Women's History Month: Textiles keep the legacy, culture alive for North Carolina women

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- Walking through the North Carolina Museum of History, you'll find that every item tells a different story about the state and the people who have shaped it.

Textiles are a unique way that their legacies are being preserved.

"It often allows you sort of a glimpse into people's history that you don't necessarily learn about in written records," Diana Bell-Kite, the museum's Textiles and Clothing Curator, said.

Many of the items you'll find aren't made by household names in North Carolina, Bell-Kite said. This preserves the experience and contributions of everyday North Carolinians.

"They allow all of us to realize that we're all history makers every day and that our lives and the things that we make are a part of North Carolina history as much as anyone else's," she said.

For Women's History Month, you'll find exhibits all over the museum that honor the lives of women in NC.

One exhibit displays three different quilts, all made by black women in the state with very different experiences. Records show that one quilt was crafted by an enslaved woman around the 1860s in Warren County.

"It was made for a newborn baby who was the son of the people who enslaved her. We don't know if she was told to do this by the people or if it's something she chose to do herself, but it passed down in the enslaver's family until very recently and they donated it to the museum," Bell-Kite said.

"We don't know much at all about the woman who made it, but the 1860 slave schedule from the census shows that there were five enslaved women living in this particular household. So, we can see that one of those women is most likely the quilt maker."

Bell-Kite noted the quilt's beautiful construction and the skill it would've taken to make it, calling it a testament to the quilter's existence, even though their name is lost to history.

Another quilt also sits in the museum unfinished. It was made by a single mother named Bertha Bridges from Cleveland County. Bell-Kite said she was a laundress, and later a maid at a textile mill there in the early 20th century.

She made that in the most likely in the 1940s," she said. "Something extraordinary about Bertha Bridges is that she had one daughter, a woman named Ezra, who went on to be a very prominent community leader in Cleveland County. She was the first African American woman there to get a master's degree in 1946."

Ezra was a teacher at a Rosenwald school for about 50 years. She brought Head Start to Cleveland County and also started the Habitat for Humanity chapter there.

"So, she was just a super accomplished woman," Bell-Kite said. "And she and her mom lived together until her mom's death in 1959. So, their stories are very closely intertwined."

A woman named Laura Pettiford-Hayes from Person County made the third quilt hanging in the museum. She lived to be 101 years old and was employed as a domestic worker in a household.

"She made a quilt for each of the children of the family that employed her," Bell-Kite said, adding that the quilt hanging is one made for those five children. "She didn't view her quilting necessarily as an artistic pursuit, but something that was very practical and useful and a good gift to give someone because it's something you could use."

Bell-Kite said Pettiford-Hayes also loved gospel music, cooking, and working in the garden.

"I think it's cool when we know more about the person's life and what their personality and interests were," Bell-Kite said.

She believes a big takeaway from this exhibit is that North Carolinians of all backgrounds quilted, and their quilting meant something vastly different to each person.

"Those meanings have changed over time, and black quilting, in particular, is not a monolith. Black quilters have as much diversity among themselves as any other group of quilters," Bell-Kite said.

Other items in the museum feature Mexican culture, with the displayed doilies from a woman named Maria Salas, who moved to Alamance County in the late 1980s. She called them carpets and shared them with friends and family as a way of keeping her Mexican heritage alive in NC.

Indigenous culture is preserved and highlighted at the museum too.

A sewing basket there was made by Loretta Oxendine, who is a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina.

"There's a long tradition in that part of the state of using pine needles to make basketry. So, this is a sewn rather than woven basket," Bell-Kite said, "but, (Oxendine) became an expert basket maker after challenging her students when she was a schoolteacher to try to make a pine needle basket, and then she became so interested in it that she took up the tradition herself."

The North Carolina History Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and then on Sunday from noon to 5:00 p.m. You can visit it for free at 5 East Edenton Street in Raleigh.

To learn more about the museum, click here.