It’s as though their lives were woven together by the stars.
Though they mainly lived apart from each other—like the stars—the common thread of a comet’s discovery tied them together fortuitously.
Maria Mitchell was 29 when she observed a previously undiscovered interstellar object using her Dollond refracting telescope on October 1, 1847.
Astronomy was a field she studied as a young girl stargazing in a little rooftop observatory on the Pacific Bank building in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Her father, a school principal, had taught her. Her landmark discovery of Comet 1847 VI—now designated as C/1847 T1—launched what would become her legacy, advocating for women in higher education.
Both studied astronomy and both were teachers.
Fortuitously, Ms. Baker happened to be born the very year Ms. Mitchell made her comet discovery, 1847, entering the world just months prior, on June 8.
Ms. Baker’s husband, Marion Baker, had owned a general goods store. They lived in Lone Tree, Iowa, and would raise seven children together. It was here that she took up her needle and silk thread and began her embroidery journey in 1876.
In those days, suffragists derided the foregoing roles of women. Ms. Mitchell herself condemned needlework as “the chain of woman, and has fettered her more than the laws of the country”; though she admitted the craft might be redeemed, at least intellectually, writing in her diary how “the eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer.”
Fettered by chains Ms. Baker probably was not. A teacher of astronomy herself, like Ms. Mitchell, the younger woman sought to employ her quilting skills to create an instructional aid for exploring the known universe with her students.
And so, Ms. Baker’s Solar System Quilt, as it came to be called, would become a grand educational chart for the sun, moon, planets, and stars—and even a comet—to be displayed richly in silk and wool thread and to illustrate what was then regarded an “accurate” depiction of the solar system.
A coal-black woolen backdrop of space is embellished with wool braiding, fabric applique, and embroidered depictions of cosmic bodies. Emblazoned in the center, an enormous sun boldly sets the tone for a series of concentric circles marking the planetary orbits, of which only eight are shown in her quilt—Pluto was only discovered in 1930.
The asteroid belt makes an appearance, though, as do Saturn’s rings and all the moons of the planets. A crown of stars encircles the whole. On the outskirts, a festive comet with an atomized tail seems to set the cosmic disk into motion. In one corner, a date, 1876, places the year it was begun on a timeline.
Finished in 1883, the quilt (measuring 89 by 106 inches) took Ms. Baker seven years. It garnered her some measure of fame, even in those days. The New York Times republished what an Iowa newspaper wrote of her handiwork: “Mrs. M. Baker, of Lone Tree, has just finished a silk quilt which she has been seven years in making. It has the solar system worked in completely and accurately.”
Speaking of comets and the one Ms. Baker stitched on her quilt, the New York Times published that “the lady went to Chicago to view the comet and sun spots through the telescope that she might be very accurate.” What comet could that have been?
Her trip could have been to Chicago’s Interstate Industrial Exposition Building. There, a telescope had been erected inside a glass room for the public to observe the newly-discovered Coggia’s Comet, first observed by Jérôme Eugène Coggia in 1874.
Or, alternatively, it could have been the Great Comet of 1882 that she traveled to Chicago to see.
As for the grand conception of the Solar System Quilt, inspiration for it could have come from Ms. Mitchell. She visited Burlington, Iowa, with four of her female students in 1869 to study a solar eclipse. Conceivably, the two female teachers could have met.
Leaving her own legacy, Ms. Baker’s Solar System Quilt went on to influence society. She died prematurely of tuberculosis on March 30, 1886. Yet her quilt would inspire the fictional version of its creation in the children’s book “She Stitched The Stars” by Jennifer Harris, published in 2021. Descendants of Ms. Baker’s daughter Carrie donated the historic heirloom to the Smithsonian, where it remains today.
