In anticipation of the centennial celebrations of 1876, three dozen women from the small river port of Indian Bay, Arkansas, gathered to make a Presentation Album quilt for local planter E. G. Adams. We can only speculate as to the ladies’ original intention—they may have made their quilt to be presented at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia, or they may have made the quilt using silk purchased there. Either way, their work caught the American spirit of that anniversary year. Thousands of displays at the Centennial commemorated a century of American industry, of “manufacturers and products of the soil and mine.” State-of-the-art technologies in farming, milling, logging, and other major industries were on full display for attendees from around the world to see. But it was also a celebration of one hundred years of American arts. The women from Indian Bay captured that “industrious and creative” American sentiment, in their hand-stitched community quilt. Each uniquely pieced or embroidered silk block carried a style that each woman brought over from her birthplace; Tennessee, Vermont, and Missouri are among the makers’ native states. The quilt is a cornucopia of flower baskets and lilies, log cabins, hearts, moon and stars, and intricately embroidered flora, as eclectic as the Americans that populated the nation. As if to immortalize the sentiment of the nation that year, one of the makers embroidered onto her block the following verse, “100 years since JONATHON left the old man and sat up for himself,” an allusion to Jonathan Trumbull, America’s first patriot during Revolutionary times.