• Some records lists his birth as 1830

• Some records list his place of birth as “Cincinnati, Hamilton, Ohio”

• George T. Holyoke was a farmer with a residence on Main Street, the south side of Rock Island, second door west of Pearl

• Resident of Rock Island, IL at time of enlistment in Civil War (1862) …

• Served with the 45th Illinois Infantry during Civil War. Enlisted as a Private in Company K, 45th Infantry Regiment Illinois on 1 September 1862. Mustered out on 3 June 1865.

• In a Union Army camp somewhere in the South, he spied a quilt in another soldier's billet. The elegant bedcover in a dirty camp bothered Holyoke, so he bought the quilt and sent it home to his wife in Illinois. When he and Mary moved to Kansas the couple carried the quilt with them, first to Axtell, then to Topeka. After about 30 years after George’s death, Mary donated the quilt to the Kansas Historical Society. She asked staff to attempt to find its original owners … this quilt bore many clues—more than 50 names handwritten on the blocks. After some 75 years later, descendants of the Mellichamps contacted the museum after learning of the quilt's existence.


[S:64], [S:104]

• Most references simply refer to her as “Ann” or “Ann P”

• A Southern Quilt, the first quilt in the collection of the Kansas State Historical Society was accepted only because of its link to the Civil War. Needlework was not really of much interest until the validation of material culture and women's history in the late 20th century.90 In 1924 Ann donated it to the Society telling curators that her husband Union soldier George T. Holyoke had come across it during the war in Louisiana or Mississippi. He bought it from another soldier (who probably stole it) and shipped it to his wife in Illinois. At the time Ann was raising her young son Albert while George served from September, 1862 till the end of the War. 

• As a widow, she received a pension from the Civil War Pension, filed in Kansas.



[S:64], [S:261]