Bicentennial Quilt

Created to commemorate the United States Bicentennial, this quilt features several historic Yonkers sites illustrated in appliqué. Glenview, the Museum’s Gilded Age home, is in the lower left corner. Yonkers City Hall, Philipse Manor Hall, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Church of the Immaculate Conception, Holy Trinity Orthodox Church, and Congregation Ohab Zedek, Yonkers’ first synagogue are among the sites also pictured. The quilt includes a visual acknowledgment of the Munsee people of Lenape Nation, who were native to the land on which Yonkers was settled. Their village of Nappeckamack (meaning rapid water settlement) was located where the Neperah stream (the present-day Saw Mill River) flowed into the Shatemuck River (the Hudson).

Commemorative quilts, also known as presentation quilts, have been popular since the mid-nineteenth century, as a remembrance of meaningful events in a community or an individual’s life. This quilt project attracted local news coverage. When The Herald Statesman published a story about McDonough, Kolb, and Ringler’s collaboration on March 18, 1976, the artists had already been working on the squares for six months and still needed to assemble the quilt. They hoped the quilt would be “displayed throughout the city” and “stimulate young people to take up quilting.”