Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell's Graveyard Quilt

An American Pioneer Saga Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell's two sons were buried in distant Ohio graves. On the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, Elizabeth began making a quilted cloth graveyard with two walnut-dyed cloth coffins for each of her two boys. The quilt would not only be a mourning piece but, at a time when there were no photographs, it was also Elizabeth's representation of the actual graveyard in Ohio. In the collection of the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, Kentucky, the Graveyard Quilt is an unusual piece of American folk art, as well as a quilt masterpiece. Using this well-known quilt as a document, Linda Otto Lipsett has uncovered a piece of American history never before written. The quiltmaker's pioneer saga begins with her grandparents before the Revolutionary War and continues until 1930, through five generations of her family. Throughout the book Linda Otto Lipsett weaves the story of the making of the Graveyard Quilt. Linda brings to her book over five years of research, which took her tens of thousands of miles from Maryland and Virginia to Pennsylvania and Ohio, to Kentucky near the banks of the Ohio River where Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell began her famous Graveyard Quilt, to Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and finally to California (the author's resident state), where three of the quiltmaker's children lived at the end of their lives. This book focuses on the following family surnames: Mitchell, Roseberry, Hughes, Swan, Stallcup, Boyd, Garrettson, Biggs, Dye and McElroy. Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell's Graveyard Quilt is unique--for the first time the detailed story of a museum quilt is set down in a full-length book. Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell's Graveyard Quilt: An American Pioneer Saga by Linda Otto Lipsett, Halstead & Meadows Publishing, Dayton, Ohio, 288 pages with illustrations, photographs, and color photographs of the quilt, CIP/LC 95-41580, ISBN 0-9629399-2-7, $18.95.