CLAREMONT — As part of the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, Claremont MakerSpace is inviting residents to celebrate the city’s immigrant history by participating in the creation of a Community Immigration Quilt.
On Saturday, from 2:30 to 5 p.m. at MakerSpace on Main Street, residents can make a quilt square depicting the flag of the country where they or their ancestors are from. The only requirement is to bring a photo of the flag they want to make. MakerSpace will provide all the materials.
“They can be as creative as they want to be because we will have all different kinds of fabric,” said Felicia Dalke, executive director of TwinState MakerSpaces. “We want it to represent the ancestry of the people who live here.”
The event is part of We the People programs at MakerSpace celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The quilt will illustrate the flow of immigrants that built the city from a farming community into an industrial mill town as well as later and recent immigrants who settled in Claremont.
Dalke said the first big immigration wave to Claremont was in the 1840s when Irish people arrived to escape the potato famine in Ireland. Later in the century, French-Canadians came to work in the mills along the Sugar River.
“At one point, 40% of the city was made up of French-Canadians,” Dalke said.
Russians, Poles, Greeks, Scandanavians and others contributed to Claremont’s melting pot. Later immigrants arrived from other parts of the world from Latin America and Africa to the Far East.
Dalke hopes the quilt truly shows Claremont’s rich and diverse immigration history.
“I hope we get a lot of people who want to celebrate their country of origin and celebrate immigration in Claremont,” Dalke said. “Immigration has been viewed in a negative way recently and we want to try to erase that a little bit. We want this quilt to represent the history of immigration to Claremont, past and present.”
After the event, Tammie Davis, co-lead at the Makerspace Fibers Studio, and MakerSpace Community Quilts volunteers will combine the squares to finish a full-sized quilt. They will iron together the pieces of fabric using an adhesive so no sewing is required.
The completed immigration quilt will be unveiled July 3 during Claremont’s 4th of July ceremonies, and then permanently displayed in a public Claremont building.
The event is free. To register, visit claremontmakerspace.org/events
Dalke said depending on the turnout this weekend, they may hold a second event.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
