The title of a favorite Christmas carol has been a real inspiration to me during these last weeks of extreme cold. Bleak midwinters have been part of life in these West Virginia hills for thousands of years, and finding ways to keep warm has been a central focus for women in all cold climates. They had to cobble together whatever they could find to keep warm.

Making quilts out of what they had was essential for survival in earlier times, but by the 1880s during the religious Great Awakening and the American Gilded Age creating crazy quilts became a socially acceptable art form. These beguiling works of art became popular when America women became a little more prosperous. Young women used intricate embroidery to link silk and velvet swatches of material, and they added appliqued birds and flowers. It was such a part of the advertising in our early consumer culture that tobacco companies put satin squares in their cigar boxes for men to bring home to their wives and sweethearts.

When we started cleaning at the historic Kump House we found a fascinating crazy quilt in a closet under the eaves. There it was in a white sheet inside a box of quilts made by the mother of Edna Scott Kump. It was just big enough to make a wall hanging about three feet long and two feet wide. A patchwork fan at the top of her crazy quilt represented “Fannie” the quilter Frances Irvin Logan Scott. Near the center was an appliqued white cross representing Fannie’s religious conversion experience when she was seventeen years old. In the lower right-hand corner of the quilt was the brightest patch of all.

It was a peony colored piece of satin ribbon loosely flapping from the bottom of the quilt. When we turned the ribbon back we discovered a political campaign ad that read:

Our next president, Grover Cleveland of New York,

Our next Vice President, Allen Thurman of Ohio

Our next Congressman, WM. L. Wilson of Jefferson County

Grover Cleveland was the only politician I recognized in the list above. When I read about him, I learned that his presidency was split in 1888 when he did not win the Electoral College. He won the popular vote all three times for the presidency, but he only got enough Electoral College votes when he had support from powerful politicians at Tammany Hall in New York. Cleveland’s 1888 running mate was Allen Thurman who was listed on the Democratic campaign ribbon in Fannie’s crazy quilt. It all happened 136 years ago — that’s more than half of our 249 years of US history.

This quilting history lesson tells me that Donald Trump’s reelection on the third try is not really unprecedented. Cleveland’s case may be a reason that Trump thought he could stop Biden in 2021.