The Drunkard’s Path That Goes By a Dozen Names

I have a Drunkard’s Path quilt tucked in my collection that I pulled out recently for an entirely different reason: I needed a good example of worn cotton batting for an article on dating quilts by their filling. But once it was out on the bed, it turned into a case study of its own. Here is how I went about researching it.

A bed with a quilt featuring a pink and white geometric pattern of squares and interlocking vine shapes, spread out neatly on a white comforter.
The quilt is sideways on the bed. Note the pieced border.

A block older than its most famous name

Drunkard’s Path looks like exactly what it sounds like: a staggering, zigzagging trail made from quarter circles pieced into squares. But the name is much younger than the block. Quilters have been piecing this curved unit since at least the early 1800s, brought over from English patchwork and stitched into American quilts by the 1820s. Long before anyone called it Drunkard’s Path, it was going by names like Solomon’s Puzzle, a name some quilters trace all the way back to ancient design motifs, though there is no solid documentation tying the block itself to any actual ancient artifact. Consider it charming folklore rather than fact.

So many names, so little agreement

If you look this block up in Barbara Brackman’s BlockBase, the software built from her exhaustive research into printed quilt sources, you will find well over a dozen names attached to this one design. Depending on which decade and which newspaper column you were reading, you might have known it as:

  • Boston Trail
  • Trail of Friendship
  • Drunkard’s Trail
  • Ghost’s Walk
  • Old Maid’s Puzzle
  • Wonder of the World
  • Indiana Puzzle
  • Cleopatra’s Puzzle
  • King Tut’s Crown
  • Wanderer’s Path in the Wilderness
  • Solomon’s Puzzle
  • Rob Peter to Pay Paul

Here is the fun part. Several of these names all trace back to the same handful of syndicated quilt pattern columnists working in 1933 alone. Mae Wilford’s pattern booklets that year called it Trail of Friendship, Cleopatra’s Puzzle, and Drunkard’s Trail, all for the same basic block. Nancy Cabot, the pen name for Chicago Tribune needlework editor Loretta Leitner Rising, called it Boston Trail. Quilt historians who have studied Cabot’s column note she had a habit of recycling older patterns under fresh, catchy names, and occasionally stretching the truth about their origins. So when you see a dozen names for one block, you are not looking at a dozen different histories. You are looking at a handful of newspaper writers all trying to sell the same pattern to their readers under whatever name sounded good that week.

You will often read that this block was adopted by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the late 1800s as a symbol of their fight against alcohol, sometimes with the added detail that blue and white color schemes symbolized the purity of water. It is a nice story. It has also never been documented.

A newspaper clipping showing a black-and-white quilt pattern called Drunkards Trail, with a description of its history and instructions on how to request more patterns.
Found in a 1933 Newspaper

Dating my own Drunkard’s Path

With the block’s tangled naming history in mind, I turned to my own quilt to see what it could tell me. I do not have paperwork on this one, but I have owned it for about 35 years, which sets a firm outer boundary: whatever its age, it predates my ownership.

A few things ruled out some easy guesses. I bought it at a feedsack show, so I wondered if the solid fabric might be a plain feed sack. Looking closely, I do not think so. The fabric reads as ordinary commercial yard goods rather than feed sack cotton, and that is common; quiltmakers in this era mixed sack fabric with store-bought cotton all the time, so this does not rule out a period-correct quilt on its own.

The construction told me more. The blocks are machine pieced, the binding is machine applied, but the quilting itself is done entirely by hand. That combination is a classic home-sewn utility quilt profile from the 1930s through the mid-1900s: piecing and binding done quickly by machine, with the actual quilting, the part that took real time and skill, done by hand the old way.

A quilt with a geometric pattern in pink and white, featuring curved shapes and intersecting lines forming a repeating abstract design.
A closeup of the piced border thaat continues the design and the machine applied binding.

The batting sealed it for me. It is cotton, and it has clearly been through many wash cycles: thin, flattened, and pieced together in sections rather than one continuous layer. Old-style unbonded cotton batting compresses and thins with repeated washing in exactly this way. This is a quilt that got used on a bed, washed, and used again, for a long time.

A close-up of a white quilt or fabric with a pink rose floral pattern and subtle green leaves. The fabric appears slightly wrinkled and has a worn, vintage look.
This is clearly an older quilt that has been washed at least once. You can tell by the way the batting separated in the non quilted areas.
A close-up of a quilt shows faded, wrinkled white fabric with a pink floral pattern and pink stitching along the seams. A brown patch appears at the top, and the quilted stitches are visible throughout.
This area of missing batting is helpful to determine construction. The block was made by hand or machine, then the larger part of the colored block was removed.

Putting it together: I am comfortable calling this a home-sewn utility quilt from the Depression era through the 1950s, based on construction and wear rather than any one flashy clue. No single detail proved it. The combination did.

Variations on the Drunkards Path block

Mine is not a typical drunkards path quilt. As it happens, I don’t own one. Here are some pictures I found in the public domain, or pictures that wonderful people shared with me. If you would like to share yours, let me know.

A green quilt with a brown geometric pattern and border hangs on a tree branch outdoors, with grass and trees visible in the background.
1940 Quilt from the Library of Congress
A red and white quilt featuring a repeating geometric floral pattern with red circles and petals on a white background, bordered by red and white stripes.
The Smithsonian dated this 1880 – 1900
A colorful quilt with a floral pattern made of red, green, and white fabrics. The quilt has a green and red border and is placed on a tiled floor.
Lana F started this Christmas Quilt in 1994. She finished it in 2024 and gave it as a gift. Notice the candy cane binding.
A gray tabby cat lies on a patterned quilt with green, cream, and floral designs, spread across a wooden bed.
Cindy W tells me that she bought this quilt for my daughter in the mid 90’s from Amish people near New Wilmington, PA. (That was very much what they were doing back then – sewing for the “English”.) Over the years it became tattered, I imagine because her daughter dearly loved it so much. Her daughter asked her to replace it, but Cindy decided to replicate it using her Accuquilt to cut the many pieces. She found fabric very similar to the original. She plans to update the batting with bamboo and might even take the completed top to some Amish ladies to hand quilt. There is no question that her daughter will love it as much as the original. By the way, the cat’s name is Chessie.
A quilt block with a curved, interlocking pattern in green and beige fabric, featuring swirling leaf-like designs on green and intricate beige prints, laid on a textured carpet background.
Lana’s extra block
A colorful patchwork quilt with red, green, and white floral-like patterns, bordered by red and green fabric, is laid out on a tiled floor.
This is the second Christmas quilt that Lana F started in 1994 and finished in 2024. She says she still has blocks left over – what will she make next?

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