Nova Scotia Heritage Quilt Project History

In the early 1990s, the Nova Scotia Museum began researching for an exhibition of the quilts in its collection. The outcome of this research was a national travelling exhibition and a book by the same name, Old Nova Scotian Quilts, authored by curator Scott Robson and researcher/writer Sharon M.H. MacDonald. 

For the preparation of the quilts for hanging, we worked with quilters Barbara Robson, Ruth Edsall and Jamie Pratt. Barbara and Sharon talked about the idea of conducting an inventory of quilts in Nova Scotia. Numerous projects had been carried out in the United States and in Britain, so we had other models to go by. 

In 1992, the national conference for the Canadian Quilters’ Association met in Halifax with Mayflower Quilters Society hosting the event. The society committed to using a portion of any profit made on the conference to assist the newly formed Nova Scotia Heritage Quilt Project (NSHQP). This seed money along with our fundraising quilt cards allowed us to go to communities throughout the province for our quilt registry days. 

The first documentation day occurred in Halifax in 1995. From that beginning we travelled across the province. With about 6 quilt volunteers from Mayflower, we would go to a community that wanted us to conduct a registry. In advance, we sent the local volunteers the instructions for the set up, public relations and advertising material and they would arrange for the local team and location for the registry, be it a church hall, school, library, museum or other site. Over the course of a number of years the NSHQP conducted 22 registries and documented 1170 quilts. We decided to limit our documentation to pre-1970 quilts, primarily because these quilts predate the newer quilt revival that began in the early 1970s. As well, many Women’s Institutes (a national organization, mainly for farm women with local institutes in rural communities) made quilts in 1967 to commemorate Canada’s Centennial.

This database represents a mere fraction of the number of quilts that exist in the province. The NSHQP could have worked indefinitely to register quilts in more communities; however, the personal directions in the lives of the co-founders changed, so the project came to a halt. These many years later, the database is finally up and we hope that interested members of the public can find this of interest and informative. 

A number of points should be made here. For privacy reasons we have not included information on the owners of the quilts. The photographs are simply for identification purposes. At one time, we might have imagined professionally photographing the quilts for a publication but that did not happen, so the quality of the photographs is purely for identification. There are a few quilts that did not receive complete documentation because there were far too many quilts brought in on one particularly busy registry. 

There may be individuals who have come into possession of one or more of these quilts, either through inheritance, sale or other means. On the back of each quilt, a cotton label was sewn at the time of the registry that includes the number given to the quilt. One can search the database by quilt number if you do not have the paper documentation that went with the quilt. Quilt owners had the option of paying a nominal fee of $5.00 per quilt if they wished to have a copy of the paper documentation and photo mailed out to them. This was not mandatory, so if you own a quilt, the previous owner may or may not have chosen to have this material.

We hope that you enjoy seeing the variety of quilts that we were privileged to discover on our quilt registry days. And, finally, we would like to thank Mayflower Quilters Guild for supporting this project and thank the many members of the guild who gave of their time to volunteer at registries as well as volunteers in local communities that we visited. A big thank you also to quilter Meredith Annett, who helped fund the final data entry and website development.

We are grateful to the Nova Scotia Women’s History Society for sponsoring this website. Because the Nova Scotia Heritage Quilt Project is a significant contribution to women’s material history in the province, it is fitting that the History Society has made it possible for researchers and the general public to have access to, and enjoy,  this site and its treasures.