Barbara Frietchie Star

About this block

This star block honors a real woman whose legend outgrew her life. Barbara Fritchie (also spelled Frietchie) was born in 1766 and became a Unionist folk figure during the Civil War, dying in December 1862. The story goes that when Confederate troops under Stonewall Jackson marched through Frederick, Maryland in September 1862, the elderly Fritchie defiantly displayed a Union flag from her window, reportedly daring the soldiers to "shoot if you must this old gray head, but spare your country's flag." John Greenleaf Whittier turned the story into a poem published in 1863, and it became one of the most widely known verses of the era, reportedly memorized and recited even decades later by Winston Churchill. The catch: Whittier heard the story secondhand more than a year after the fact and later admitted the details were probably not entirely accurate, and historians still can't fully verify the confrontation happened as described. True or not, the tale of an elderly woman standing her ground against an army made her a folk hero, and quilters carried that spirit into fabric: the Grandmother Clark needlework company named this star-and-pinwheel block "Barbara Frietchie" in 1932, and it later resurfaced in Eleanor Burns' Stars Across America, a sampler quilt book dedicating a star block to each of twelve notable American women, including Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony.