ULEN, Minn. — In Ulen, the talk of the town is about more than just the harvest and the grain hauling to the elevator in town.
At the cozy museum on Main Street, everyone was buzzing Tuesday, Nov. 12, about a discovery there — a piece of our collective past.
A donated item — a quilt — that we now know was made before this country even called itself America.
Smack dab in the middle of the Ulen Museum among the Scandinavian antiques and old military uniforms:
“Let’s pull this edge over and fold it back from where it came,” said quilt historian Kim Baird. “Oh boy, I am so excited. Because it is so unusual to find.”
Baird joined museum volunteers in carefully handling the precious piece of history.
“Can you see the stitches that hold the seam together, can you tell they are hand-stitched?” Baird asked the volunteers.
This quilt was donated years ago by a Ulen resident, but what nobody knew at the time was that it was made before the Revolutionary War.
“No idea, didn’t pay much attention to it,” said Ulen museum volunteer Diane Blakeway.
“On the 29th, in 1769,” Baird said, pointing to a piece of the quilt.
That’s right — part wedding skirt and part quilt made for a woman named Margaret.
“This one is made out of linen and inside is a batting made of wool, and I am betting this came from a farm where the quilt maker lived,” Baird said.
Made in 1769. Before the United States of America, before the Revolutionary War.
“Amazing, amazing,” said Virginia Trom, a museum volunteer.
The information was sewn right into the quilt.
“How many generations can you trace in your family? This is five generations back,” Baird said.
Baird is fascinated with the history and has traced the quilt to when and where it was made, present-day New Jersey.
“Which was a British colony (in 1769),” she said.
The quilt was handed down to family members, until a great-great-granddaughter, Blanche Warren, brought it to Ulen. It later was donated and displayed at the museum. But volunteers had no idea what they had. One of the oldest quilts ever made in America — more than 250 years old — in Clay County.
“I was flabbergasted, like, what? We have something that valuable in here,” Blakeway said.
The quilt will stay in Ulen. They are pretty proud of this museum piece, it sure has survived a lot.
“If you were 250 years old, you probably wouldn’t look this good; I know I wouldn’t,” Baird said, laughing.
Because so many people initially doubted that the quilt was made of linen, North Dakota State University textile experts used a microscope to look at the 250-year-old threads, and, sure enough, the linen was made from flax at a farm in 1769.
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