African-American folk artist Harriet Powers, now nationally recognized for her quilts, was born in rural Georgia on October 29, 1837. Using traditional applique（嵌花的，贴花的） technique, Powers recorded local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events on her quilts. Considered among the finest examples of nineteenth-century Southern quilting, Powers's work is on display at the Smithsonian Institution and is featured in the online exhibition Seven Southern Quilters.

In 1938, one hundred years after Powers's birth, Mayme Reese shared her own memories of quilting in turn-of-the-century South Carolina with a Federal Writers' Project interviewer. Just as the beauty of Powers's work transcended（超越） race and class, Reese's recollections（回忆，记忆） suggest fine quilting was a skill Southern women of all classes appreciated. Reese remembered:

Sometimes rich white women would hear that such and such a person had won the prize for pretty quilts, they'd come and ask that person to make them a quilt…Sometimes they'd make it and sometimes they wouldn't…If they did make it, they'd get around five dollars…Sometimes they'd furnish the scraps and sometimes they wouldn't. Most of the time, though, they'd buy pieces of goods and give it to the person who was making the quilt to cut up.

Although prized for their beauty, quilts were necessities of life for pioneer families. Quilts not only adorned（装饰，佩戴） beds, but also served as makeshift（临时的） doors, windows, and cloaks. Patching quilts to keep large pioneer families warm was one of many housewifely duties. Writing about newly wed Anne Janette Kellogg, Gerald Carson characterized the lot of the early Michigan wife:

Thus began another woman's life in pioneer Michigan—the hanging of the almanac（历书，年鉴） from the clock shelf, the childbearing, the round of baking, sewing, washing, canning, threading dried apples on strings, the interminable（无限的，冗长的） making of carpet rags; quilts and comforters; filling bed ticks（被套） with oat straw（燕麦杆）; of ironing, patching and mending.

During the Depression, the handcrafting of quilts from scraps（小块，碎屑） and surplus materials helped rural Southerners survive hard times. Photographers of the Farm Security Administration documented quilting activities in small towns throughout the United States. These photographs also reveal the social and intergenerational nature of the pastime.

Sharing the work of quilting with friends and neighbors lightened the burden and created an occasion for fun and conversation. New Englander Ella Bartlett recalled the quilting bees of her youth for an WPA interviewer in 1938:

We would think we'd got everybody quilted up, when some mornin' there'd be a knock at the front door and some boy or girl would be there to say that 'Ma sent her compliments' and would I come to her quiltin' bee, and then we'd know another of the girls had got engaged.