by Paul Morden for the Sarnia Observer

(2009) Quilts have a lot to say, says Bob Tremain, curator at the Lambton Heritage Museum.

Galleries at the county museum, located on Highway 21 near the Pinery, are covered in them these days.

One gallery is filled with the county museum’s summer and fall exhibition, “Between the Stitches,” and others are home this week to a show celebrating the 20th anniversary of the North Lambton Quilters’ Guild. It displays 130 quilts – both traditional and art pieces – made by the guild’s 35 members, said member Cynthia McNair.

The guild show runs Thursday to Sunday. Between the Stitches will be there through Thanksgiving. It’s an opportunity for the museum to exhibit some 50 historical quilts collected over the last three decades.

“Each of these quilts tells a story,” curator Robert Tremain said.

That includes one Ada Hanes of Blind River, Ontario began in 1894. “She called it her ‘hope quilt,'” Tremain said. Hanes was a talented artist who caught the eye of Sarnia lumber merchant Edward Lawrence when he travelled north to Blind River in search of fresh hardwood for the family business.

During the years she worked on her quilt, Hanes’ added new pieces signifying important dates in her life. The last date was 1901 – the year she married Lawrence and moved to Sarnia to live in the Lawrence House on the corner of Christina and Wellington streets.

Years later, the family donated her quilt to the museum. It’s displayed in the show, along with a portrait of Ada Lawrence, and other items from the Lawrence House. That includes the writing desk given to Ada by her husband. It started out life as a melodeon (an early foot-peddle organ) used at the Methodist mission on Sarnia’s First Nation reserve. Tremain said Edward paid $65 in 1920 to have the melodeon’s rosewood cabinet turned into a desk.

Other stories told by the show include signature quilts made to raise money for bond drives during both world wars. Residents would pay to have their names stitched into the quilts sewn by community groups, such as the Khaki Girls Club, Happy Hour Mission Band and Uttoxeter Red Cross. Looking over the Uttoxeter quilt recently, Tremain found the name of one of his own relatives who lived in that part of what is now Plympton-Wyoming.

The quilts in the collection are reminders of earlier times when people came together for a common cause, and often one of the few enduring reminders of once vital rural communities and churches.

“We’ve developed an impressive collection of quilts that tell Lambton stories,” Tremain said.