glenda & marty’s dresden (PART TWO)
Glenda & Marty’s Dresden Plate Quilt (photo courtesy of Glenda Carbaugh)
The following is an excerpt from a conversation I had with Glenda and Marty Carbaugh who answered one of my calls for quilt stories.
Please eavesdrop as I tell you the rest of Glenda and Marty’s story – to read part one, please see my May, 2025 blog. In it, I began to tell you about Josephine Robertson. here is what Glenda and Marty have uearthed…
Glenda & Marty’s gorgeous cedar chest in which they were given the Dresden Plate Quilt
“Though they were probably a wealthy family,” Glenda starts, “Josephine Robertson seemed to be ill. She couldn’t have children, there was a gravesite for a baby that may have been George and Josephine’s. As you piece together these clues that have to come together… Seems to me there’s a childbirth problem …they probably desperately wanted children…apparently a child died…they were living at Lakeside,” (a northern Ohio faith-based community). “I can imagine this religious community that got together and made this quilt for Josephine.”
We discuss this a bit further. “Maybe it was with her on her deathbed and she was coughing up blood,” referring to the stains she showed me earlier on the borders of her quilt that she eventually had to cut off as they were worn with wear. Later she gets on Marty’s iPad to do another basic search on Josephine Robertson. Just doing this brief search, she finds Marty’s ancestors both near and distant.
I asked Glenda what she most wanted to share with others about what she’s found so far.
“I’m trying to think of how I want to answer that question,” she replies pensively.
“…It’s about them...it’s not about me,” Glenda says. I’m just the caretaker of this quilt right now. To me it’s like a puzzle. We’ve got these puzzle pieces to put together, just like putting together the pieces of a quilt. We want to piece it together to find the history of these people. They lived in a whole different universe to ours. I don’t remember a time before man walked on the moon and to them that would have been inconceivable.”
Josephine died in 1968, but the quilt was probably made long before then. Piecing together when Dresden Plate quilts were first on the scene, they seemed to peak in popularity around the 1920’s with the first patterns being published in the 1930’s. It’s quite possible though that it was made before then without a pattern. Quilters display great ingenuity and it’s possible the quilter or quilters were ahead of their time.
Glenda and Marty have done a fine job of unearthing clues about their quilt and the other contents of their cedar chest. It is fortunate that we have some of the pieces of this puzzle to put together. It would be lovely to know exactly who the quilter or quilters were, whether or not they followed a pattern, for whom it was made, and why. It would be interesting to know what was happening in the world around them as it was quilted. While we have some idea, it leaves me wanting to know even more about George and Josephine, Glenda and Marty, and their pink and white quilt. Beckett Johnson says, ‘Life can’t surprise you if it doesn’t have room to show up.’ I love how Glenda and Marty have made room in their lives for things to show up and surprise them.
If you want to hear more quilt stories, follow me on Instagram and Facebook. If you have a quilt story to share, message me at the email below. I’d love to hear it! And if you need a little help telling your quilt stories, you might find my journal helpful. The Story of Your Quilt is available on Amazon here.