- From the Curator's Deskby Katie Gardner
Eight year old Augusta Ruggles sewed the final stitches in her silk pieced quilt. Her older sister Sarah, her mother, and a number of her mother's friends from their regular sewing circle helped. This communal and social practice was and still is common in quilting. The year was 1830 and this New England ladies' group was working on a typical New England-style quilt-except they were sewing it in the Sandwich Islands.In October 1819 seven families sailed from Boston on the haddeus, arriving on April 4, 1820 in Kailua, Oahu in what is now known as Hawai'i. These families, mostly young married couples, were the first company of Christian missionaries sent to the islands by the American Board of Commissioners or Foreign Missions. Among the group were Connecticut newlyweds Samuel Ruggles, a teacher, and his wife, Nancy Wells Ruggles.The Ruggles and other New England missionaries brought their faith, their customs, their skills, and their aterial culture with them; all of which was shared and some of which
Augusta and her sister returned to the United States after 1830 to attend school. The rest of their family followed in 1834. Augusta's treasured island quilt traveled with her and was eventually passed along to her son, Samuel Ruggles Stevens. Stevens, [born in 1852] moved to Colorado City near Colorado Springs in 1895 where he operated a shoe shop. In 1967 five of his children donated the fragile but lovely silk quilt to the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum in his memory.
At this time his daughters Hulda Garnhart, Katherine Pearl Rogula, Hazel Madonna, Myrtle Cave and Clara Jones, also provided the long-held family tradition that Augusta's quilt was "made of cast-off robes of kings and queens" of the Sandwich Islands. There is a companion Ruggles quilt residing in the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu, Hawai'i where museum volunteer, Diana Francese, saw it on display. This experience, she says, reinforced her love for historic artifacts and opened her heart to a new understanding of Hawaii's culture. She introduced the Mission Houses Museum's astonished staff to Augusta's quilt by providing them with photos and documentation from the CSPM. The "sister" quilts were reunited at
last by research! A compa r i son of the two quilts reveals that the type of silk fabrics and the "Four Patch" pat tern used are the same. The color schemes are nearly mirror images: Augusta's quilt is primarily gold with blue h i g h l i g h t s , whi le the one in Honolulu is primari ly blue with gold accents. There are several identical fabrics in both quilts. The quilts were both made in 1830, and the Mission Houses Museum records indicate that the blue quilt was made by either Augusta's sister
Sarah or their mother, Nancy Ruggles. It seems plausible that the two girls were making their quilts together under the instruction of their mother and her circle of sewing friends.The Hawaiians imported expensive Chinese silk fabric so that the missionaries could sew Western-style clothing for the Hawaiian royalty. The unused scraps were then used to make quilts including the two Ruggles quilts. In addition to the scraps, Augusta's quilt incorporates a piece of white floral fabric, with a visible curved seam that appears to be a scrap of a used woman's dress bodice. Could it have belonged to Nancy Ruggles? Augusta's quilt and the story of early nineteenth-century missionary life it represents are among an infinite number of history lessons embedded in the CSPM's collections. By preserving and studying them, we can bring the stories from the past alive once again.
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