WEBSITE UPDATE–GOOD BY GOD, WE’RE GOING TO MISSOURI–PART I
A couple of weeks ago, we loaded up the car, pointed it east, and headed for Missouri. Mark Twain used to tell a story about a family’s moving to Missouri, and the little boy leaning out the back of the wagon and saying, “Goodbye, house, I’m goin’ to Missouri. Goodbye, trees, I’m goin’ to Missouri. Goodbye, God, I’m goin’ to Missouri.” “Now,” Mark Twain said, “you know he never said such a thing. He said, ‘Good, by God, I’m goin’ to Missouri.”
That was us. We were headed to the tiny town of Hamilton, Missouri (1500 residents), which you’ve most likely never heard of, but which is known to quilters as Quilt Town, USA. The home of the Missouri Star Quilting Company, the town is a mecca for them and for sewing machine collectors. My husband Courtney is both, and he’d wanted to go ever since a quilter friend first told him about it.
Missouri Star began as a tiny family quilting enterprise with a single long-arm sewing machine, selling quilting services and supplies to locals. Unable to make enough from that, they went online and began making how-to quilting videos, which Courtney says were actually fun to watch and easy to follow (unlike many which are deadly dull and/or unnecessarily complicated. I remember watching one where the teacher used two nearly identical shades of cream you couldn’t tell apart to show how to piece a quilt.)
The online business was quickly a hit, and the store in Hamilton, MO, expanded to two, then three, then a whole line of stores, buying up abandoned buildings in Hamilton’s dying downtown and turning them into what Forbes called “The Disneyland of Quilting.”
At this point they own one entire city block (except in no way can Hamilton be called a city) with two floors of undivided stores. Babies and Kids, Sew Seasonal (holiday fabrics), the Batik Boutique, Modern, and even one devoted entirely to fabrics with Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, and sports fabrics called License to Sew.
One of the stores was originally the J.C. Penney’s store in town and the fact that J.C. Penney was born here is the town’s other claim to fame. The appropriately named James Cash Penney (his name is what’s called an aptonym, a name that matches the person’s occupation, like William Wordsworth, runner Usain Bolt, tennis player Margaret Court, or John Blow, the pipe organist at Westminster Abbey) was one of ten kids, and the house is a museum.
Penney started out as a clerk in a dry goods store, but his health was bad, and he was forced to move to the drier climate of Colorado. He bought a meat market which went bankrupt, and then, in 1902, started his own dry goods store in Kemmerer, Wyoming called “The Golden Rule Store” which eventually became the chain known as J.C. Penney, the first truly nationwide department store chain. Penney is on record as saying, “Boy, am I glad I failed as a butcher!”
On the other side of the street are the main Missouri Star store (with T-shirts, baseball caps, tote bags, jigsaw puzzles, etc.) and shops devoted to florals, old-fashioned quilting prints that look like the calicos and flour-sack prints Grandma made her quilts from, and primitives, including flannels that look like wool for making the pioneer wool sugans Courtney loves.
The stores are decorated on the outside with quilting murals (it really is Disneyland) and inside with quilts (of course!) and quilting maxims like: “Quilt till you wilt!” and “A Clean House is a Sign of a Broken Sewing Machine” and “She Who Dies With the Most Fabric is Not Sewing Fast Enough” and my favorite, “Do not question the size of my fabric stash unless you think it should be bigger!”
For anyone who loves fabrics and/or colors, the stores a a rainbow-colored paradise. Courtney bought some batik fabric that’s the most beautiful red I’ve ever seen, and I succumbed to a pinkish-orangeish-reddish-coral called “Crush,” which is this year’s “Kona Color of the Year.” (No, I haven’t suddenly started sewing. It’s for a blouse.)
Besides the quilting stores, there’s a sewing machine shop and “Man’s Land,” a place for bored husbands with a TV tuned to a sports channel, a pool table, and a long row of leather recliners. (Note: Every time I sat down, there or anywhere else, I was asked, “Too much shopping?” and had to explain that no, my husband was the quilter, at which point they assumed we quilted together. It’s sort of like the sexism you encounter in hardware stores, only in reverse.)
There are also several quilt-themed (of course!) gift shops and places to eat. We had a wonderful lunch at a tea shop called Mrs. Little’s with the Missouri version of high tea: cream cheese and ham or turkey sandwiches, corn chowder, orange carrots and pineapple jello, and lemon-frosted cakes. The other day we ate at the hamburgers and cokes place (which has lattes and ice cream, too.)
There’s also an ice cream shop which was fun to go to because it was presided over by a young guy who all the high school girls came in to flirt with. “Are you serious?” he asked one pair of giggling girls. “No, I’m 16 and she’s 14,” they said. “And jail bait,” we added silently.
But the highlight of Hamilton for Courtney was the Missouri Quilt Museum, located three blocks away from downtown in a 1903 high school building. It had an impressive array of antique quilts (one embroidered with names including that of J.C. Penney’s father) and an even more impressive array of sewing machines (4000 at last count) Courtney even saw one he’d never heard of. (Note: Courtney knows almost every brand, machine, and model ever made, so a machine has to be really rare to be one he doesn’t recognize.) It was a Singer Model 76-1, a small machine used specifically for gathering (making the loose stitches to be pulled to form gathers or ruffles).
He went home the first night and did a bunch of research on the machine and then went back the next day, armed with his computer, to ask if he could take a closer look at it to see exactly how it worked.
The Singer 76-1 was in a huge basement room lined with toy sewing machines (the museum people had mistakenly classified it as a toy) which was the largest I’ve ever seen. They had hundreds of toy machines in dozens of colors.
Some of our favorite displays included:
–antique toy machines complete with domed wooden cases, just like their full-sized counterparts
–toy treadle machines with narrow stands
–a large quilt made of tiny black and white pieces which, when you stood back from it, formed a portrait of Albert Einstein. It was displayed next to the classroom’s blackboards with Einstein’s famous “E=mc2” equation and quotes by him.
–a room full of miniature quilts made for doll beds made of pieces so tiny you couldn’t imagine anyone being able to sew them
–an entire room devoted to crazy quilts, the fancy silk and velvet and ribbon quilts sewn in irregular shapes with embroidery stitches edging them. (“Stitched with more than common pains, offspring of artistic brains…”)
The building itself was wonderful, too, with its stairways at either end, its gymnasium with wooden bleachers, and its built-into-the-wall blackboards. One of the visitors I talked to said he’d gone to school there and couldn’t believe how small it had gotten. “It seemed huge to me when I was a kid.”
Out front is “the World’s Largest Spool of Thread,” which is 22 feet high and has a million yards of thread on it. Visitors are welcome to bring their own spool of thread and add it to the mix.
The museum–and the town–were full of visitors who wanted to talk, sharing where they were from and comparing notes on other quilt places to go. We talked to people from California and Maine–and a group from back home in Colorado Springs.
Connie Willis
Visit Quilt Town, USA
MISSOURIQUILTCO.COM