Dateline August 4, 2019, The Disneyland of Quilting
Over the border into Missouri we went, with a single purpose: to see Hamilton and the Missouri Star Quilt Company.
How Janice came to quilting. Janice took up quilting after she came across something while going through her mother's things, a bag of fabric sewn into squares with a note tucked in: "these squares were made in 1930 by Jeanne Otis and Helen Otis." Jeanne was her mother, and Helen her grandmother, and that small discovery set her on the path that eventually brought us here.
A town brought back. Back in 2008, downtown Hamilton looked like a thousand other forgotten little towns, its main street lined with empty, forlorn buildings. The story of how it turned around is a good one.
Jenny Doan had fallen on hard times in the middle of that decade and was afraid of losing the family home, so in 2008 her son Alan and his sister took out loans and set their mother up in a small business sewing other people's quilts together. Customers kept asking where they could buy fabric, so Alan built a website to sell it, and Jenny began putting together pre-cut bundles, a fairly new idea then, packs of complementary prints that made a handsome quilt quicker and easier to piece. The first year was a disaster. Then Alan asked his mother whether she might try her hand at tutorials; she hadn't the first notion how, so the two of them studied other videos on YouTube, taught themselves, and started filming, with her pre-cut fabrics front and center. As the views climbed, the sales climbed with them. Nine years on, her five hundred-odd videos had been watched something like a hundred and thirty-five million times, and had carried the company's revenue to a reported forty million dollars a year.
There are wonderful painted murals all around the town. Figuring that Jenny's online following would come in person if they had a reason to, the Doans set about remaking the one-stoplight town of Hamilton, all of nineteen hundred souls, into what they like to call the Disneyland of quilting, and it now draws as many as eight thousand visitors a month. The company keeps better than two hundred people on to run its Hamilton stores and ships thousands of packages a day.
The quilt company is not even the first famous name in retail to come out of Hamilton. James Cash Penney landed his very first sales job here, a hundred and twenty years ago and more. He left town as a young man, but came back in time to open his five-hundredth J.C. Penney store right here, and that original Penney building is now one of the Missouri Star shops.
Our visit. We went into town in the morning for some breakfast before setting out through the shops.
The whole place manages to look old and new at the same time. Each of the quilt stores leans toward a different sort of material, and the old J.C. Penney store stood out for the sheer range of it. Janice was thoroughly overwhelmed by the choices, every shop full of beautiful fabrics and kits for making something fine, and the staff were a marvel, full of ideas, patient with every question, happy even to send you down the street to another store to find what you were after. A very pleasant morning all around.
Man's Land. Since the husbands turn up too, the company likes to say that behind every woman in a quilt shop is a man hauling fifteen bolts of fabric and begging her to quit. So in among the shops they built a place called Man's Land, a lounge and billiards room where the recliners face a pair of big-screen televisions. Sit down for "just a minute," they warn you, and you may never get up; it is the perfect spot for the big game or a quiet nap while she shops.
Our sister-in-law Marilyn Roberts, an expert quilter, had told us we would need a plan before we came, and she was right, though you have to know a good deal before you can even begin to make one. If quilting is your passion, Hamilton is a town like no other. And with that, it was back to 2019, and the road on toward Idaho.
