folkartwork

BETTIE BENDOLPH SELTZER Flower Garden Quilt (1990) // Cotton; 100 x 79 inches

via Souls Grown Deep Foundation

“When I was growing up, Mama made quilts to keep us warm. The ladies then piece their quilts at home and go to each other house to help quilt. At the start all they was making them out of was old clothes, pants, fertilizer sacks, dress tails, and meal and flour sacks, too.

It wasn’t till I started at the quilting bee around 1971 that I started using good cloth. I never used that old-clothes stuff again. It’s too tough to sew.”

BETTIE BENDOLPH SELTZER

Daughter of Annie Bendolph, longtime quiltmaker Bettie Bendolph Seltzer is a clearinghouse of quiltmaking information. Born in 1939, she confirms the utilitarian character of early-twentieth-century quilts, the social aspects of their creation, and the humble origins of their materials. 

After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin. As part of its Depression-era intervention, the Federal Government purchased ten thousand acres of the former plantation and provided loans enabling residents to acquire and farm the land formerly worked by their ancestors. Unlike the residents of other tenant com­munities, who could be forced by economic circumstances to move—or who were sometimes evicted in retaliation for their efforts to achieve civil rights—the people of the Bend could retain their land and homes. Cultural tradi­tions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.

Souls Grown Deep Foundation