"Beautifully illustrated with thirty-two color and seventy black-and-white photographs, Mary Black's Family Quilts utilizes a remarkable collection of sixteen quilts to tell the story of a family through six generations and to document the material behavior associated with quiltmaking traditions. The daughter of a prominent farmer, Mary Louisa Snoddy Black (1860-1927) is remembered in the Spartanburg, South Carolina, region for the hospital named in her honor and for the philanthropic foundation that continues to support community health and wellness. Laurel Horton explores the even more tangible legacy Black left to her descendants - trunks full of quilts made by women of the family, each labeled with detailed information about its origin and significance. Pairing the information from the labels with research culled from interviews, letters, and public documents, Horton stitches together the family's history across the fabric of two centuries as she explores the roles of women as keepers of home, hearth, and history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America." "Valuable both as artistic creations and as historical artifacts, the family quilts reflect decades of work, familial interactions, economic philosophy, and personal and communal values. Suggesting that quilts were exchanged as a mode of currency in an informal, female-centered economy, Horton uncovers the clues they hold about the people who made and used them in their daily lives."--BOOK JACKET.