Adeline Harris Sears
Adeline Harris Sears (April 7, 1839 in Arcadia, Rhode Island - 1931) was an American quilter. Her work now titled "Quilt, Tumbling Blocks with Signatures pattern" by t is featured in the 2021-22 Anna Wintour Costume Center exhibition "In America: Lexicon of Fashion" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and provides the inspiration for its interior architectural display design. This quilt begun in 1856 when she was seventeen includes the autographs on top of the blocks of many known celebrities and politicians of the day including the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens , Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, and eight United States Presidents; Abraham Lincoln , Andrew Johnson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Ulysses S. Grant. Other figures represented on the quilt include U.S. Congressmen Elihu B. Washburne and John Sherman of Ohio.