Block · Pictures
House
A pieced house: a roof, a door and windows. It is known as Schoolhouse, but it has had many names.
- Other names
- Schoolhouse · Hus · Skolehus
- Known from
- USA, from about 1880; most survivors from 1890–1940
- First known print
- Pieced houses are in the Ladies' Art Company's catalogue of 1898 as The Old Homestead and Little Red House; the name Schoolhouse comes from Ruth Finley's book Old Patchwork Quilts (1929).
- Origin
- Unknown, as for most traditional blocks
- Family
- Pictures
- Difficulty
- Medium · Triangles, geese and other angles cut with a ruler
- Grid
- 4 × 4 cells
History
House blocks became popular after about 1880, and Barbara Brackman shows an album quilt of 1898 from Missouri and a crazy quilt of 1904 with "The Old Schoolhouse". The museum in Lincoln has house quilts from 1880–1900 from New Hampshire and from 1890–1910 from Pennsylvania and Oklahoma.
The names changed: the Ladies' Art Company sold The Old Homestead and Little Red House, the magazine Hearth & Home called one version Lincoln's Cabin Home, and Ruth Finley gave it the name Schoolhouse in 1929. Finley did not care for picture blocks; she showed it in her chapter on the decline of handcraft and called such blocks "appealing yet absurd". There are so many versions that Brackman's encyclopedia has a whole run of numbers for houses.
How it is used
The roof is a large flying geese unit with sky on both sides, and the house below is rectangles and squares: a door in the middle and a window on each side. All of it is cut with a ruler.
The houses are set in rows like a street or a village, often each in its own colour and with sashing as roads between. Brackman shows quilts with names written between the chimneys.
Related blocks
Sources
The text is our own, written from the sources below. Photos of old quilts with the block are in the museums' collections.
- Book Ladies' Art Company: Diagrams of Quilt, Sofa and Pin Cushion Patterns (1898)
- Book Marie D. Webster: Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them (1915)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Schoolhouse History for AccuQuilt (2021)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Yankee Notions #2: Schoolhouse (2020)
- Article Barbara Brackman: Small Mysteries: Lincoln Rail Fence Quilt (2021)
- Museum International Quilt Museum: Schoolhouse, probably New Hampshire, 1880–1900