Sowing Alberta's Black History

Lossie Lane, Ivy Belle Bowen, and the Wagon Wheel quilt Lane made for Bowen in 1960. Photo courtesy of the Royal Alberta Museum. Photo submitted

In celebration of Black History Month, the following story has been adapted with gratitude from Assistant Curator of Daily Life and Leisure Lucie Heins’ blog post for the Royal Alberta Museum titled “The Lossie Lane Quilt: A Testimony of Friendship Between Two Black Pioneer Settlers.” To read the full story, visit https://royalalbertamuseum.ca/blog/lossie-lane-quilt-testimony-friendship-between-two-black-pioneer-settlers

Lossie Lane was an early Black pioneer in Alberta. Her husband’s parents, who had been born into slavery, had moved from Oklahoma, USA to Maidstone, Saskatchewan in 1909, seeking refuge from the new segregation laws that had arisen when Oklahoma and the Indian Territories merged to become the State of Oklahoma. They had their sights set on the free homesteads available in Western Canada, and Maidstone was a popular destination point for early Black settlers.

Lossie and her husband followed with their eldest son in 1912. Although they were able to cross the border, it was not without experiencing cruelty by border officials: family lore indicates that Lossie had said, “They didn’t have to be so mean to us.” Despite hardships involving racism and the harsh winter environment, Lossie and her family became members of a thriving community in Maidstone.

Around the same time, Ivy Belle Bowen moved with her family from Evergreen, Alabama to Amber Valley, Alberta near present-day Athabasca. She married Walker Beaver in 1920 and moved to his homestead in Campsie (near present-day Barrhead) where they raised their family. Walker’s own family had also come from Oklahoma, crossing the border at Emerson, Manitoba in 1911, then traveling with their farming tools and household necessities to Strathcona in 1912 by train. From there, they continued on by foot, horse-drawn buggy, and oxen cart for the remaining 138 kilometers over the course of three days, battling mud holes and fierce mosquitos on the way to Campsie. Like Amber Valley, Campsie came to be known as one of Alberta’s five primary settlements of Black pioneers fleeing the escalating violence of the Jim Crow laws.

Ivy and Walker’s children attended the Benton School of District #3319, which was the only school district designated as “segregated” or “blacks only” by the government of Alberta. Despite this designation, many white parents opted to send their children to this school because it was closer than the school designated for “whites.”

Ivy was warmly remembered for her tenacious character and “waste not” attitude on the farm. She kept chickens and turkeys, sold eggs, grew vegetables and apple trees, and was reputed for keeping one of the most beautiful flower gardens in the community. Each January, her dining room table transformed into a plant nursery filled with seeds in the tin cans she had been saving all year for that purpose.

In 1947, Lossie’s husband died of prostate cancer, and she moved from Maidstone to live with her eldest daughter in Edmonton. Each summer, she would stay with family on the farm in Tiger Lily, 11 kilometres northwest of Campsie. Lossie took residence in the top floor of her son’s house, spending six to eight hours a day (except for Sundays) hand-stitching quilts. She was a prolific seamstress, ensuring each bed in the house was adorned with a beautifully hand-pieced quilt.

Three years later, Lossie and Ivy met at the marriage of their adult children on April 8, 1950. Over the course of the following decade, Lossie honed her craft, and in time began teaching her granddaughter her meticulous quilting techniques. Christine Beaver recalls her grandmother telling her to rip out her stitches and start again whenever her work became sloppy, a reprimand Christine later acknowledged helped foster her own immaculate work.

Lossie’s friendship with Ivy blossomed during these years, and a decade after they first met, Lossie presented Ivy with a hand-stitched quilt with the inscription, “To Ivy Beaver Remember Me From Lossie Lane 1960.”

Known for her frugality amidst economic challenges, Lossie salvaged the blue and yellow fabrics of the quilt from shirts damaged in a fire of a local variety store. The grey and white pieces are also suspected to be scraps from clothing, flour sacks, and old curtains.

The quilt is sewn using the Wagon Wheel pattern. This pattern, like many others at the time, was used to signal to wagons heading north to Canada as part of the Underground Railroad. However, it is not clear whether Lossie chose to use this pattern for that purpose.

Lossie’s granddaughter Christine remembers her grandmother teaching her that the colours used in the quilt would indicate whether someone would be traveling in a box in the wagon or under the wagon. This kind of oral history is a primary source of information on the quilts sewn by Black quilters at that time.

This quilt is one of several sewn by early Black pioneers that have been donated to the Royal Alberta Museum. To learn more about the rich history of quilting in our province, check out Heins’ “Alberta Quiltmakers and their Quilts” at https://ramshop.ca/alberta-quiltmakers-and-their-quilts/