Lancaster County Quilts
You can’t look at a handmade quilt, even the simplest one, without admiring it and wondering about who made it. After all, making just one pieced quilt requires careful planning followed by hours and hours of meticulous cutting, piecing, and stitching. But, in the quilt world, serious collectors most prize the quilts made by Lancaster County’s Amish women from the mid-19th-century to the mid-20th-century. To own one of these quilts is every collector’s dream.
Quilt aficionados prize the Amish quilts from Lancaster for their striking color and strong geometic design; for the fine wool fabric used into the 1930s; and for the tiny and skillful stitches done in dark thread. In style, these quilts can be distinguished from others by their wide borders, contrasting color binding, and large corner blocks. While you might already know how highly regarded Amish quilts from Lancaster are, you might not know the Amish did not bring a quilt-making tradition with them when they first came from Germany in the 1700s.
They learned quilting from their English neighbors who were also settling southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1700s. By the mid-1800s, Amish women had adopted what they had learned and were making quilts with traits distinctively their own.
Quilting became part of the Amish culture, and the women made quilts both for daily use as bed coverings and for special family heirlooms, such as wedding gifts for their offspring. Today, if anything, quilting has only grown in its importance to Lancaster’s Amish. Many now make quilts specifically for selling to tourists, and these sales provide an important source of family income. But what collectors really want are the old ones originally made as family heirlooms. Used only on special occasions, these family heirlooms can most often be seen hanging in museums including Lancaster’s own Quilt and Textile Museum in the former Lancaster Trust Co. building, behind the downtown square at 37 Market St.
Lancaster’s quilt museum displays the “Esprit Collection,” the 82 Amish quilts made in Lancaster County from 1852 to the 1940s and collected by Doug Tompkins, co-founder of the Esprit Corporation and now a land preservationist. Tompkins amassed Amish quilts in the 1970s to adorn the brick walls of Esprit’s headquarters in San Francisco. But Tompkins left Esprit in the early 1990s, and, by 2002, he wanted to sell his quilts to raise money for his non-profit foundation, the Conservation Land Trust, to buy and preserve a rain forest in Chile. When his foundation offered the 82 quilts to the Heritage Center Museum of Lancaster County for $1-million, the museum board gasped but seized the opportunity.
After the purchase, the quilts that had left Lancaster County in the 1970s and '80s for San Francisco returned in time for the Heritage Center’s Quilt and Textile Museum’s opening in 2004. The combination of Tompkins’ legendary “Esprit Collection” with those the Heritage Center already owned now gives Lancaster an extraordinary quilt museum and one unique in its exhibition of quilts in their place of origin.
Experts, both in the museum and the quilt world, believe the return of the “Esprit Collection” to Lancaster and their permanent and public display has turned out like a wonderful quilt: everything has come together in just the right way.
You can’t look at a handmade quilt, even the simplest one, without admiring it and wondering about who made it. After all, making just one pieced quilt requires careful planning followed by hours and hours of meticulous cutting, piecing, and stitching. But, in the quilt world, serious collectors most prize the quilts made by Lancaster County’s Amish women from the mid-19th-century to the mid-20th-century. To own one of these quilts is every collector’s dream.
Quilt aficionados prize the Amish quilts from Lancaster for their striking color and strong geometic design; for the fine wool fabric used into the 1930s; and for the tiny and skillful stitches done in dark thread. In style, these quilts can be distinguished from others by their wide borders, contrasting color binding, and large corner blocks. While you might already know how highly regarded Amish quilts from Lancaster are, you might not know the Amish did not bring a quilt-making tradition with them when they first came from Germany in the 1700s.
They learned quilting from their English neighbors who were also settling southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1700s. By the mid-1800s, Amish women had adopted what they had learned and were making quilts with traits distinctively their own.
Quilting became part of the Amish culture, and the women made quilts both for daily use as bed coverings and for special family heirlooms, such as wedding gifts for their offspring. Today, if anything, quilting has only grown in its importance to Lancaster’s Amish. Many now make quilts specifically for selling to tourists, and these sales provide an important source of family income. But what collectors really want are the old ones originally made as family heirlooms. Used only on special occasions, these family heirlooms can most often be seen hanging in museums including Lancaster’s own Quilt and Textile Museum in the former Lancaster Trust Co. building, behind the downtown square at 37 Market St.
Lancaster’s quilt museum displays the “Esprit Collection,” the 82 Amish quilts made in Lancaster County from 1852 to the 1940s and collected by Doug Tompkins, co-founder of the Esprit Corporation and now a land preservationist. Tompkins amassed Amish quilts in the 1970s to adorn the brick walls of Esprit’s headquarters in San Francisco. But Tompkins left Esprit in the early 1990s, and, by 2002, he wanted to sell his quilts to raise money for his non-profit foundation, the Conservation Land Trust, to buy and preserve a rain forest in Chile. When his foundation offered the 82 quilts to the Heritage Center Museum of Lancaster County for $1-million, the museum board gasped but seized the opportunity.
After the purchase, the quilts that had left Lancaster County in the 1970s and '80s for San Francisco returned in time for the Heritage Center’s Quilt and Textile Museum’s opening in 2004. The combination of Tompkins’ legendary “Esprit Collection” with those the Heritage Center already owned now gives Lancaster an extraordinary quilt museum and one unique in its exhibition of quilts in their place of origin.
Experts, both in the museum and the quilt world, believe the return of the “Esprit Collection” to Lancaster and their permanent and public display has turned out like a wonderful quilt: everything has come together in just the right way.