finished and it was on display in August and she died in March. I was so glad we got it done. We call it the ‘Generation Quilt’ because we had three generations of people working on it.”
Park Ranger Barry Geertsen said the Fort attracted about 100 visitors a day on Friday and Saturday.
It was the third bi-annual symposium held and Geertsen said as far as he knows, the community originally initiated the event.
Angelique McNaughton 