Stitching lives together: Quilters created warmth, friendship

By Kathy Cook Hunter

In the late 1800s a rural area south of Silverton was the home of McCalpin School, that served children of the farming community of Waldo Hills until 1950 when Victor Point Elementary opened.

McCalpin was a close community where people knew each other and liked to be together. Many were in the same family. In 1938 or 1939 a group of women organized the McCalpin Stitchers to create quilt-like lap robes for people in nursing homes in Mount Angel, Silverton and Stayton. Along with a purpose, it gave its members a social outlet.

Nancy Fisher, who cares for a collection of scrapbooks recording the group’s history, theorizes an earlier group of “stitchers” was the forerunner of the McCalpin Stitchers. These women may have made items such as wool socks to send to the WWI troops, she said.

A photo dated 1914 lists the following women: Myra King Fischer, Alma Olsen Terry, Elizabeth Krenz, Millie Krenz, Ethyl Fox Doerfler holding baby son Don Doerfler, and Ruby McClellan. Also shown are Melvina Amstutz Doerfler, Amelia Morley Jones holding baby son Norman, Bertha Krenz Darby, Elsie Darby Schreiber, Nora Olsen, Leona Hubbard Krenz, Edythe Fox Mulkey, Lucinda Slagel Fisher and Emma McClellan Dondit.

Rita Doerfleur verifies the group was pre-WWII. “I can remember when we made quilts for nursing homes, but during the war they made quilts for the troops,” she said.

Charlotte Mader joined the Stitchers in 1956, brought there by her mother-in-law, Genevieve Mader, who started it. “They’d been going for years and years,” Maden said. “I married in 1947 and moved to the farm, and my mother-in-law had been in it when her children were little. I went because she did.”

Mader describes the lap robes as individual quilt blocks that were crocheted around, then crocheted together and sized to fit over the legs of wheelchair-users. The group met monthly except January, she said, and everyone, including husbands and children, looked forward to the Christmas dinner they had in December at Waldo Hills Grange.

The Stitchers’ oldest member, Dellora Guyer, soon to be 88, said she’s enjoyed the social contact. “We could get together with our neighbors and do a few things for our neighborhood,” she said.

As age set in, members became less adept at stitching and turned to making table favors and supplying a Salem women’s shelter with personal items. The meetings used to be potluck affairs but nowadays they have dessert in a member’s home, meeting six times a year. All the original members are gone now, but many current members are second generation.

Nowadays the McCalpin Stitchers is purely social and has about a dozen members. President Bernice Freeman joined 35 years ago. “We’ve stopped making anything,” she said. “As we’ve gotten older we just send flowers to members who die or are ill, and we give money to the community. We’ve raised a considerable amount of money with 12 members.”

The glue holding them together, Freeman said, “is the fact that they’re all farm families who grew up with each other and were often related. We’ve stayed together because we’re fond of each other and draw comfort from knowing each other.”