Oral History Interview Sally Moss

Teka:Sally, currently you are serving as President of the board of directors of the Lou Tate Foundation, Inc. Tell me of the past positions you’ve held and how long you’ve been involved with the board.

Sally:I came on the board the first year the foundation was formed, I didn’t start with the board, but I filled an unexpired term. Charles Moberly was the original director that I replaced and his obligations were to do publicity and the newsletter, so I came in to fill half of the year of his term and I was delivered into sending out the newsletters and the releases and that sort of thing. Then the following year I was the vice-president of the board of directors and Lee Ebner, I’m not certain that I’ve have that right now that I think of it. I think the next year, I may have just remained on the board and then the next year Lee Ebner was President and I was Vice-president and the following I was the President and continued as the president for 2 years. Then last year I was the executive director and the president again, so you might say I’ve come up through the ranks. I wasn’t on the original board because I was having a baby.

Teka:I was going to ask you why you weren’t on the original board because your relationship with Lou Tate goes back almost further than anyone serving on the board now.

Sally:I would say yea, that’s probably true. I wanted to be in on the, entire well I was with Lou when she was dieing in the hospital and I was pregnant with my son Ethan. We sort of had a sad joke between us. She had some stomach problems which complicated her health problems and her stomach was distended and she was joking with me, “She bet she would have her baby before I did”. It happened that she died before I had Earthen. I had Ethan shortly after she died and of course I missed out on all the ceremony and so forth, that how it came to be that I wasn’t on the first board. I was recovering from childbirth.

Teka:Tell us when you first met Lou Tate.

Sally:I met Lou Tate through a mutual friend, Hal Tenny who was also a board member at one point in the foundation’s history. I was a seamstress. I had my own shop, it was called Ah Sunflower. It was right next to Hal Tenny’s shop.

Teka:And what year was this?

Sally:When I first met Lou Tate… it was about 1968 and I was introduced to her because I wanted to find more interesting fabrics to sew with, so Hal Tenny said, “Why don’t you go see Lou Tate because she could teach you how to weave those fabrics?”

Teka:And this was your own shop that you had? It was located at?

Sally:At 131 West Main and it was a small women’s custom dress shop with little imported scarves and jewelry and that sort of thing, but most of it was hand made clothes and my husband gave me a loom for my birthday the year before we were married and that sort of lead me into the textile thing. I would come out to the Loomhouse every Wednesday and Lou would sometimes give me a lesson, but sometimes I would wind up sorting threads or sweeping the porch.

Teka:So it was Hal Tenny who said you ought to meet Lou Tate?

Sally:Yes, because she has all kinds of weaving expertise.

Teka:But did you have that little loom at that point?

Sally:I think it was all sort of simultaneous; it was just a happy coming together, serendipity kind of thing that pointed me toward her. She never got rid of me after that.

Teka:Do you remember the first time you came?

Sally:Yes, I came up to see her. I didn’t know what to expect when I got here. I knew she was a really famous weaver and she was well known through out Louisville and I didn’t know anything about weaving at the time and people would say, “Oh yes, Lou Tate, she’s really something. She’s the woman to ask about weaving.” I came out here expecting I don’t know what, but I found this really charming rather eccentric woman with a little Dutch hair cut and a couple of teeth missing in the front, very outspoken and kind of brusque but yet with a real sense of joy to her. You know she would get giggly about something and that sort of thing, which intrigued me. I thought she was fascinating and I just picked up that she was a kind of out front person like me, so I said,” Look, I can’t afford to come out here and get you to teach me to weave, because I don’t have any money.” She said, “Well that’s alright, I don’t have any money either. What can we do?” So I made her some clothes: some jumpers and she designed them. She told me what she wanted. She said her dressmaker of many long years had just died and she had no one to make her any clothes and so if I would make her these jumpers out of denim, (she liked it because it was very soft and easy to move in), she would in turn teach me how to weave. Over the years, I would make her things and she would teach me things.

Teka:Did they have pockets on them?

Sally:That was the biggest prerequisite about anything she wore, it had to have pockets because she always had one of her little hand-woven purses with the Velcro across the top. She had one of those in one pocket and in the other pocket, pens, pencils and little scrapes of paper with notes. Sometimes you’d see her, she’d have a note pinned onto her shirt with a straight pin, only it was upside down so she could look down at the note so she could read it. It was funny, people would come out and we would be out here working and she’d have one of those little notes pinned on her shirt and people would be talking to her, and as they would be talking to her, you’d see her head sort of starting to turn, ya know, trying to read what was on her note that was so important that she would pin it to her shirt. Anyway, she’d get a kick out of that too, I think. She was the kind of person that was always making notes. She had little pieces of paper everywhere, which is what we find even now, her artful materials or those little notes.

Teka:Did she ever decorate the pockets?

Sally:Oh yea, that was one thing she would ask me to do, would be to take a certain coverlet design that she had woven in a square and use that as an embellishment on her jumpers with the sewing these coverlet pockets on her jumpers and making them more attractive that way.

Teka:Did she ever visit downtown where you worked? Did she ever some see your shop?

Sally:I don’t think so. I don’t recall that she did. She may have, maybe once, but it was probably in conjunction with an art show that Hal Tenny had. She didn’t very often go around. She was mostly the kind of person; she had a purpose, she had a solitary direction she was heading in and most anything that didn’t concern THAT, weaving or textiles, research or anything like that was just extraneous. She had tunnel vision. She would go downtown to get her pages printed. She would ride the bus, she would carry these heavy stacks of papers and things, but socially she didn’t have a whole lot of activity in that way that I know of. Perhaps she did, and I didn’t know about it, but I’d say there wasn’t a lot of it, but mostly people coming to her, especially toward the end of her life when she wasn’t well. Everyone just expected, she was like the Guru, you would come and bring her oranges, or bring her fruit and things that she liked to eat and in return she would sit and talk with you. I would refer to my teaching lessons, “I’m coming today to pick your brain,” which would indicate to her that I didn’t want to sweep the porch that day, I needed to know something about something that I was doing at home on my loom. We would get into a discussion or sometimes we would sit in her kitchen, which was a very high honor if you got to sit in her kitchen, because most people weren’t even allowed into the lower house. They just met at Top house and that was it. Sometimes we would sit in the kitchen, she might have some wine and we would sit there and have a glass of wine. She would smoke cigarettes. She used to smoke a lot. She was quite a smoker, she had little sardine cans around the edges of Top house, and down in her house and in Esta where she would use them for ash trays. We also used them to put the nails in for the looms and different things that we needed, but mostly they were little ashtrays, little Vienna sausage cans. People write to us even now and ask how the Loomhouse is doing and do we still have the sardine cans in the window sills? Things like that (laughter) but we would sit in her kitchen and talk. A lot of times she would answer my questions if I would persist about weaving. A lot of times we just sat just talking about what was going on with her. She had a long battle on her boundary dispute on one side of her property.

Teka:This might be a good time for you to describe, you referred to a bottom cabin and a top house, this might be a good time for you to describe the cabins.

Sally:The property is basically about a half acre slope up the side of Kenwood Hill and the bottom part borders on Kenwood Hill Rd and the top part of the property borders on Possum Path.

Then there are three cabins peppered up the hill; the lower cabin is called Esta and Lou Tate told me the meaning of that word (I’m sure Sue Kendrick might remember it) but it’s written on the door in the cabin and we know that’s its name. It has to do with art I believe, but it was named before her cam e there. She always referred to it as lower house, but if people would push her, she would say it, “Yes, it was Esta” and that was where she lived. That was where she camped out, that’s what we used to refer to her house as because it had no central heat. It had a big fireplace, but she didn’t use it a lot. She had electric heaters here and there, but mostly she stayed, in the winter time she stayed down there. She wouldn’t come up to Top House. She didn’t do much cooking; she had a little hot plate. She’d warm up some instant coffee or water on it. What she ate was TV dinners or fruit. She liked grapes a lot I remember.

Teka:Did she eat the sardines? Was that why there were so many cans?

Sally:Yes, she ate that and she collected banana boxes too. I’d take her to the grocery sometimes and she’d buy pretty much convenience foods. She wasn’t really into food that much. She just wanted to mostly do her work and if there was less time preparing food, then it was more time she had to do her work with.

Teka:In general, when people came to see her, they would come to Top House, which is where we are interviewing right now?

Sally:Right. They would knock on the door of lower house to let her know they were there, then they would head on up and then she would go up afterwards because she wouldn’t make a habit of staying at Top House because if she came up, it would be for a long period of time. I don’t know how to explain this: People would come or if she knew they were coming, she would go to Top house and she would work up there. But when she was finished, she would go back to Esta. She didn’t make a habit of going up & down the hill a lot of times because it’s a pretty steep climb and it was tiring for her. As she got older, especially, she would not come up here days in a row. She would mostly stay in Esta, unless it was in the summer, she had a day bed on the porch up here at Top House and she had her desk spread out on the front porch of the top level and had all of her materials up here and she’d just sleep up here during the summers. I guess that’s where the sardines came in, because we had a refrigerator up here originally and she’d keep things in the refrigerator up here, so if you came for a lesson, you could bring a soft drink or your sandwich and stick it in the frig’ and you didn’t have to worry about the heat getting to it.

Mostly she stayed in lower house during the winter and that was really an ordeal. She had a lot of her personal possessions, things that were in her family, her parents china and crystal and that sort of thing that were on shelves in the lower house and in front of those shelves, she had these wonderful coverlets all hung up in front of the shelves. You could tell actually what was on the shelves, but all the coverlets just lined the whole bottom cabin over the top of those shelves. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t sure there were shelves all the way around. Usually, you couldn’t get in there, it was just a path. She had loom tables set up all through the living room area where the big fireplace was and down the hallway with papers all over them and they were just stacks and stacks of paper and there only just a very narrow trail that went in between and lead to her bed which was in the living room there. The rest of the house was just filled with research work and papers and stacks and stacks so you couldn’t tell what in the world was going on, except that there was an area by the window that she had her draw down machine which was a piece of glass that had light underneath it. She would take the coverlet pattern and she would ah and by projecting the light up through the coverlet, she was able to draw down her drafts. And that was how she did a lot of them. You know the research of translating the drafts onto the written graph, you know, written down onto the graph paper in a visual way. She of course had the patterns drawn down in the traditional form on the grid there and also in the 4 line traditional manner that most weavers use. But she actually worked from the original fragments that people would bring to her and a lot of things she would be preparing things to take to the printer and that’s where she worked, right in front of the big window there in Esta. Then her typewriter and everything would be in the kitchen because that was the warmest place. Right now that are holes in it, but at that time it was the warmest place, and so she would be out there working and typing and it was next to the hot plate and she could have her coffee and so that was her office.

Teka:We also have a middle cabin and what is it used for?

Sally:Well, that is Wisteria cabin and originally it was a summer house before Lou Tate acquired it. It was used as a summer house, it’s like a dog trot cabin, which means it has two double doors that open into a central hallway which has double doors that open at the other end and there’s rooms off to the right and off to the left and a stairway that leads up to the attic. That cabin was originally like a little meeting room place where the original Little Loomhouse members would come. There was a little sofa and little chairs and things, a charming fireplace, it was like a little meeting room, it was probably originally the living room and behind that was the kitchen and it eventually became a storage room. On the left side of the cabin was a long, a long room which is right now the roof is caved in. Everything that was in there is now ruined, but it was a storage area.

Teka:Lou did not spend time in there as she did in Top House or bottom house

Sally:No, it was open to the public during our open houses and sometimes we had exhibits in the hallway, and at one point we had all the spinning things there, all the spinning wheels and all the samples of wool. We had a friend in Canada who would send us different bags of colored wools and rovings and things like that. We stored all that there because it was more convenient for us.

Teka:You would sit with her in the kitchen and you would talk with her, tell me some of the things you would discuss.

Sally:Well, I won’t say that they were discussions in the sense that we both talked a lot, because mostly it was me sitting there listening to her talk. I wish at this point I had a tape recorder like this to put there and listen to her talk. She would go from; she really didn’t talk about herself in a personal way. She never said, “I have a niece, and she’s doing this and that…..”, like we might converse about our children or anything. She mostly talked about the Loomhouse, what was going on with restoration. She had a preservation account at the bank which we would all contribute to when we did volunteer work for her, like we would have the Girl Scouts come out and charge them 50 cents to weave. She would give me 25 cents and 25 cents would go in the preservation account. So we would talk about the preservation account and if it was going along. There were never any figures mentioned, it was just there and we were trying to contribute to it. We talked about programming, she would say what she hoped would transpire that year in terms of open house series and when we would have certain people come up. It was probably me that got her started into the spinning because we would talk about that a lot.

When I was gone a year from the Loomhouse when I lived in Wisconsin, my husband was an instructor at the school of art and design in Milwaukee. When I was up there, I studied weaving with Mary Lou Porter. She got me interested in spinning because I needed some interesting yarn, so when n I cam e back to Kentucky, I was all excited because I wanted Lou Tate to become involved with spinning too, but she of course declined. She had been through all this before, she knew all about spinning. It wasn’t that, she just said, once again the tunnel vision was in effect, she was weaving and I could be spinning if I wanted to and she would go along with it. We ordered these Ashford spinning wheels, had them shipped over and we gathered around us, because of that spinning program which was around 1972, a group of people who were very interested in spinning, and mostly just spinning. Those people later, this was just an aspect of the total Loomhouse, this wasn’t something she was interested in developing because there wasn’t that much to it, not like spinning, I mean weaving, where you could trace the historical aspects back to 1779 and that sort of thing. Spinning was just a craft; it wasn’t an art like the weaving. The people that got as far as they could get at the Loomhouse in spinning then broke off and became the Fleece and Flax Guild. A lot of the people who are members of that guild are also Little Loomhouse members.

Teka:We have a picture here, which is of you in front of Wisteria with a spinning wheel.

Sally:That’s me right when we first started the spinning program. Lou Tate had a walking wheel there and that’s what I’m spinning on. We had a spinning bee where we invited everybody in the state that we could think of and out of state too, that would know anything about spinning. This picture was taken shortly after that spinning bee where I learned spinning on the walking wheel from Sarah Bailey, who’s quite an accomplished spinner in Pine Mountain, Kentucky. She came yup and gave a lot of her time and eventually formed her own spinning bee at Pine Mountain, Kentucky. Many of us go down there every year. I went the first year, but children came along.

Teka:The spinning was something that you all added to your open houses to which you’ve referred.

Sally:That’s right, we’ve had several spinning open houses, spinning bees where we would have a person, Bob Eubank came up one year with a lamb and sheared it and gave the kids a real thrill. We laid out the fleece and sorted it, then we had an auction where we would auction off the fleeces to see whose fleece would bring the highest bid. It was very exciting and a lot fun, lots of good spinners came. Brother Camaloid from St. Minnard Arch Abbey in St. Minnard, Indiana came and I think that it was through him that I really polished off my spinning. I really got down to where I felt I was a good spinner, because I t5ried, well, every spinning wheels is different and you have to get used to and it was through him that I got it down to where I felt like I could teach it to someone else. I sort of became the spinning teacher in residence. When Lou would have a group come out, she would say,” I’ll teach you the weaving and Sally Moss will be the spinning teacher,” so we sort of worked in conjunction that way and it made a nice program and it was fun.

Teka:When we were sitting in the kitchen, you did say one of the things you discussed was the

boundaries and I get the impression that there are ongoing questions concerning boundaries.

Sally:Because of the antiquity of the cabins and the tracing back into when the state was first formed, particular parts of land has a great and fascinating history behind it. I don’t know if you want me to go into all of it. There was a stone quarry up the hill. Stone was brought done the path, the roadway we now consider our driveway. And the bottom cabin was the caretaker’s cabin for the stone quarry and it was the man who lived there who built to other two cabins later after the stone quarry was not used. The other two cabins were used as summer houses. The cabin we are now in, Top House was the last cabin to be built. Wisteria and of course Esta built as his house. All the cabins I think except Esta, except Wisteria excuse me, had additions since they were built originally. The lower cabin had the kitchen which was the addition put on that and now part of it is now decayed away. There was a sun porch on the top of part of Esta that is gone now, also like a walkway from the second floor down over us where she used to store her oil barrels and then down into the parking area. It was very charming; we have some pictures of that. Also the exterior was changed, it used to be vertical pole construction, now its board and batten, so maybe some day we’ll have the finances to peek under there and see if we could get it back to its original state.

The she would discuss thing with you like the boundaries and preservation. The she would discuss with you her drafts perhaps.

Sally:Oh yes. Well I want to go back to the boundary a little bit because during her lifetime, she spent almost, I think it was a bad year in court, trying to separate the boundary as you look at the cabins on the left hand side. The developer who built the other homes that surround the cabins now, these ranch style houses, that move up to our borders. He was kind of an unscrupulous character from what I understand. He changed all the boundary lines on any existing properties that were on Kenwood Hill to his own benefit so that he could build more houses. When I first met Lou Tate, she was attempting to put a definite boundary on that left side because this developer was ready to fill in natural drainage area, which is located on that side. It’s a regular dip in the hill where all the water runoff came. He wanted to fill that and put another house up there, and I know for a fact that several foundations have shifted that he built in this area, because of him taking a bull dozer and flattening everything out and then plopping a house down. There.

Lou Tate was not the kind of a person that was going to sit still for anything encroaching on her property. She was involved in a lawsuit to determine the boundary on that side. Finally, by virtue of the dear little outhouse that sits over on that side of the property, which we jokingly call the fourth historic building, by virtue of that outhouse being there, the boundary line was definitely placed beyond that point and that was the one thing that kept it from slipping away from her grasp. That boundary was settled before her death. Then of course she had slipping and eroding house side which was also happening because of this builders need to develop this wonderful old wooded hillside.

He went to the top of the hill and bulldozed that down and of course with no trees holding the land, it started to slip. Then Hill House, which is another historic log cabin building, which is right above us on Possum Path owned by Hal Tenny, owner of Port of Call, was living there. That’s how he knew Lou Tate, they were neighbors, he was the owner at the time of the erosion. He awoke one day and found that his foundation had literally been washed out from under him and there was like a two foot gap there on his porch that just happened over two days. Big boulders were rolling down and he became very frightened. During this time, Bob Douglas and several other friends of Lou Tate had gone to the city and begged them to do something about this slippage. Through several false starts, eventually right about the time Lou Tate died, construction began to build a half million dollar retaining wall on the opposite side of Possum Path to keep the hill from eroding any further. It was a great coup for us because we thought that the city would be so benevolent and I really can’t say enough in their behalf because they have been very supportive of the historical aspects of the whole.

Side #2 Tape #12

Sally:The boundaries were finally resolved on the left side to the benefit of Lou Tate and she retained that drainage dip which was quite a piece of land and the retaining wall was built. It wasn’t completed until after her death, it was built at a cost of one half million dollars. That left us with a boundary on the right side which after the Foundation had been in existence for a few years, one of the people who owned the property on the lower corner near Esta cabin one day came over and parked his truck in our driveway. Well, our driveway which is actually the road which lead to the rock quarry, one of the people working here got into quite a heated argument for leaving his truck in our driveway, so what happened was that he decided to bring suit against us to gain rights of access to his own property, which he claimed was a pie shaped piece of land which stuck out from his property and went underneath the entry to the road. At that point, we were in the middle of a SETA summer project, whereby we were doing some basic landscape cleanup work and that sort of thing and we used the balance of that SETA money to put new rock down on the driveway. Therefore establishing that we had indeed maintained the roadway and provided upkeep on it. Now the Man who owned the property next door at that time, named Paul Steerman, I went over and talked to him. He seemed to be a very nice person. I think he just got off on the wrong foot with this other person he was talking with. The lawsuit established that we indeed would have right of way to that roadway, but never determined exactly where the boundary was. So to make a long story short, his sold his property and established the boundary where he thought it was which cut across our roadway. The people who bought the property, the Seeckles, they deeded over that corner of the property to the Lou Tate Foundation, Inc. as a good will gesture and also, since we are a non-profit organization, they could take that donation off their taxes. And now we do own that corner of the property, however the boundary line goes off in a rather diagonal direction which leaves another property at the top most right hand corner

Of our property, which is owned by a couple named Hollis. They are claiming that the boundary line goes right through the corner of Top House Cabin, which is ludicrous because these cabins have been here since the 1800’s and they just built their house twenty years ago. I don’t see how they could claim any of our property. However we have had to come to terms on what we are going to do on that situation and the board of directors is now endeavoring to make some definite and legal statement as to where the boundary line is on that side. Poor Lou Tate, her boundary line problems carry on even posthumously so now we are endeavoring to get that straightened out. This hill and these cabins have been here so long, originally this was a passageway for the buffalo that were going to the salt licks and that’s what Kenwood Hill Road was, a buffalo trail, and of course where the buffalo went, so also went the Indians. As the Indians passed this way, they would have the hides with them and need to tan, so Kenwood Hill was flat on top and the Indians called it Sunshine Hill. And because it was flat and treeless and made the prefect place to lay the hides down and cure them and prepare them for use, so that’s why you can find a lot of artifacts on the hill as well. That’s why we want to make sure that as long as there are unscrupulous developers and disputes and that sort of thing, that the our property retains its historic flavor. There are some huge Oak trees on the property that are hundreds of years old. We are gradually losing them, but Lou Tate referred to them as “the mighty Oaks of Kenwood Hill” and we want to make sure that if we lose some of these mighty oaks that we will have the right and the privilege to plant more of these to carry on this tradition.

Teka:Did you learn this when you were talking to Lou Tate in her kitchen?

Sally:Oh Yes, she loved history. She was a history major in college and she just loved anything that had to do with history and had any historical implication. That was the basis for her interest in weaving I feel positive. She was good at the craft. She studied weaving at Berea College. She was nimble fingered. She was very, very pleasurable to watch. She was nimble on the threads with her fingers, but I think the biggest thrust of her interest, especially in her later life, was the research of the drafts. She had, even now we find mailing lists in nooks and crannies of the cabins. She kept in contact with hundreds of people about coverlets that were in their families or they were interested and wanted more information. She just didn’t simply lay down the pattern, I mean anyone could draft a pattern if they had the training, but she actually endeavored to go back and find historical documents in families. She was interested in following the development of the pattern through a family from when they first immigrated to this country through the present time. What happened, why did they bring this pattern with them? What were the historical happenings at that point in time, why was the pattern named this? Who was the daughter that received the pattern from the parent? How was it transported? What hardships did they endure when they endeavored to bring these patterns along with their treasured possessions of their families? It was fascinating, she just gave me before she died a piece of a pine bloom pattern and I still have a fragment. She was working on this pine bloom pattern; she was doing research for herself and for the mailing list that she kept up. She also of course, finally some kind of an educational institution in Texas, I ‘ve not been able to find a name of this, I assume it’s the university, but she was doing some extensive research for them, and it involved a lot of historical information. We have some pages in our archives that she published on the Snails Trails and Cats Tracks pattern which was a pattern that brought over at the time of the American Revolution, it was one of the earliest patterns she had, which is probably why it was so fascinating to her. She wrote down everything she could find out about it, including correspondence from a young lady who came to this country and her sweetheart was fighting in the revolutionary war and what was happening with the captain at that point. Anyway it was fascinating reading even for anybody who doesn’t care to look into weaving as a craft or art, but just to see all the history that goes behind these patterns. The mother would write the pattern down so carefully on a strip of paper, then she would roll it up into a little roll and we reproduced some of the original drafts by duplicating at the printer. Then we cut them up into strips, roll them up and give them out to visitors to the Loomhouse at one open house so they would get the essence we were talking about. Lou would explain the story, she would say that the women who came to this country would have very few possessions, they would obviously come on boats and so forth. They would take their little strips of paper that were rolled up and out them in their jewelry boxes with their most treasured things, you know their antiquities and goodies for things. They would carry these boxes on their person and these were one of their most valuable things when they came to this country. They could begin weaving because they had their patterns with them even though they had no looms, no threads, no shuttles, and no spinning wheels. They could always make them or find a man to make them for them or find some craftsman t make them, these looms and other equipment, but they had to have those patterns, so they carries them with them like their treasured possessions. That was something that Lou Tate was very fascinated with, was the evolution of these patterns. How they changed a little bit through each generation, they might improve them, they might alter tem. They might do something different in their weaving. Alt the weaving that women did was very utilitarian like diapers, bed sheets, underclothes, hand towels, and things like that they wove a great deal of, but these coverlet patterns were something that were the culmination of the craft of the weaver, because they would be the decorative bedspread that would adorn their beautiful bedrooms that they were proud of, something that showed your skills with these coverlet patterns.

Lou Tate traveled around extensively in the Kentucky area and in northern Tennessee, sometimes on horseback, gathering these patterns up and people would know she was coming and they would sometimes would not be aware of what she was she was getting. They would say, Oh, you mean those papers that look like that singing song music. So they would refer to her as the lady who came for the singing song music, and so they would drag up their drafts and either let her copy them and sometimes they would give her the drafts and she inherited some drafts form a weaver she studied with because

the weaver saw she was a person that was going to carry on this research and so she inherited some drafts that way, so we have a really large collection of original weaving drafts on very old paper, parchment like yellow paper all drawn out very precise little ink lines of the original weaving drafts and unless they have a year written on them, it’s hard to discern when it was, but it is certainly antiliquor type materials,

Teka:The titles also reveal something about who the people who are.

Sally:A lot of times, the titles were reflecting something that is happening historically,

like Bonaparte’s Retreat, Wellington’s March on the Field of Battle, Whigg Rose for the Whiggs and Torries, that sort of thing a lot of times reflected what is going on historically. Often times they have humorous overtones. We have one pattern in our archives called Bonaparte’s March Across the Rockies, which people were hearing Bonaparte is here and there. The next thing he’ll be coming over the Rocky Mountains to get us and so that had a humorous tilt to the pattern name. It’s very interesting

Teka:Did the women do most of the weaving?

Sally:There were two distinct groups of weavers in this region which makes this a real fascinating point to study history from and the weaving history especially. We were located on the river so a lot of goods could come down the river; cotton notably would be grown in the south and shipped up the river, spun in the mills and the wools and so forth and brought back, so it was a good place for commercial weavers. They readily had access to these materials off the riverboats, but it was also a settler’s kind of state, you know ole Kentucky and Tennessee were places where you went and you homesteaded and these two groups of weavers, what we call the professional weavers and the home weavers who wove utilitarian goods... Now the professional weavers were in two groups. We see them as Jacquard weavers which are basically very exciting and colorful birds and basket of flowers. They always had a corner with the weavers name and the date They are very easy to identify. We don’t have too many of those in our collection, because they are very desirable as antique items because they have the date woven in and they are beautiful and they are very sturdy, They are wool and cotton, there’s quite a few of them around. These weavers would come to an area and people would come to town and say weave me this pattern or what pattern do you have now or weave this for me and they were run very much like a computer. They had punch cards. Children would sit on the top of the loom and they would feed these punch cards into the loom and the weaver would sit and weave. That was the Jacquard looms, sort of a forerunner to computer. It has a fascinating history also. People that study weaving, study Jacquard weaving almost exclusively. A lot of people we have had correspondence with, and are very unnerved to hear that we are not that much into Jacquard coverlets, however there were other weavers who traveled around with their looms on their wagons. These were professional weavers also. There were men weavers. There were several in this particular region, like Mr. King and others who would put the loom on a wagon and drive into a region, post bills saying “I will weave coverlets for this much money. Contact me here and I will make your beautiful bedspreads for this much money”. So the people who lived in these little towns would have access if you go to this weaver have their linens woven and have something new and different, some pattern not indigenous to this region, something more exciting and that would be another type of weaver that the Jacquard man couldn’t go. He might weave in that region for awhile and move on.

They had more mobility. Then the third group which was what Lou Tate was interested in, the women weavers. They all would weave at home. They might have woven for others than their family, but they all wove from home. They either wove in their homes or had their own loom houses. This was quite common for big land owners. He might have a big house, a carriage house, then a loom house. Then the person who wove on that farm would have their own place where they could do their dyeing and weaving and spinning and all that sort of thing away from the household. I’m sure how the evolution of this Little Loomhouse came upon us, because Having a separate loom house back in those days was a very common thing when things were not easily come by.

So those were the women that Lou Tate researched, the women who wove on their own in their homes and did these beautiful coverlets. Sometimes they sold them to other people or gave them as wedding gifts.

Teka:You were saying she had coverlets hung up in her house, bottom house where she lived, Esta?

Sally:That’s right, she had collected a number of coverlets just by virtue of buying them or having them given to her, even when she began her professionals weaving career, she wove reproductions of these coverlets which were taken from the original drafts and rewoven like in 1938, 1939 around then, They were woven like the original ones in two panels, with a seam up the center. These were sold as money making venture to bring in funds for herself. She was a professional weaver at the beginning of her career producing draperies, any kind of woven goods anyone might want.

Teka: Tell us more about the contraption (I don’t know enough to know what to call it) that was near her window that she used to draw down the drafts.

Sally:Well, she had a lot of magnifying glasses, a lot of graph paper, but this contraption was the same effect as holding something up to the window and having the light shine through it. She could put the paper on top and draft it down and she could get the treading and threading sequence by looking at the actual woven piece and translate it into a graph type, more precise kind of draw band(she called it). So when you wanted to produce it again putting it on the loom, you would have your actual graph and she translated that through (and also copied patterns from other pieces of paper) where she would draw in the blocks where the overshot panels are and then black them in. Then later go back and count how many passes of the shuttle and so forth (it’s kind of hard to explain without actually seeing it)

Teka:What did she do with these drafts? You said she had mailing lists, partly people to whom she wrote but she also had other kinds of mailing lists similar to the newsletter you were in charge of when you first came onto the board of directors.

She sent out many press releases and newsletters and letter from friends and information sheets that would say maybe the history of a certain weaving pattern, what went on at the Loomhouse that month, who was visiting, who got married, why something was important for us to remember to do, what activity would take place in the city that she thought we should be mindful of. It was like a real fascinating, I used to read every single word. There might be a couple of pictures, or sometimes it might just be a typed letter. Toward the end of her life there were several flat out pleas, saying you know, the cabin is deteriorating, I’m not able to spend as much time doing this or that, but Lou’s newsletters were (the big charm of them to me was because they are not only the history of the research she was doing, it was also the history of the Loomhouse cabins, what was happening there, who and what people were there: Frank Lloyd Wright, Eleanor Roosevelt, the man who invented Velcro which is the story she told me but evidently didn’t tell anyone else. This is just what she told me and I have no way of documenting it. “The man who invented Velcro, came for a visit and she took him for a hike to the top of Kenwood hill and he got those little stick tights stuck all over his pants. He was impatiently picking them all off, but looking at them very carefully too, saying there ought to be some way that this could be put to use. Evidently he studied up on it and developed Velcro and sent her some packages of Velcro and that’s how come we started putting Velcro strips on the top of our little coin purses that we handle and take to these art fairs. When I first started coming out here, I had never even seen Velcro or didn’t know what it was and said “What’s that? That’s interesting” and then the story came from that.

Teka:She used it on her pockets too; didn’t you say she would sometimes use this Velcro when she was giving you the directions for her jumpers?

No, mostly her things didn’t have any closures on things she wore. This sounds crazy, but, she liked to put them on over her head. She didn’t want any zippers, any buttons or anything. When I said she designed them herself, she did, but it wasn’t a pattern. It was just she wanted it to have a waistband, but it couldn’t be too tight. She wanted it to have big pockets, but it couldn’t be down too low; she wanted it to have a scoop neck, because she didn’t want anything up around her neck. She liked to wear men’s shirts, so she wore men’s shirts underneath her jumpers, then when it got really hot weather, she put on shorts, pull on things with no closures on them. I never saw her really dressed up.

Teka:She also used to, in addition to the typewriter, write things by hand a lot. We see her inimitable handwriting a lot.

Very distinguished

Teka:And easy to read.

Not bad really at all, I have a lot of letters from her. We corresponded the year I was not here and also due to the fact I live in Fern Creek and she was here in Beechmont, South Louisville, Iroquois area, I couldn’t always get out, especially when the babies started to come, so we corresponded quite a bit. And I know she corresponded with many other people on many subjects, but a lot of it was very, her life was very poignant.

Teka:I was going to ask you about that... When you think about that,

When you think about meeting her the first time you were here, look at all those years, What was it like, How did she change?

I think that because of her dedication to the Loomhouse as a historic area and because of her person, she was a very high energy person. I can understand exactly why she came to be an independent like she was. She received no charity from anybody. To my knowledge, she never received a grant that she wrote herself. She didn’t go seeking gift money from anybody. If she asked for money, it was because she wanted it to preserve the cabins or to carry on some historic tradition or something that was absolutely necessary. She was a very independent person; she was a very self-sufficient person. She had tunnel vision, that single mindedness. She didn’t have time to get married, she had fun, but a she grew older, there were less parties. We has chili suppers

She had a secret chili recipe