The Daily Catch

From a Box to a Book: Sarah K. Hermans Unearths the Northern Dutchess Stories In a Rare 1903 Quilt



Amateur historian Sarah K. Hermans holds the quilt top that inspired her first book, The 1903 Jackson Corners Signature Quilt (photo by Emily Sachar).

When the square cardboard box containing the carefully folded muslin fabric passed down to her in 2010, Sarah K. Hermans had no inkling of the project that lay before her.

The material was yellowed and stained. She detected quilt pieces, assembled with finely detailed “turkey red” stitchwork. But the quilt, homely in presentation, was unfinished. And what of all the names — 260 in total — embroidered across the 70-by-80-inch swath? 

Hermans set to find out. Over the next 11 years, a period that has culminated in the late 2021 publication of her first book, The 1903 Jackson Corners Signature Quilt, Hermans has added hundreds of stories to the history of Northern Dutchess and Southern Columbia counties. 

Her book is a testament to a radically different time, when cars were a luxury good, when the telephone had not yet infiltrated domestic life, when TV, radio, and film had yet to be invented, when hot water on demand was a pipe dream – and when women gathered to sew. Hers is a project that illustrates a woman’s zeal, with painstaking research, to produce something remarkable from a tangible good that appears quite unremarkable to the eye.

“Sarah guides us to a small place at a time that has nearly lapsed beyond local memory,” said William Tatum, Dutchess County historian. “Reading this book, you come to appreciate just how vital that place and that year are to understanding the larger story of community in our region.”

The 343-page book, documented in scholarly fashion with hundreds of footnotes, eight family trees, maps, a 27-book bibliography, and dozens of photographs, is all the more unusual because Hermans is not a trained historian. She earned her B.S. in communications from Ithaca College in 1999 and has no graduate school to her name, nor plans to attend. She also has a demanding day job, in operations and accounting, at Fraleigh and Rakow Insurance Agency in Rhinebeck. And Hermans’ time is also consumed with the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, details of which she articulates as she fondly fingers the game’s polyhedral dice.

Hermans, surrounded by family photos and memorabilia, shows off her new book. (photo by Emily Sachar)

“Researching people who have been forgotten is absolutely addictive to me,” Hermans says. “And if that work enlightens or entertains others, that’s great.”

Hermans, 44, who grew up in Millerton and now lives in Pine Plains, believes she inherited her love of historical research and family lore from her grandmother, Clara Weller Losee, a dedicated local and family historian and past historian for the Town of Milan who died in 1997.

In 2007, Hermans started dabbling with Ancestry.com, an online genealogical and historical records database, then further honed her skills as Chapter Regent, from 2010 to 2016, of the Rhinebeck chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). She began to meet other local historians and to entertain queries from members of the public who wanted to research their family’s connections to patriots of the Revolutionary War. But rather than teach others to do the research, Hermans found she actually enjoyed completing their projects herself. “Most family researchers are only interested in their own families. But I found I could listen to people talk endlessly about their own stories. That made me very popular,” she says wryly.

She would take notes, then set the prospective members loose so she could do the research.

“I would find out everything I could from the past,” Hermans says. “The living are always more difficult to work with than the dead.”

When the signature quilt landed, quite literally, in her lap, Hermans quickly recognized a dozen or so of the embroidered names. And she had already amassed a network of resources, most online, to consult. Reaching libraries and archives, since she works full-time, is difficult. Among her favorites: The Red Hook Journal, Rhinebeck Gazette and Hudson Columbia Republican, as well as FultonHistory.com, which has digitized more than 1,000 newspapers totaling nearly 52 million pages from around New York State. Findagrave.com, owned by Ancestry, is another useful resource, she says. So are old gazetteers, geographical indexes sometimes used in conjunction with atlases or maps.

“We’re fortunate to have a ton of local historians who have written books on our rural area as well as locals willing to talk to me about their families,” Hermans says.

Which isn’t to say Hermans can pull blood from a stone. She’s quick to note humbly that she works largely with resources available to any curious interrogator. Indeed, Hermans concedes, sometimes there is simply no history to be found on a given individual. But give her a name like Clarissa Pritchard, whose tombstone can be found at the Old Red Church Cemetery in Tivoli, and Hermans has a field day. (Pritchard, she learned doing research for the 2021 Historic Red Hook Cemetery Crawl, was, with her twin sister, the youngest female lawyer then to practice in New York State; the year was 1913. And she was an adherent for women’s suffrage). Hermans also takes on smaller projects, like a brochure for Historic Red Hook (HRH) about Red Hook’s Methodist Episcopal Cemetery on Cherry Street.

Hermans is proud of the meticulous systems, both digital and hard copy, she uses to document her findings. “Every little teeny piece of data you can find is useful or can become useful,” Hermans says. And those systems came in handy as she set to producing the book and documenting the quilt, a family relic first purchased by her great great grandfather, Jacob Hermans, for four dollars at a church auction in 1903.

The item, in fact, is less a quilt than a large piece of embroidery, and it was created to earn money to pay the salary of the pastor of the Jackson Corners Methodist Church, a fact Hermans gleaned from the Columbia Republican newspaper. A person would pay a small sum to have their name sewn into the quilt top, and then the quilt itself would be auctioned off, Hermans explains. In total, the 1903 quilt yielded $43.75 (about $1,500 in today’s dollars), another nit of a detail Hermans uncovered in her research. 

Her first task for the book, she says, was to research the origin of signature quilts themselves – they were common projects prior to World War I, the reader learns – and then to situate this particular quilt as a relic in time and place. 

The chapter, “Life in 1903,” consumes 52 pages. One learns that in 1905, the Newburgh, Dutchess & Connecticut Railroad offered eight passenger trains each day – two each way between Beacon and Pine Plains and two each way all the way to Millerton. “If someone in Stanford wanted to meet someone in Elizaville for tea at two o’clock, thanks to the frequency of trains that came through each day, they could send them a letter or postcard in the morning’s mail to announce their visit,” Hermans writes.

Yet, train travel was slow. Hermans tells us that the “Hucklebush line was so nick-named because it was slow enough one could hop off and pick berries as it trundled along.”

Hermans, a Dungeons and Dragons devotee, has a coy and dramatically playful streak around her polyhedral dice (photo by Emily Sachar).

And what was 1903 famous for? It was the year the first “Teddy Bear” hit the market, the first Tour de France ran, the Wright brothers made their first controlled powered flight of an aircraft, and the Model A was produced by the Ford Motor Company. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize and Harry Houdini was delighting audiences with his escapist magic tricks.

What becomes clear in a close reading of the book is that while Hermans may start with the minutiae of individual lives, the collective stories yield a tableau of rich life in the region. Rhinebeck was the center of some 116 violet growers, and several dozen of the men involved in their trade feature on Block 14 of the quilt top. The monotony of farming life was broken with Grange meetings, Hermans writes, and the fatal recreational shooting of a fox would command mention in a local paper.

More than 200 pages are devoted to the 42 blocks, each detailed one by one.

When it came time to put the book to bed, Hermans designed it herself using Adobe InDesign software and had it professionally printed by ColorPage commercial printers in Kingston.

What’s next? Hermans plans to return to her work documenting the lives of the 180 people buried in the Red Hook Methodist Cemetery. And she’s at work on an illustrated memoir, in color, of her grandfather, John Losee of Upper Red Hook. She is also brainstorming a food history event and strawberry festival for 2023 for Historic Red Hook.

“Sarah’s local history work is immensely important,” says HRH executive director Elisabeth Tatum. “We depend on researchers like Sarah who volunteer their expertise and time to do the hard work of sifting through years of documents, data, and objects to tell the stories that otherwise might be lost to the past.”


Sarah K. Hermans’ book, The 1903 Jackson Corners Signature Quilt, is available here.

One response to “From a Box to a Book: Sarah K. Hermans Unearths the Northern Dutchess Stories In a Rare 1903 Quilt”

  1. Christopher Klose says:

    Great story! Local history at its best. Thanks for the interview.

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