“Quilter”

Juanita Hatmaker was a quilt maker working on a craft project in the Clearfork Valley with several women at the time this photograph was taken. She worked inside the front room of her daughter’s small rural home with the quilting frame suspended above the room’s four beds. At night, the frame and quilt would be rolled up to the ceiling. Ultimately, the craft industry declined due to competition from cheap foreign imports and the difficulty of marketing for a very small enterprise. Corn writes that “the mountain people in the crafts organization thought that governments were set up to suppress rural communities.”