news-record.com

BURLINGTON — Ask them about their big quilt, and they just laugh.

They spent hundreds of hours — sometimes on their knees, curved pins in hand — sewing, sticking, pulling and putting together these 30 panels that portray the mill houses they call home.

They’ll auction it off Sunday afternoon. They hope it’ll raise at least $1,000 for the Textile Heritage Museum at the bottom of their street so they can keep alive the proud past of the working-class South.

That’s the textile South, hard-to-find spots in Greensboro,

Jamestown and Burlington where life revolved around the early morning mill whistle.

That South has all but vanished. That is, all except its wooden monuments.

Stand at the intersection of Sarah Rhyne and Glencoe, just up the street from the Textile Heritage Museum, and you can see a row of houses, painted the colors of a crayon box, descending like a set of stairs toward the Haw.

It’s a sight straight out of the Americana world of Norman Rockwell.

But it didn’t always look like that. There was a time a decade ago when these houses had no heat, no plumbing, no windows, no porch, no chimney.

No matter. Once you rounded that corner, where the Haw bubbles over boulders as big as a VW Bug, homeowners will tell you they got grabbed by the sight — and potential — of what that row could be.

You see it today along the street and in that big quilt, created by a dozen homeowners and spearheaded by Sue Mason, a Vermont grandmother who moved in 2004 to the village of Glencoe, just north of Burlington.

When she visited Glencoe, she had never heard of it. Three hours later, she and her husband bought a 1,200-square-foot house. The price: $34,000.

“The winters were too darn long in Vermont,” she says.

On the quilt, framed by the famous Glencoe plaid, you see the village’s new details: the beehive, the bed and breakfast barber pole, the 1880 American flag on the front porch hanging near a pot of geraniums.

But ask about a particular panel, and the old stories come. And oh, they’re funny. It opens a window into another South, before color TV, when lovestruck workers just getting off their shift decided to get married underneath one of the village’s few lighted spots.

In a parlor. Underneath a bare light bulb.

Ann Hobgood, a village resident since 2000, heard that story eight years ago. It came from a woman, standing in Hobgood’s bedroom, who visited during an open house.

“She told me, 'This was the parlor,’” Hobgood said, “ 'and it had a settee (a couch). I was married here in 1935, and I didn’t bring my mamma. You want me to show you where I stood?’”

That’s when Lynn Pownell pipes up.

“A man came by and told me he preached his first sermon here,” she said. “And he was late because he got stuck in the snow. He told me that 10 years ago, and I didn’t even get his name.”

Each square tells that kind of story.

Like the one about the goat. It kept the river clear of briars and underbrush. Or the one about the barber shop. It offered haircuts for 10 cents. Or the one about the mill. It made fabrics for blankets and nightgowns and created a lifestyle for generations.

It opened in 1882. It closed in 1954.

Its memories are kept in the Textile Heritage Museum. And they’re now stitched into a quilt, made by village residents who have come from as far away as Vermont.

They didn’t really know each other. But these neighbors, from far-flung ZIP codes, spent nine months working together, working separately and even exclaiming from the floor, “I’ve got the worst knees in the world! Can’t we use a table or something?!”

They created a present-day community by working to preserve their past.

With needle and thread.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com