Elizabeth Graham “Lee” Jacobs

1. Elizabeth Graham “Lee” Jacobs Quilter Bolton, Columbus County 1996 North Carolina Folk Heritage Award Recipient

2. Quilt-maker Elizabeth Jacobs is a member of the Waccamaw-Siouan Tribe, one of North Carolina’s smaller Native American tribes, whose traditional homeland is down east.

3. The Waccamaw Siouans have become better known outside their region since they began holding annual powwows in the 1970s, but most of the tribe lives in small, rural communities in Columbus and Bladen Counties.

4. “Miss Lee,” as Elizabeth Jacobs is known, lives about 40 miles west of Wilmington, in the Buckhead community.

5. Miss Lee is possibly the most prolific quilt-maker in the community. At one count, she believed she had made nearly two hundred quilts.

6. How long quilt-making has been going on in the tribe, she says, she has no idea.

7. When she was growing up, making quilts was a tradition of “making do.”

8. She continued quilting when she married John Jacobs, a blacksmith and farmer. Together they reared seven children.

9. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “people did not have money to buy cloth to cut up. I’ve had plenty to eat all my life, I’ve had somewhere to live all my life. But now I’m telling you one thing, I have seen some tough times.”

10. Space was at a premium in the house where she raised her family, but she always made room to quilt.

11. Some of her quilts have been worn to shreds. Her children still love them, because the quilts tie them to their past. They see family and community history in those exposed layers.

12. Feed sacks, blankets, textile mill remnants, shirttails, dress hems, and even tee shirts, silk slips, and old tablecloths show up among the fabrics.

13. Miss Lee makes quilts partly to keep warm, but she kept quilting long after she had enough bedcovers.

14. They are the best gifts she knows, she says.

15. She gives quilts to high school graduates, couples getting married, families celebrating the birth of a new baby, families who lost everything in a fire, and, of course, to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

16. She believes that when you get a quilt, you get something you can really use.

17. Women in the community who want to learn to quilt know they can get help from Miss Lee.

18. She remembers how her grandmother and mother taught her, and she keeps that in mind when she teaches.

19. One of her famous quilting classes meets in the local fire station.

20. Women in that class still smile when they remember her argument for making small stitches: “Make the stitches kind of where you wouldn’t get your toe hung in them.”

21. Priscilla Jacobs, former chief of the tribe, says quilting is one of her tribe’s most persistent traditions. She remembers how her grandmother would pile quilts on the bed so thick you couldn’t turn over on a cold night.

22. “Like cooking,” she says, “quilting was something women had to do.”

23. Women don’t have to quilt these days, but if you stop by Jacobs’ grill, you can still see them making quilts in the side room.

24. Like most quilters in the community, Miss Lee tried many methods – working from whole cloth and quilting around the printed design, for example.

25. But her best quilts, she says, are the ones for which she used her own imagination to piece together the design.

26. Those quilts are not ideas that somebody else gave to you. They are, as she puts it, “the ones that your own mind accumulated.”

27. She says that when she was still doing a lot of quilting, night was the best time to quilt, because at night you couldn’t see anything else you had to do.

28. She would sometimes sit in her dining room quilting until one o’clock in the morning.

29. She didn’t make these quilts just because she was cold, she says.

32. “I did it because I loved it.”

33. Elizabeth Graham “Lee” Jacobs 1909 - 2000 Photographs by Bill Bamberger and Jill Hemming, and courtesy of the Jacobs family.