Behind the Exhibition: The Myth of the Bunker Hill Quilt Top

When I first began to think about this exhibition, I was inspired by one object in the collection: an unlined quilt pieced together with squares of blue, white, and red wool. This quilt top was donated in 1934 by Jennie White Burleigh, who passed along a message from its original owner, William Cheney. According to Cheney’s note to the Burleigh, the quilt descended in his family—a common story for most items that make their way into the collection and archives of Historic New England. However, there was something unusual about Cheney’s history of the object: According to him, the quilt was “made from English Officers’ uniforms, who fell at Bunker Hill. . .. All the quilt is made from uniforms of the soldiers that fought in 1775.” What an extraordinary claim!

The quilt has never been exhibited; after coming to Historic New England, it was catalogued and placed into our rolled textile storage at the Haverhill Center for Preservation and Collections. It wasn’t until I did a cursory search of our collections database for keywords relevant to the American Revolution that I became aware of its existence.

How might I verify Cheney’s story? My first step was to research the provenance of the quilt. The 1934 donor letter to Historic New England includes an important piece of information from original owner William Cheney: “When I was a child my mother showed me a bed quilt—unlined—which she seemed to guard with great care, and told me, if I remember rightly, that it had come down from General Riddle.”

According to my genealogy research, General William P. Riddle (1790-1875) married Sarah Ferguson in 1824; Sarah’s father was Captain John Ferguson of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, who indeed fought in the American Revolution. The quilt descended through the Riddle family until it came to Cheney. The Bunker Hill attribution either originated with the Cheney’s ancestors or developed later in the family’s timeline. So, there was clearly some truth to his claim, although more research is needed to determine if Ferguson actually fought at Bunker Hill.

What’s next? The object itself. Mid-to-late eighteenth-century New England quilts share many common features. The most popular kind were “whole-cloth quilts,” made from three layers of wool—two top layers and an interior layer of wool batting for insulation—stitched together, often in a decorative pattern. Our quilt was unlined and unfinished, which is unusual.

I also wondered about the material, which was a coarser grade of wool than the finer textiles I’ve encountered in Historic New England’s collection. Could the wool itself be a clue to the quilt’s origins? To help answer this question, I consulted with David Wood, Curator of the Concord Museum, and Joel Bohy, an appraiser and living historian who regularly works with historic battlefield sites. Together, these subject matter experts examined several pieces for the upcoming exhibition, including the quilt.

After careful examination of the quality of wool, the stitching, and its dyes, Joel and David informed me that the wool grade of my quilt was indeed consistent with eighteenth-century period clothing, including military uniforms worn by American soldiers, but not British soldiers. This type of wool was used in clothing until the 1860s, when advances in textile manufacturing introduced new fabrics for the military. This was an exciting development in my research—might the story be true? Not quite.

It’s possible this quilt was made from uniforms of soldiers who participated in the American Revolution and donated them to the unidentified quiltmaker in New Hampshire, who made the quilt top as a souvenir of sorts—not dissimilar from other domestic goods fashioned from salvaged materials associated with revolutionary-era battlefields or architecture. However, the Bunker Hill attribution is unlikely, and not only because, as our experts noted, British military uniforms used a different kind of wool. The British enlisted men killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill were buried in shallow mass graves in various locations; it is doubtful that Captain John Ferguson, if he was indeed present, would have taken the time to strip fallen soldiers of their jackets.

I began researching this quilt with the expectation that I would be able to “debunk” the myth behind its origin, but I ended up with a contradictory mix of evidence and doubt. This same tension animates the rest of the exhibition—not every question will have an answer, and visitors are welcome to form their own conclusions.