Job's Troubles Revisited

This past week I mentioned that I had found a reference to the "Job's Troubles" quilt block in a research notebook I had prepared. The block was called "Snowball" by Donald Beld in his pattern for a Civil War reproduction quilt originally made in Vermont and given to the U.S. Sanitary Commission. In my previous post, I mis-cited an entry found in Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Patterns which lists "Snowball" and "Job's Troubles" as alternate names but shows an entirely different drawing than the "Snowball" block used in the Civil War quilt.

This reproduction of a Sanitary Commission quilt made by Patricia Cummings has two sets of blocks: plain ones with Biblical inscriptions and pieced ones called "Job's Troubles." The original quilt was made by Caroline Fairbanks.

The Quilter's Album of Patchwork Patterns by Jinny Beyer has a colored diagram called "Job's Troubles" that corresponds to the block seen in the quilt by Caroline Fairbanks that I mentioned. The block was published by Clara Stone in Practical Needlework, ca. 1906. This date post-dates the Civil War time frame but do we really know the name that Fairbanks had called the block? To me, the name "Job's Troubles" makes a lot of sense because the quilt is religiously-based, containing quotes from the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, etc. Today, we know the alternate block which includes an octagonal shape as "Snowball." I postulate that it could have been known much earlier as "Job's Troubles." I have not yet checked other encyclopedic sources for quilt blocks which I have on hand.