The Apple Pie Ridge Star & The Guadalupe Dance

 Hollingsworth Family Quilt, 1858, detail. Collection of the Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society.

The name of this appliqué quilt block pattern, “Apple Pie Ridge Star,” appears to be a local name for a pattern observed elsewhere under different names. There are also published references to variations of the pattern as a “Fleur-de-Lis Medallion,” “Snowflake,” “True Lover's Knot,” “Conventional Scroll,” and a “Kansas Pattern.” Now, we can one more name to this list.

In October, I presented a Study Center about the pattern at the 2018 Seminar of the American Quilt Study Group (AQSG) in Bethesda, Maryland. This post contains large excerpts of the article that was published by AQSG in the Seminar 2018 edition of their newsletter, Blanket Statements.  

The earliest documented American example of a ‘slim’ version of this pattern appears on a Baltimore quilt dated 1844, but the first documentation of the name, “Apple Pie Ridge Star,” was not published until 1998. This unique block pattern name was discovered by my friend Janney Lupton when her cousin pointed to a block of the Hollingsworth Family Quilt dated 1858 and declared, “My Grandmother called that an Apple Pie Ridge Star.” The name, which makes reference to a nine-mile stretch of road in Frederick County, Virginia, has since appeared in numerous articles and books.

 

Quilt, est. c. 1850, detail, purchased in Maine.
 

The term “Apple Pie Ridge Star” was discovered by Janney Lupton in the 1990s when one of her Loudoun County, Virginia, cousins, a Mr. Wilson, invited her to see an old family quilt he had inherited. After entering his house and climbing the stairs to the second floor, Janney first spied the quilt about halfway down the hall, nailed to a bedroom door.

 Hollingsworth Family Quilt, 1858. Collection of the Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, 

Winchester, Virginia. Photograph by Barbara Tricarico.

The quilt was frankly in pitiful condition, but thanks to Janney Lupton’s studies and the Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, where it is now preserved, it would end up yielding an incredible wealth of information.

As the cousins stood looking at the Signature Appliqué Album quilt, Mr. Wilson pointed to one of its corners and said, “My grandmother called that an ‘Apple Pie Ridge Star’.” Janney Lupton became the first person to document the name in an article she wrote about making her own reinterpretation of the Hollingsworth Family Quilt for the magazine “Traditional Quilter.” 

Excitingly, I am able to share a brand-new name for this old pattern! I discovered this new name when I was volunteering at a historic house tour. The home “Cherry Row,” was built in 1794 along Apple Pie Ridge in Frederick County, Virginia. It is now owned by David and Jenny Powers who have restored it to much of its original appearance. They occasionally offer tours to interested groups. 

At one of these tours, I was standing in my assigned room when a visitor on the tour pointed to the “Apple Pie Ridge Star”-patterned quilt on the bed and declared, “My Grandmother called that, ‘The Guadalupe Dance’!” In subsequent correspondence, the visitor explained that he had seen the pattern before on a batch of “old squares.” His grandmother had purchased them locally with the intention of using them in a quilt.

Why would a nineteenth-century resident of the Shenandoah Valley assign such a name to a quilt block pattern? Perhaps it had something to do with the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821), when the revolutionary leader Miguel Hidalgo used the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a banner at the beginning of the revolt that he led to end Spain’s rule over Mexico. 

                           Deed, detail, dated 1853. The Town of White Hall in Frederick County,

Virginia, was, “formerly called Guadaloupe [sic].”

There is a tiny town at crossroads along Apple Pie Ridge, (where the ancestors of the house tour guest lived), now known as “White Hall.” According to an early nineteenth-century deed, this crossroads was once called “Guadalupe!” The area was officially renamed "White Hall" in 1818 when a post office was established there but various nicknames for the area persisted such as, “Got-A-Loop,” “God’s Loop,” and “The Loop,” before the name “Guadalupe” was completely relegated to the distant past. Thanks to pure happenstance, the name was brought it to my attention in connection to a pattern named (twice!) for a small area along Apple Pie Ridge in Frederick County, Virginia.

Notes and Sources:

All text and photographs on this site are by Mary Holton Robare unless otherwise noted. All Rights Reserved. ©Mary Holton Robare 2018.

To learn more about the American Quilt Study Group please visit:  https://americanquiltstudygroup.org/

Barbara Brackman. Encyclopedia of Applique: An Illustrated, Numerical Index to Traditional and Modern Patterns. Mclean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1993, 127.

Deed of Sale from Martin and Elizabeth Ann Fries to James and Richard Griffith, 18 August 1853. Frederick County, Virginia Deed Book 80, p. 442. County Recorder’s office, Winchester, Virginia.

James V. Hutton Jr., In and Around the Loop (Northern Frederick County, Virginia). (Athens, GA: Iberian Publishing Co., 1998).

Janney Lupton, “Hollingsworth Revisited: A Labor of Love.” In Traditional Quilter, Newton, NJ: All American Crafts, Inc., November 1998, 50-51.

For previous publications that mention the “Apple Pie Ridge Star” quilt block pattern see: Virginia Consortium of Quilters, Quilts of Virginia 1607-1899: The Birth of America Through the Eye of a Needle, (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2006), 81; Mary Holton Robare, "The Apple Pie Ridge Star," in Blanket Statements, 88, edited by Gaye Ingram. Lincoln, NE: American Quilt Study Group, 2007, 10-11; Robare, “Threads of Quaker History: Sarah Pidgeon, Family and Friends.” In Journal Volume XIX. Winchester, VA: Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, 2007, 24-43; Barbara Brackman, “#7 Pattern Names: Names in the Oral Tradition & A Curious Scroll Design,” in “The Quilt Detective: Clues In Pattern,” in A Digital Newsletter for 2007, 13 May 2007; Karen Biedler Alexander, “Apple Pie Ridge Star quilt pattern,” blog online, “Quilt History Reports.” http://karenquilt.blogspot.com/2012/07/apple-pie-ridge-star-quilt-pattern.html; Accessed 23 May 2015; Hazel Carter, “Apple Pie Ridge Star Quilts,” In Blanket Statements, 100, edited by Paula Pahl, Lincoln, NE: American Quilt Study Group, 2010, 14-16; Linda Baumgarten and Kimberly Smith Ivey, Four Centuries of Quilts: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection. (Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2014), 182; and Alden O’Brien with Virginia.

Mary Holton Robare, "The Apple Pie Ridge Star," in Blanket Statements, 88, edited by Gaye Ingram.  Lincoln, NE: American Quilt Study Group, 2007, 10-11 and "The Apple Pie Ridge Star: New Findings," in Blanket Statements, 136, edited by Jill Wilson, Lincoln, NE: American Quilt Study Group, 2018, 7-9. Also see: “Threads of Quaker History: Sarah Pidgeon, Family and Friends.” In Journal Volume XIX. Winchester, VA: Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, 2007, 24-43.