Pilgrims may have put bed ruggs on blessings list

When I imagine my Pilgrim ancestor, Isaac Allerton, and the other citizens of Plimouth Plantation sitting down to a harvest dinner in 1621 – which many years later became the model for what we call Thanksgiving Day – I see them saying prayers of thanks for what had been harvested. Then I see them praying for warmth and a safe passage through another frigid, snow-lashed New World winter.

I think of the women in the rude village houses flying around like black-clad crickets gathering every available scrap of precious cloth to stitch into the first American patchwork quilts. But, alas, this scenario is a figment of my deeply romantic and fiction-infested imagination. They had no cloth except what they may have brought with them from England. Patchwork quilts didn’t appear on the American scene until the 1700s.

More likely, the Plimouth families stayed warm under bed ruggs brought with them on the long sea journey from England. Or perhaps, they slept under layers of furs supplied to them by the Wampanoag Indians. The Wampanoag helped the English survive that first year in the land Isaac Allerton thought of as New England, but was in truth, the Wampanoag nation, and the site of Patuxet, an Indian village.

According to “Labors of Love” by Judith Reiter Weissman and Wendy Lavitt, no bed ruggs from the 1600s are known to have survived. Nor does anyone know for sure how they were made. But in the dictionary written by Samuel Johnson in 1755, bed ruggs are defined as “course, nappy coverlets used for mean beds.” Apparently, bed ruggs were made of other than top grade wool, which doesn’t sound all that appealing. Rough wool most likely made the ancestors itch, as it still does some of us who are their descendents.

Textile historians surmise that bed ruggs were made with a knotting technique that gave the coverlet a shaggy look. If so, one assumes that bed ruggs, while providing the necessary warmth, were weighty to sleep beneath.

Maybe Isaac Allerton woke one glitteringly cold January morning and said to his wife, Mary Allerton, “I feel like I’ve slept under a ton bricks.” Maybe that comment, apropos of nothing but a poor night’s sleep, floated out into the ether just waiting for some nimble female mind to come up against it and reply, “Well, no wonder. Bed ruggs do weigh a ton. I think I’ll invent a bed cover as warm, but a whole lot lighter.” Like a patchwork quilt. But that event – if indeed it happened at all – was still at least more than 100 years away.

A different type of bed rugg appeared in the late 1700s, so obviously the ladies had their thinking caps on. These bed coverings were made with needle and yarn using a running stitch to create loops on one side of the bed rugg. The loops could be cut which gave the piece a “pile” or fuzzy appearance.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe having women around who possessed the imagination to craft – eventually – a lightweight way to stay warm was one of the things Isaac Allerton gave thanks for that long ago day.

To learn more about bed ruggs, visit www.historyofquilts.com/bedrug.html.

To learn more about the first Thanksgiving, visit http://teacher.scholastic.com/

thanksgiving/, and http://pilgrims.net/plymouth/thanksgiving.htm.

Snippets

The annual wreath making workshops with Claire Ackroyd will be held 5:30-8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 29 and Thursday, Dec. 1, at the Page Farm and Home Museum, University of Maine. The fee is $15 and covers the cost of materials.

The museum will offer completed wreaths for sale beginning today. (Tuesday, Nov. 22) Call 581-4100 for more information or to register for a workshop.

Ardeana Hamlin may be reached at 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.