Benefield: Mystery donation to Santa Rosa nonprofit thrift store proves to be historic gem
Susan Amalia did with this donation what she does with much of the antique linens gifted to the Welfare League in Santa Rosa's Railroad Square, she took it home.
At her Sebastopol home, Amalia sorts the linens, perhaps cleans them up and, in some cases, runs an iron over them before they are displayed for sale at the league's Railroad Square thrift store.
But a recent item took her breath away. It was a large quilt, patterned with a repeating red star-like design on an off-white backing material. It was in almost pristine condition.
"It looked nice," she said. "I opened it up, and it was beautiful. I turned it over, and there were all these names on it."
In a calligraphic style not of this century were more than 200 names penned in black ink on the back of the quilt. Next to one collection of names was a date.
1888.
"I was flabbergasted," she said.
She didn't know what to make of it, but she knew just who to call.
Since 1939, the Welfare League has run a litany of charitable operations. The engine that funds them all is the entirely volunteer-run thrift shop on Fourth Street in Railroad Square. It is there that an unpaid army of some 145 women sort donations, price jewelry and China, stage displays and run a bustling retail shop.
It all helps fund the group's good works, including the massive Christmas Unlimited program that gives thousands of local, low-income families free gifts for their children and annual scholarships for Santa Rosa Junior College nursing students, as well as funds for those pursuing courses in culinary arts, industrial trade technology and natural resources.
With the quilt in hand, Amalia, a volunteer with the nonprofit league since 2023, called her friend in Santa Rosa, Joan Fleck.
Over the years, Amalia had come across Christening dresses or other items that are sometimes affixed with a small, pinned label indicating the date of wear or other information. But nothing so big, so potentially historic, so sweeping as the quilt.
Amalia knew she needed Fleck's expertise. And her doggedness.
"She knows I like to do genealogy. She said, ‘Come on over, I want you to see this quilt,'" Fleck said.
One look and Fleck knew the quilt was something special.
She took a series of photographs, went home and got to work.
"I just couldn't help myself," she said. "I started searching. I go down that rabbit hole."
She looked in the book documenting burials in the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery. No matches. This quilt probably was not created locally.
So Fleck started dropping names into "Family Search," a free genealogy website.
"Within about an hour and a half or so she texted me and said ‘It's either New York or New Jersey,'" Amalia said.
It was New Jersey. Hoboken to be precise.
"This is Ground Zero, this is their commonality," Fleck said.
The names of mayors appear on the quilt. As do judges. And plumbers and cloth merchants. Mothers and sisters and brothers' names appear.
"From the moment I saw the quilt, I became obsessed with it," Fleck said.
So her fascination led to our reward: In hour after tedious hour, sometimes at home and sometimes at the research library at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Petersen Lane, Fleck pored over entries from Hoboken.
"I went there specifically to research newspapers from Hoboken, New Jersey, from that time period and I was able to find some obituaries," she said.
From those simple stories she could sometimes learn birthdays and death dates, but also parents' names, children's names, maiden names and other crucial information.
From Census records she found places of origin. Some of the Hoboken residents were from Ireland and England and Switzerland.
"I put together a spread sheet with all the peoples' names on it to keep track of who I found and who I didn't find," she said.
"I took some of the ladies' names and I started searching for any newspaper article with that name that may have gotten some press back in the day," she said. "I found a newspaper article and it describes a quilting group called the Ladies of Trinity Church. When I saw this, I thought "Oh my gosh, I just found out who made this quilt.'"
The April 25, 1884, story, which ran under the headline "A Wonderful Patchwork Quilt Presented to a Pastor - The Ladies who Made it," may have been published four years prior to the local quilt's creation but the similarities were hard to ignore.
A group of congregants including a Mrs. Erskine, a Mrs. Dillworth and a Mrs. Plumer, were credited with creating the piece gifted to "the Rev. Mr. Houghton" as an Easter gift, according to the byline-less piece.
"It is one of the most beautiful pieces of work I have ever seen," said the rector, as he "unfolded it to our admiring gaze," the story reads.
Perhaps crucially, the name Plumer appears in the 1888 quilt.
"I made the leap that four years later, in 1888, this same group made this quilt," Fleck said.
Fleck isn't positive she's right, but she's confident. She's also confident that locals in Hoboken may know exactly who many of these people are.
She urged the members of the Welfare League to reach out to the nonprofit Hoboken Historical Museum and let them know about the quilt.
"I can pass the baton to the Hoboken Historical Museum people," she said. "They might be able to come up with a congregation list."
But there is also some hope that there is some local detective work still to be done. Starting with who donated the quilt to the League and beyond that, who owned it? How did an heirloom quilt with civic value to a town near the Eastern Seaboard end up in a donation bag in Santa Rosa, California?
The way donations are organized and sorted within the league's system, it's nearly impossible to track back to find a particular donor, Amalia said. On top of that, some donors don't ask for receipts to acknowledge the gift. And often, the person who brings the items to the shop may not even be the person behind the donation or the original owner, she said.
So she, and others, have questions. People who have seen the quilt, and people like Fleck who are so invested in it, hope someone local might have answers.
"How did it get from Hoboken to here, and what is the story of no longer keeping it?" Amalia said. "This thing has been treated well."
Both Amalia and Fleck are confident in the Welfare League's decision to reach out to Hoboken Historical Museum director Bob Foster and offer the return of this heirloom.
"When I saw the names, I just thought, ‘This is very historical,'" Fleck said. "I wondered about what was the connection between these people, where did they live? I felt very strongly that the quilt needed to find its home."
Members of the Welfare League agreed. The quilt was scheduled to be shipped to the museum on Thursday.
The Hoboken museum gets plenty of citizen donations, typically ephemera from yesteryear. But Foster said he's never seen anything that rivals the quilt he's seen only in photographs.
"This was sort of in a class by itself," Foster said. "One, it's a really interesting artifact. And the fact that the people at the shop have really thrown themselves into it. This artifact is talking to these people."
The museum staff is currently preparing for a show Foster described as "Every Object Tells a Story."
"This is the type of artifact we look for. You always want to tell a story," he said. "This quilt could be the star of that show."
Fleck, for one, hopes so.
"It would be really wonderful if the ancestors of the people on this quilt still live in Hoboken and can actually see it, see their ancestors' names memorialized on this fabulous fabric," she said.
"The people of Hoboken made it. They should have it."
Find out more
To learn more about the Welfare League of Santa Rosa, go to welfareleague.org
To learn more about the Hoboken Historical Museum, go to hobokenmuseum.org
You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.
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This story was originally published June 20, 2026 at 9:51 AM.