Patterned Cotton Flour-Sack Sewing
All about Sam's grandmother's quilt, her long life, and her kindness
A few years ago I brought a pieced quilt top down from our closet shelf and put it on a clean table in the studio. You can see part of it in the background of this painting, below, that I made of Sam’s grandmother, Lucy Matilda King Anders. As a boy, Sam often stayed with her and I think her portrait shows the kindness that Sam remembers.
Lucy Matilda King was born in 1879 in a house on the banks of the Little River, where Cascade Lake is now in Transylvania County.
Lucy and her brothers and sisters went to Laurel Creek School, which was named for a feeder creek of the lake. Lucy attended school only through the third grade because the teacher married and the school system did not allow her to continue teaching.
When Lucy was a young woman, a man named Elbert Lindsey Anders hired her to care for his elderly parents. E. L., as he was called, was a successful businessman in Hendersonville. His father had fought in the Civil War and his mother was the granddaughter of two Revolutionary War veterans. I think that a nation at war must have seemed very real to Americans then.
E. L. and Lucy lived in his parents’ house. Before long they fell in love and got married. When Lucy became pregnant she wanted a house of their own before the baby was born, so E. L. built a cabin.
One of E. L.’s jobs was making coffins. He was called away to take measurements for one when the baby was due, so Lucy gave birth alone. The story goes that it was blowing snow that day. It came through cracks in the log walls that were not yet chinked, and the new mother had to get up to shake snow off the blankets.
E. L. owned several stores and a small dairy farm. One of his stores is still in use today; it’s the wooden building on Brevard Road right across from Campground Road. He and Lucy also owned land on Jeter Mountain and in Green River Valley. But he had invested heavily in a bank that failed during the Depression, and a lot of their wealth disappeared. E. L. was older than Lucy and in 1935 he died.
Throughout her life, Lucy sewed for her family. Every quilt Sam slept under as a child, he says, was made by his grandmother.
Her single-bed quilt top that Sam has now is made of rectangles cut from the cotton flour bags that were popular from the 1920’s through the Depression and on into the 1950’s. The patterns are cheerful and the fabric feels soft and comfortable.
Early on, when grain companies noticed that their plain cloth packaging bags were being turned into clothing and household fabrics, they began to compete to produce patterns that would attract customers. “Husbands were often given instructions to buy a certain number of bags with the same print so there would be enough fabric for the dress or dresses.”
Lucy Anders also had a spinning wheel, though Sam doesn’t remember her using it.
He does remember her telephone. It was a party line that she got late in her life. If she thought someone was listening in, she would bang the receiver on the table!
But she was committed to her community. You may have heard Sam tell the “Sunday Hat” story.
Early in her life, Lucy was a midwife. By the time young Sam stayed with her, one of the more than 80 babies she delivered had grown up to become a used car dealer in Hendersonville. Lucy got wind that this man had sold a car to a struggling young widow with children who was living in a barn the neighbors had weatherproofed for her, putting in a woodstove for heat.
The car the woman had bought broke down soon after the sale.
That afternoon Sam’s grandmother dressed up and put on her Sunday hat — on a weekday! She and Sam rode the bus into town, then walked (for what seemed to the boy like forever) to the used car lot. They went inside the office and Lucy told the young man how disappointed she was in him. She demanded he make the bad car deal right for the woman he had sold it to. And he did.
This is Sam’s “Sunday Hat” story. I’ve heard him tell it on the campaign trail. “Sometimes you just have to put on your Sunday hat and go to town.”
By the way, as you drive into Hendersonville on Crab Creek Road, look for a barn with a chimney!
LUCY IS MY HERO. I LOVE HER!
What a beautiful bit of local history. I would love to have known Lucy, too!