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ONE OF THE FIRST
AMERICAN CITY TARTANS – REDISCOVERED!
©2004 Matthew A. C. Newsome, FSA Scot, GTS
published in the Scottish Banner, January
2005
It has long been a known fact that
there is more interest in things tartan in the United States than there is in
Scotland. It seems to be a truism that Scots and their descendants become
more attached to their heritage only after they leave their homeland! One
recent manifestation of this is that many states, counties, and cities in the
United States have taken to designing and registering tartans of their own.
The oldest state tartan is the
Maine, designed in 1964 by Sliomas Gilis. Many states now have official
tartans, such as
Georgia,
North and South Carolina,
California,
Arkansas, and
Texas. Many others have tartans named for them that have not received
official approval, such as
Virginia and
Michigan.
The oldest American city tartan has
been thought to be
Tulsa, OK, designed in 1978 – until now, that is.
While researching the district tartans
of US, I came across an article in This is Madison magazine, October
1975, on the
American tartan, designed by John C. Cumming and woven by Barbara (Mrs.
Erwin L.) Schaffer. Of this Wisconsin weaver, the article writes, “Tartans
are not entirely new to her since she won first place a few years ago in an
area contest to create an official
City of Middleton tartan.” (Middleton is a city near Madison, WI).
Never having heard of the Middleton
city tartan (there is a completely unrelated
Middleton family tartan), I went first to the Scottish Tartans Society’s
Register. No such tartan was recorded. I then contacted Brian Wilton,
director of operations for the
Scottish Tartans Authority, to see what they had listed in their
International Tartan Index. Nothing there, either. Finally, I contacted the
only other body I knew that maintained an index of tartans, the
Scottish Tartans World Register, operated by Keith Lumsden. Not
surprisingly, he had no record of a Middleton city tartan.
It would seem that this, what could
very well be the oldest American city tartan, had somehow gone unnoticed by
the powers-that-be in Scotland. A search was soon underway. Telephone calls
to the City of Middleton town offices, chamber of commerce, and public library
yielded no results. No one I spoke to ever heard of a Middleton tartan, or
any contest to create one. All suggested I contact the Middleton Historic
Society. Phone calls to that organization resulted only in answering machine
recordings.
I struck gold, however, when I
contacted the Wisconsin Historical Society. Though the people I spoke with
there also had no record of a Middleton tartan, they were very interested in
my search and one young woman soon called me back with the email address of
someone she believed to be Barbara Schaffer’s husband, Erwin Schaffer, now
living in Arizona.
An enquiry was sent to that address
and the next day I was rewarded with a letter from Mrs. Schaffer herself. She
had forgotten all about the Middleton tartan contest, but was delighted that
someone had taken an interest in it. She promised to go through her storage
and see if she could find anything for me.
Her search revealed a newspaper
clipping from an unnamed local newspaper, which stated, “Two related tartan
(plaid) designs for daytime and hunting, woven by Barbara Schaffer… won first
place in the ‘Clan Middleton’ contest held in conjunction with the Good
Neighbor Festival last weekend. Her design used grey to represent lead
mining, black and white for the railroad, brown of peat mining, a line of red
for the great Middleton fire of 1900, and lines of red and white representing
Middleton High.”
Mrs. Schaffer did remember weaving two
different tartans. She stated that one of the judges in the tartan contest
was a man from Scotland, and she gave him the two tartans as a souvenir of his
visit. She had no woven samples herself. But she did have a photograph of
one of the tartans, which she would be glad to send to me. The photograph was
dated early 1973, which would mean that the contest was held in the summer of
1972.
Once it arrived, I was delighted that
it was a clear enough image, and a regular enough tartan, for me to take a
reasonably accurate thread count from it. We now had on record the City of
Middleton tartan. But why did no one with the city know about it?
Mrs. Schaffer offered this insight.
“The Middleton Chamber of Commerce … were no doubt the ones who thought up the
Good Neighbor Festival. I don’t think the City of Middleton entered into the
contest per se, so I don’t think you could really call it a City of Middleton
tartan.”
So, despite what was reported in the
This is Madison magazine, the tartan is most likely not an officially
adopted one for the city. But regardless, it is significant that such a
contest was even held, and this remains the earliest instance on record of an
American town attempting to have a tartan of its own.
The thread count for the City of Middleton tartan
is:
R4 W4 R4 T8 N16 K2 N2 W2 N32
(full pivots are given)
