Making Clothes for the Boys in the Army
Adalbert John Volck
1861-1863
On September 6, 1847, Rachel Baer was at Union Spring, Rockingham County, Virginia carefully recording in her beautiful script a draft for a weaving pattern she called “the bunch snow Drop.” She collected two other drafts that day, one for “the vining strawberry” and one for diamond twill. She brought the drafts home to the farm at Panther Gap, Rockbridge County, Virginia and shared them with her sisters, Mary and Anna, and her mother, Ann. She and her sisters carefully preserved the drafts along with eighteen others. Her descendants kept all twenty-one drafts for woven fabric along with account books, tax receipts, records of land transfers, and letters, and donated the collection to Special Collections at Washington and Lee University in 1974.
Almost two hundred years later, in 2022, a group of modern weavers read the drafts and wove samples of the fabrics to illustrate what the Baer family had been weaving in the period from about 1830 to 1850. Reading the drafts, weaving the samples, and studying other archival material allowed us to create a glimpse of life in a nineteenth century farming community.
Materials in this exhibition are from the manuscript collections of Washington and Lee University as well as from collections of community partners Brownsburg Museum and Rockbridge Historical Society.
Exhibit Talk
"Sisters at the Loom" presentation at Washington and Lee University, May 11, 2023 from W&L Special Collections on Vimeo.
Exhibit History
During the summer of 2023, Leyburn Library hosted the Sisters at the Loom exhibit outside Special Collections and Archives. A recording of Frances Richardson's exhibit talk, given on May 11th, 2023, is available on Vimeo.
The exhibit has since traveled to the Clifton Forge School of the Arts during the fall of 2023, featuring the work of Catharine Hagan.
In the summer of 2024, the exhibit reopened at the Rockbridge Historical Society under the name Rockbridge Weavers.
Credits
Curators: Frances Richardson, Chloe Thomas, Byron Faidley, Mattie Clear
Graphic Design: Chloe Thomas
Digital Exhibit: Mackenzie Brooks, Byron Faidley, Frances Richardson
A special thank you to Gay McGeary, and Rockbridge Historical Society, and members of the Central Virginia Fiber Guild and Handweavers Guild of the New River Valley, whose time and material loans helped make this exhibition possible.