Just a Walk Down the Road: the History of Southern St. Charles County, Missouri

John E. Schneider, Hamburg's Coverlet Weaver

by Bob Brail

Folks who are familiar with Highway 94 in the southwestern half of St. Charles County may remember just west of the former location of the village of Hamburg a set of seven concrete steps which seemed to lead up the side of the road embankment for no apparent reason. These steps, which were removed in a highway widening project about five years ago, did lead somewhere at one time. They led to a house. In fact, these steps led to the home of an artist whose works today are in museums like the Art Institute of Chicago and the St. Louis Art Museum. That man was John E. Schneider, the coverlet weaver of Hamburg.

John E. Schneider was born in Bavaria on April 6, 1823, to Henry Schneider, Sr., a baker, and his wife Margaretha. His middle name may have been Eusebius or Eulesius. John Schneider immigrated to the United States in 1838 with his father and younger brother Andrew, who was twelve. The father and two sons took a ship from Germany to New Orleans, landing in December, 1838. One Schneider family tradition says the Henry Schneider family left Germany to prevent the Schneider sons from being forced to serve in the German army. While this was common practice at this time, there is no documentary evidence to support this tradition. One year later, the remainder of the family came to America, also travelling to New Orleans and then up the Mississippi River to St. Charles County. This included the three other sons, Jacob, Daniel, and Henry, Jr., as well as the two daughters, Elizabeth and Anna Maria, and Anna Maria's husband, William Koenig. Shortly after the family had been reunited, Henry, Sr., in April of 1840, bought two hundred acres near the Missouri River in the environs of what came to be known as the village of Hamburg, and built the village's first house.

John Schneider began weaving coverlets sometime in the late 1840's, about the time he became a United States citizen in 1848. The earliest known Schneider coverlets are inscribed with the date 1850; it was in the census of that year that Schneider called himself a coverlet weaver. He was living in the Hamburg area with the Koenigs, his sister and her husband. In no census other than 1850 would Schneider call himself a weaver, using instead the profession of farmer, so his weaving profits apparently were not enough for his family to live on. In fact, Schneider did not make enough money from weaving to be included in the 1850 manufacturing census of St. Charles County. The only record of a coverlet sale is in an account book of Schneider's that mentions a coverlet sold for $11.50. In 1853 he married Catherine Long; they would raise five children in their house in Hamburg: Margaret, born in 1854; Eleanor, 1856; Mary, 1859; John, 1861; and William, 1869. According to family tradition, Schneider wove a unique coverlet for each of his children. In the 1900 census John and Catherine still lived in the same house, and Schneider referred to himself as a “landlord.” John Schneider died June 26, 1903, in the home of his daughter Mary. He was buried in Hamburg. According to a family tradition, Schneider's walut loom was torn down soon after his death at request of his daughter Mary. So, although the latest date woven into a known Schneider coverlet is 1872, he may have continued weaving until the end of his life.

Today twenty-six coverlets woven by John Schneider are known to exist. These include the following coverlets made in the years designated:

1861 - dated but unsigned; made of wool and cotton; red, white, and blue

1868 - dated and signed; made of wool; red, blue, and butternut

1869 - dated and signed; made of wool and cotton; blue, red, and white (natural)

1872 - dated and signed; made of wool and cotton; yellow, brown, and red

1872 - dated and signed; made of wool and cotton; red, blue, and white (natural)

1872 - dated and signed; made of wool, blue, red and green.

Schneider always wove what are known as double coverlets. Kate Rabb, in Indiana Coverlets and Coverlet Weavers, her booklet published in 1928, gives a clear explanation of single and double coverlets: “There are two kinds of coverlets, known as the 'single' and the 'double.' The 'single' coverlet was woven by the housewife on the hand loom on which she also wove sheets, blankets, and linsey-woolsey. This hand loom was so much a part of the household outfit in colonial times and later in pioneer days of the middle west. . . . The 'double' coverlet was made on a different kind of loom, much more complicated, and therefore always made by a so-called professional weaver. Sometimes this man set up what he often called his 'factory' in a town or in the country on his farm; sometimes he was an itinerant weaver, though we have no record of itinerants in this state. His covers are called 'double' because in certain parts of the design the fabric can be taken between the fingers and pulled apart, as though it were two coverlets, joined in places by the pattern.” Besides being double coverlets, Schneider's coverlets are also doublecloth, which means they are two loom widths across, joined by a central seam. They are usually wool and cotton, but some are of all wool. Schneider used eight different patterns in his known coverlets. For his first coverlets, the wool was spun and dyed by his wife Catherine; later he used commercial yarns. In her later years, the Schneiders' daughter Margaret remembered as a little girl helping her father dye yarn in an iron pot in their backyard and how he dried the yarn by hanging it on a line stretched between two giant trees in their yard. Schneider's designs “included acanthus leaves, pineapples, grapes, and other motifs combined in a distinctive manner, quite different from the more conventional designs used by other American weavers of the period.” His “technical skill and sense of color and design suggest the quality of work that the best immigrant workmen were capable of producing.”

John Schneider always wove his coverlets on a loom equipped with a Jacquard attachment. This technology had been developed in Lyon, France, and was named for Joseph-Marie Jacquard, who invented the attachment in 1806. Before the advent of the Jacquard attachment, the weaver would tell a boy positioned at the top of the loom which cords to pull in order to create the desired pattern. The Jacuard attachment greatly increased the speed at which the weaver could work by using punch cards which allowed needles on top of the loom to pass through holes and raise certain yarn to create the desired pattern. The stack of punch cards was fed into the loom from the top of the Jacquard attachment.

It was probably sometime between 1840 and 1850 that John Schneider learned the art of weaving. Since he was only sixteen years old when he arrived in the United States, it is unlikely Schneider learned to weave in Germany. The earliest known Schneider coverlets are dated 1850, so Schneider must have started weaving sometime in the 1840's. Where he learned to weave is not as clear, although Indiana is a likely location. It was a major center for coverlet weaving at this time, and there are several common characteristics between the coverlets woven by Schneider and those woven in Indiana. For example, coverlet weavers always included a “signature square” in the corner of their coverlets in which they would identify themselves by name and/or symbol. The earliest signature squares of John Schneider had a star and were exact copies of the signature square of well-known Indiana weaver Samuel Stinger, who had moved to Indiana in 1831 to continue what ended as a thirty-year weaving career. Another common characteristic between Indiana coverlets and Schneider coverlets is the use of three slim lines at the outside of the pattern next to the fringe. Probably the most striking similarity involves a coverlet woven by Indiana weaver John Rogers, an Irish immigrant; according to Schneider scholar Otto Thieme one of John Schneider's coverlets is identical to one of Rogers' in the patterns used in the centerfield and the side borders. Schneider's coverlets also are similar to those woven in Indiana in weave, materials, and even thread count.

Besides these similar characteristics in coverlets, there is some further evidence that supports the idea that John Schneider learned to weave in Indiana. In her 1928 booklet Indiana Coverlets and Coverlet Weavers, author Kate Rabb records that a “John Snyder” worked for an Indiana weaver named John Whisler in the 1840's in Wayne County, located in east central Indiana. In his 1848 citizenship papers Schneider used the German spelling of his name, but in 1850, he would used the anglicized spelling “Snyder” in the census (although a few years later he would revert to the German spelling),so there is some documentary evidence that Schneider, at least at this point in his life, varied the spelling of his name. It is also worth noting that Schneider sometimes used “Snyder” in a noteboook he kept to document his children's births. (Interestingly, Whisler, also German, had changed the spelling of his name from Wissler.) The 1850 census contains more noteworthy information: John Whisler and John Rogers, the weaver whose patterns John Schneider later used, lived in the same township in Wayne County. It is also important that Samuel Stinger, the Indiana weaver whose signature square John Schneider initially used, worked in Ripley Township, Milton County, only about forty miles west of Whisler and Rogers. These facts, along with the similar characteristics in coverlets, suggest that Indiana is where John Schneider learned to weave.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, John E. Schneider was one of only three or four coverlet weavers in Missouri and the only one in St. Charles County. An immigrant from Germany, Schneider probably learned his craft in Indiana and then spent the remainder of his life weaving at least twenty-six double coverlets, each a beautiful testimony to its creator's artistic abilities. The next time you drive on Highway 94 through the former location of Hamburg, remember that John Schneider, one of America's best coverlet weavers, once lived there.

It would be an injustice to the artistry of John E. Schneider to print a black-and-white photo of one of his coverlets in this newsletter. If you would like to view a color photograph of one of his coverlets, go to http://images.mohistory.org/image/0C714553-881C-2748-9D08-D262E604D549/original.jpg.

Sources: The Arts and Architecture of German Seettlements in Missouri (Charles Van Ravensway); “Collection Spotlight: John E. Schneider Coverlet” by Chris Jeryan (coverletmuseum.org); Emails from Doug Mades; Familysearch.org; Federal Censuses; Indiana Coverlets and Coverlet Weavers by Kate Rabb (archive.org); “Jacquard Loom” (britannica.com/technology); “John E.Schneider – Weaver Hamburg, Mo.” (C. Toney Aid); Letter from Mark Sutton to Boone-Duden Historical Society, Schneider File (Boone-Duden Historical Society archives); Letters from Otto Charles Thieme to Harold E. Sutton and Lydia Wackher , Schneider File (BDHS archives); “Trailblazing Weaver,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 Apr. 2002 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers).