Driver retired in 1837, joining his brothers in Nashville, where he proudly displayed his flag every holiday until Tennessee seceded in July 1861.   A staunch Unionist and supporter of abolition, he was dismayed that three of his sons fought for the Confederacy.  Driver was naturally concerned the flag would be confiscated, and he had it concealed inside a quilt. When Union forces regained control of Nashville in February 1862,  Driver removed the flag from its hiding place.  Under Union escort he brought it to the statehouse, where it flew overnight, closely guarded by Driver himself.  

As new states were added to the Union, Driver added more stars to his precious flag.  A prolific correspondent, in 1876 he wrote his sons, "This flag has ever since been my staunch companion and protector.  Savages and heathen, lowly and oppressed hailed and welcomed it at the far ends of the world. Then, why should it not be called Old Glory?"  The name stuck, and Driver is credited with having originated it.

Driver died in 1886.  His Nashville grave is one of only a handful of places authorized by act of Congress where the US flag may be flown 24 hours a day. 

The flag was inherited by his daughter, who in 1922 gave it to President William Harding, who turned it over to the Smithsonian Institution.  But "Old Glory" was considered too fragile to display. Sixty years later, it was finally restored and in 1982 it became part of the museum's permanent exhibit.

The 10- by 17-foot flag went on display at the Smithsonian in Washington in 1982, 60 years after its donation. 

Ohio

Much of the too-convenient plot turns in the popular writing on the Moon sisters may be based on the memoirs of the flamboyant younger sister, Virginia Bethel ("Ginnie"). Among the unsubstantiated claims found on various websites (in nearly identical language): the women smuggled correspondence across the border by hiding them in quilts they assembled under the noses of Union soldiers;  disguised as an Englishwoman, spy Cynthia Charlotte ("Lottie") rode in an unwitting Abraham Lincoln's carriage; she left future general Ambrose burnside at the altar, only to have him spare her life years later; Ginnie was engaged 16 or 26 times, voted in Memphis before women's suffrage, and in her 70s appeared in films starring Pola Negri and Douglas Fairbanks.

What is known is that Lottie (born 1829) and Ginnie (born 1844) Moon grew up just north of Cincinnatti, Ohio, the daughters of Virginia-born physician Robert Moon and his wife Cynthia.  In 1849 Lottie married James Clarke, who became a Butler County (Ohio) judge and an outspoken Southern sympathizer. When  Dr. Moon died, his widow left Ginnie in Ohio and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Ginny joined her after war broke out.  

Because of their connections in both the North and South, the two young women, sometimes accompanied by their mother, were able to smuggle documents across the Mason-Dixon line and provide information on Union troop movements.  Their activities ended on April 3, 1863 when Ginnie and her mother were arrested as they were about to return to Memphis from Cincinnati.  

A Chicago Tribune article from April 7, 1863 reports that after boarding a Mississippi River steamboat the two women were stopped on suspicion of possessing contraband goods and correspondence. They vehemently denied this, blaming the accusation on their relationship to Judge Clark.  In later years Ginnie is supposed to have written that 

there was a list in my skirt, and in my petticoat I had a Colt revolver. I put it in my hand and took it out, backed to the door and leveled it at him. 'If you make a move to touch me, I will kill you, so help me God.'" 

Intimidated by her ferocity, Ginny says, the Customs officer left to get help, and in his absence she ate the incriminating list.  

But the Tribune article suggests the teenaged Ginny was something less intrepid than the heroine she describes: when threatened with a strip-search, she promptly "collapsed, and delivered her precious charge."  

What Ginny was carrying, however, is undisputed:  several dozen letters to various Confederate officers (possibly inside a quilted petticoat or quilt) and "a huge bustle, or sack, attached to her person" containing 40 bottles of morphine, seven pounds of opium and "a quantity of camphor", all of which would have been used to care for wounded Confederate troops.  

That the latter version is probably closer to the truth - and that the women's earlier exploits may have been something less than Ginny claimed - is suggested by their treatment:  after being briefly held in custody, they were released and warned not to cross Union lines again.  

After the war, Charlotte joined Ginny in Memphis and became a novelist, publishing under the pseudonym Charles M. Clay (books here and here); she died in 1895. For awhile Ginny ran a boardinghouse, adopted a child, then became a boarder herself. She was "a familiar sight on Memphis streets," when it was rumored she carried a revolver hidden in her umbrella.  In 1920 she was renting a room in Santa Barbara, California, but census records indicate she was unemployed.  Eventually she made her way to New York City, where she died in 1925. 

The B.O. quilt

Buying on ebay is always an adventure; unless you know the seller, it's always a surprise to see how much relation an item has (or doesn't) to its description.  In December 2009 I bought a Churn Dash quilt described as 1880s, Mennonite, and from Dundas, Ontario. The photos were unhelpful but at $9.99, even with Canada's stratospheric postage rates, I couldn't resist; if it turned out to be junk, it'd be fun to study.  

Finally the quilt arrived - along with oh my God an eye-blistering aroma of spoiled cottage cheese. The quilt was frail - dared I risk washing it, and would anything get rid of that stink?  What if its wool-like fabrics were Aralac, that WWII-era cloth made from milk protein that smelled like vomit whenever it got damp? Ecch.  Worse, like the valet's B.O. in the Seinfeld episode "The Smelly Car," the smell clung to everything. I gingerly toted it outside, draped it over the clothesline, and changed my contaminated clothes, hoping that after a night in the chill air, some of the gaah would be gone. 

Unfortunately I neglected to account for our new puppy. Let out to pee just before bedtime, Mr. Helpful decided to bring inside what I had left outside.  Thanks, good doggy.  Now not only was the quilt smelly; a strip about a foot wide on one edge was mangled beyond recognition.  I had nightmares.

The next morning I decided to salvage what I could by cutting off the shredded portion, finishing the edge by folding the front to the back, and washing it using my own instructions (here).  

And in the process I found out something interesting:  the quilt's present palette - olive and gold Churn Dashes on a field of pale beige with black sashing - is very different from what it was originally. The seam allowances and back sides of the fabrics showed that the the dark olive started out as black, the gold was dark olive, and the warm beige, slate gray, while the tan plaid backing was a soft amethyst. 

So when the quilt was new, it was more somber, with much less contrast;  what today looked like a hinky combination of olive and gold in some blocks would've been almost unnoticeable.  I'd like to think that close observation would've revealed this to me, but my dog disaster helped make it certain.

Kyra Hicks. This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt and Other Pieces. Black Threads, July 2009. 182pp: illustations, notes, bibliography. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0982479650

A sensation from the moment it was first exhibited, since 1886 the Bible Quilt and its reprise, the Pictorial Quilt, made by Georgia native and former slave Harriet Powers has been featured in more than 150 news articles, books, poems and plays. It is thus both remarkable and embarrassing that not until Kyra Hicks's latest work has anyone bothered to verify the received wisdom about the woman who is arguably the world's best-known quilter.

Hicks's easy, conversational and very personal tone belies the painstaking care of her research. What apparently began as an annotated bibliography snowballed into an astonishingly detailed provenance which both documents the lives of key figures in the quilts' history and refutes commonly held, if perennially evolving, assumptions about Powers.

It soon becomes clear to the reader that from the first, everyone who saw Powers's Bible Quilt regarded it as not only unique, but a work of art - high praise given its abstract design, the status of quilts as homely craft, and the tenuous role of black women in turn-of-the-century rural Georgia. Among the visitors of both races crowding to see it at the 1886 Northeast Georgia Fair was Jennie Smith, a white art teacher at an Athens girls' school. Smith was so captivated she tracked down Powers and offered to buy the quilt. After three meetings in four years, she convinced Powers to sell, agreeing to supply the avid quilter with fabric scraps and granting her what can best be described as visitation rights to the quilt. Smith carefully recorded Powers's description of the quilt's subjects, and exhibited it at least once thereafter, identifying Powers as the maker. In 1969 Smith's executor donated the quilt to the Smithsonian, and again it became a sensation.  

Other Powers admirers purchased or commissioned a variation now known as the Pictorial Quilt, presented to Charles Cuthbert Hall in 1898 probably when he became Union Theological Seminary's new president. For years Hall displayed it on the wall of his summer house, and even as a child, Hall's great-grandson knew the quilt was "a living thing, not meant to be on a bed, but meant to  be art." Like the Bible Quilt, the Pictorial Quilt long remained in appreciative private hands; then in 1961, art collector Maxim Karolik acquired it on behalf of Boston's Museum of Fine Art, where it has been on display since 1975. (It is currently in storage while the MFA undergoes renovation.)

Hicks's tenacious pursuit of primary sources uncovered crucial details about Powers's life which future researchers cannot ignore. She also confirms suspicions that these were not Powers's only quilts. In fact, Powers appears to have been something of a competitor, winning at least one prize for another 1880s quilt. Powers herself describes a fourth quilt's distinctive appearance; is it still hidden, unidentified, in some collection?

It is hard for any diligent researcher to resist sharing every tidbit we unearth; too often, every toy is our favorite. But this can distract rather than illuminate. The reader feels ungrateful complaining that Hicks sometimes provides *too much* information about peripheral characters; nevertheless it is hard not to wish that, for example, the thirteen pages on Karolik's life had instead been devoted to Powers's early years (rarely discussed in other sources) and careful descriptions of the quilts' materials and techniques, both of which Hicks seems to have omitted. But this is praising with faint damns. Hicks's main fault is modesty: she seems to view her book as supplemental when it should be the axis on which any reading on Powers revolves.

Hicks does yeoman's work viewing her subjects in historical context. A self-identified Christian familiar with Biblical iconography, she avoids the common pitfall of treating Powers's imagery as inscrutable and exotic, and she refrains from Rorschach-test psychologizing. While frankly confronting the patronizing racism of another era, she is also heroically "slow to wrath" (although the reader is baffled by her observation that "no African-American made quilts [were] included" in the ground- breaking 1971 Whitney quilt exhibition, as none of those quilts' makers appear to have been identified.)

Hicks might be amused that white vaudevillian and "Negro mimic" Lucine Finch, fabricator in 1914 of a grotesquely stereotyped "interview" with Powers (who had died four years before), appears to have been no respecter of persons regardless of race - even when she knew them personally. One review quipped that as Mother Goose in her friend's operetta, Finch "unfortunately trusted to her own capacity for making up things on the spur of the moment in preference to adhering to the lines of the part." Hicks's careful work marks a break with this kind of artistic license, and our appreciation of Powers is better for it.

The museum identified the quilt as having been made c.1995 by Ora Phillips, and said it was on loan from its owners, Joe and Sandy Todaro.   Sandy Todaro was co-curator of the 2003 exhibit A Piece of My Soul: Quilts by Black Arkansans, and also played a major role in assembling the African-American quilt collection at the Arkansas Old State House Museum.   In the late 1980s she co-directed the Louisiana Quilt Documentation Project with Judy Godfrey, who in 2003 was the Grace Museum's director.  Godfrey had asked Todaro to provide many of the quilts in the current exhibit.

A highlight of the exhibit was a lecture by Caroline Streeter, Ph.D., of UCLA's English Department and Center for African-American Studies. Discussing "The Movements of Spirit in Everyday Life:  African-American Quilters and the Creative Impulse," Streeter relied on Tobin and Dobard's Hidden in Plain View to use the quilt as an example of the "Underground Railroad quilt code" and of "the power of color, which Tobin and Dobard identify as part of West African heritage." 

But Ora Phillips's quilt bears an uncanny resemblance to one made more than a century ago which appeared on the cover of Kentucky Quilts (1982), in the Spring 1983 issue of Lady's Circle Patchwork and Quilting magazine, and in Terri Zegart's 1994 Quilts:  An American Heritage, and also toured nationwide in a Smithsonian exhibit.

That quilt was made of homespun "linseys" (cotton warp, wool filling) in the mid-1890s by a young white girl, Nancy Miller Grider of Russell County, Kentucky, whose parents were of English, Scots and French ancestry. (Recent genealogical research by Grider's great-granddaughter indicates that family lore of Cherokee ancestry had no factual basis.)