Digitizing the quilt
In 1976, residents of Essex, Connecticut worked together to commemorate the 200th anniversary of American independence. Combining their sewing skills, town quilters created an original quilt of 42 squares. Each square depicts a place or event in the town's history.
Quilters began meeting monthly in September 1975 to plan and create the quilt. Over a series of eight workshop meetings, quilters completed 42 nine-inch quilt squares. The squares were then joined together and presented to the Essex Historical Society in honor of Independence Day in the summer of 1976.
The completed quilt was displayed at Hills Academy, part of Essex Historical Society. In 1996, the 20th anniversary of the project, the quilt was displayed at the Connecticut River Museum. Since then the quilt has been on permanent display at the Essex Library Association at 33 West Avenue.
Today the quilt is displayed in the library's 1889 Society conference room, where it's on view for residents and visitors. The conference room also holds the library's collection of local history materials. Accompanying the quilt is a visual guide card and a red scrapbook. The scrapbook contains a description of each quilt square plus memorabilia from the 1976 quilting project (correspondence, invitations, and press clippings).
In 2021, Essex Library Association embarked on a project to make the Bicentennial Quilt more widely accessible to town residents and individuals interested in the local history of Essex and quiltmaking. The library entered an agreement with Essex Historical Society to photograph the quilt and scan accompanying memorabilia.
In the summer of 2021, a college student majoring in history volunteered to photograph the quilt squares, scan the scrapbook, and add descriptive metadata to make the quilt digitally available using Omeka. Omeka allows for the exhibition of cultural heritage objects via a free, open-source content management system. Items in the Omeka collection are digitally preserved and made discoverable through Dublin Core descriptive standards.
The library's Omeka collections are available via the library's website at https://www.youressexlibrary.org/about/history-of-the-library/.