When I began this story, I didn’t know a whip stitch from a running stitch—truth be told, I didn’t even know what a “crazy quilt” was. My hands were more accustomed to flipping book pages than fabric. But what started as a story to cover the 2025 Curtiss Corners Quilt Club show became a journey not just into the world of quilting, but into the heart and heritage of a community that measures time in stitches and stories. In fact, the history of quilting here is inseparable from the rhythms of the land—woven into the rise of logging camps and the spread of dairy farms across Clark County’s patchwork fields.
The 2025 Curtiss Quilt Show was held at the Curtiss Community Center on Saturday, August 2, 2025. The building, standing sturdy and proud, is one of the most storied in the Owen-Withee area. Originally a single-room schoolhouse built in 1910, it doubled its size in 1930 to become a two-room high school—accommodating students up to the 10th grade until the high school closed in 1943. It remained a grade school for another two decades, and by the 1960s, it had found new life as the Curtiss Community Center.
LaVerna Thieme Marcott is the First Lady of Curtiss quilting. For many years, since 1986, and until she retired, LaVerna ran LaVerna’s Fabrics and Crafts, a staple of Curtiss, Wisconsin. She’s the co-author of “Zig Zag Diamond,” an acclaimed book among quilters. Her shop was a trove of fabrics, threads, and notions. It was also home to an industrial-sized sixteen-foot quilting machine—an impressive beast that churned with the steady confidence of a seasoned farmer’s tractor. But more than her expertise, what struck me about LaVerna was her belief in community. Most of her instructors over the years were just regular folks. Sometimes the teachers learned as much from the students as the other way around. In a world that can be obsessed with expertise, quilting in Curtiss is still a craft of the people, for the people. I couldn’t help but see the parallel: just as local loggers and farmers learned from one another—passing down knowledge about felling white pines or milking cows—quilters in Curtiss trade patterns, tips, and stories, each teaching and learning in turn.
The Curtiss Corners Quilt Club’s origins trace back to the town’s 1982 centennial. What began as a celebration of local history grew into an enduring tradition—a club that preserves, creates, and displays quilts with roots stretching through generations. Each year, the show is both a reunion and a revelation. And while I once might have struggled to tell a “Log Cabin” from a “Sunbonnet Sue,” I learned that every pattern tells a unique story. The “Log Cabin” block, after all, speaks directly to the pioneer past and the cabins that dotted the cutover land once so thick with pine.
Quilts come in endless styles and themes. “Grandmother’s Flower Garden”—a garden of hexagons, each blossom bright and unique. “Carpenter’s Square”—sharp lines and symmetry, echoing the skilled hands that built the barns and schools of this region. “Log Cabin”—a pattern born of the pioneer spirit, the center square representing the hearth and home. And, of course, “Sunbonnet Sue”—her silhouette a nod to childhood and innocence.
It became clear that these weren’t just crafts; they were chronicles. To document a quilt, I learned, is to affix a label bearing the maker’s name, the date of completion, location, quilt title, pattern name, occasion, and fabric source—each detail another thread in the tapestry of history. In fact, some quilts contain scraps from old logging camp shirts or faded feed sacks brought home from the creamery—a tangible link between the region’s working past and its artful present.
Over the years, neighboring shops like Brubaker’s Sewing and Furniture in Withee have supplied quilters with fabric, thread, and inspiration. It’s a reminder that quilting, while sometimes solitary, is more often a communal act—a way of gathering, sharing, and remembering. The same spirit that brought neighbors together to harvest or clear a fallen oak now brings them together around a quilting frame.
For many, quilting is a family affair. Some of the quilts have pieces cut from Grandpa’s overalls, or a scrap of Grandma’s Sunday dress. They’re not just blankets—they’re archives. The Wisconsin Quilt History Project reminds us, it’s this personal and local significance that makes a quilt worth documenting. If you look closely, you might see a patch from a feed sack once used on a local dairy farm, or a bit of plaid salvaged from a logger’s shirt—a bit of Owen-Withee’s working history stitched into every quilt.
I learned that the beauty of a quilt isn’t in its perfection, but in its story: each uneven seam, each mismatched patch, a mark of the maker and the moment.
I may be a novice quilter, but I now see quilts not as mere covers, but as chronicles—living testaments to a community whose greatest strength has always been its ability to come together, stitch by stitch, whether in the woods, at the barn, or around a quilting frame.