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Color, Craft and Comfort: 

The Quilts of the

Healdsburg Museum

May 20 - September 17, 2009

 For centuries women have been contributing to the fabric of our nation's history with artistic expression and careful colorful craft. In the design and function of quilts the stories and statements of many families have been stitched. Now on display through the middle of September, are examples of quilts from the Healdsburg Museum's collection. Some intricate and delicate, and others formidable and functional, tell their tales. From the Ozarks to Ohio, some of these quilts were carried in wagons to warm the beds and sitting rooms of new residents of California. 

Still others were loaded in steamer trunks and made their way around the tip of South America on their journeys to San Francisco and then northward along the dusty and sometime muddy roads of the new state to be used by pioneer families in Sonoma County. A few were stitched right here near Healdsburg before the town had a name. Women from well-to-do families like Josephine Fitch Bailhache, the daughter of Henry Delano Fitch and Josefa Carrillo Fitch, designed and detailed two of the examples of art in which form and function find expression. Another comes from the Pioneer Bice family, whose members were among the "squatters" who settled on Westside Road and set their roots in Healdsburg's colorful past.  Also, from the Alexander Valley came the work of Mary Cooperider Ferguson whose family arrived shortly after statehood in 1857. 

Please come visit to enjoy the artistry of these women and discover more about their unique contributions to our heritage.

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