DWR 3: Source of the Design?

If you ask anybody that knows anything about quilt patterns the source of this very popular pattern they would tell you that it seems to be derived from the older Pickle Dish pattern.

Here's Laura Jordan's 1910 dated Wedding Ring from Georgia,

the earliest date-inscribed example yet found.

And here's the earliest dated Pickle Dish I've found.

1881 by Stella Nash, found in the North Carolina project.

So that's a 30 year difference.

But the number of dated examples before 1920 is so small

I wonder if we can really know which came first.

2 Wedding Rings before 1920.

1 Pickle Dish before 1920.

I went to the Quilt Index and did a search for Double Wedding Ring quilts. 1,579 hits. Not all of them had photos but I skimmed through them all. The majority were made in the 1930s color scheme---pastel arcs on a white background.  

Like this 1929 example I found in an auction.

I also did a search for Pickle. This pattern is far less popular---I got 63 hits (and several of those hits  were quilters with the lovely name of Pickle.) Most of the pickle files that came up were from the Quilts of Tennessee project.

I color corrected some of

the old quilt project slides, which have deteriorated.

I didn't really have any pictures of Pickle Dish quilts that looked significantly earlier than the Wedding Ring Quilts. I was looking for earlier fabric styles like red and green prints or chintzes or Prussian blues. Couldn't find any pieced of the madder-style browns so popular in the 1870s.

I did some matchups of similar colors and fabrics, all of which to look before 1920.

Both from Auctions

It looks to me like these are parallel patterns developing at the same time

in the South.

I won't be addressing the published patterns for these designs because Wilene Smith has already done a thorough job of this. See her post on her Quilt History Tidbits site:

I'm sure I'll have it all figured out tomorrow.