By Karen Parsons

“It’s easy, Mom,” my 12-year-old daughter said. “Are there memories in that quilt? Just write about the memories.”

In a year of bringing the school’s history alive, a year of memory-making celebrations, and a year in which the all-school theme was, quite appropriately, the topic of memory, she couldn’t have stated the obvious more clearly. 

Memories. Of course. It’s about the memories.

But whose memories? 

Do they belong to Sheilah Zielinski, parent of a junior and the visionary artist and quilt maker who designed Loomis Chaffee’s Centennial Quilt, sourced all the materials (in school colors, no less), and organized a global team of parents and students who sewed the fabric kits she created for each square? Or perhaps the quilt represents the memories of parents and students who contributed time and talent to the effort. Sheilah included a panel with their names on the quilt’s backing. They will be remembered, perhaps at the school’s sesquicentennial in 2064. 

Or maybe some of those memories reside with the girls in Richmond Hall, the first group to live in the newest dormitory on campus, the dormitory dedicated on September 20, 2014, the day of our Centennial Celebration. A photo of Richmond Hall appears on the quilt. 

Other photos on the quilt evoke memories too. There’s a photo of Mason and Taylor halls and the William H. Loomis Dining Hall, the only three buildings on the quadrangle when the school opened in 1914. Walter Wood ’18 kept a scrapbook in which he inserted photos and letters and other ephemera from living in Mason Hall, raising chickens as part of his agriculture course, and being one of the pioneering students at the school. His scrapbook brings us closer to the memories of students such as Walter who are no longer here to share their stories.

And there are the pelicans, exactly 100 on the quilt. The noble vulning bird taken from the Loomis family coat-of-arms to be the school’s mascot has changed its look over time. Some will remember a brown bird mascot making appearances at basketball games in the 1980s. Today’s Pelican makes its cheerful appearance wearing a maroon Loomis Chaffee jersey over its bright white feathers. Pelicans can mean different things to different people. Just ask Chaffee graduates who gathered in March 2014 for a Centennial event. They sang, from memory, the Pelican team song evoking The Chaffee School’s vibrant Pelican-Greyhound rivalry. That song brings back memories for them.

The five Founders — Abby, James, Hezekiah, John, and Osbert Loomis: Their images are central elements of the quilt’s design. Osbert painted portraits of his siblings, probably in the 1870s, and a self-portrait too. We scanned photographs of these paintings, and Sheilah printed them on fabric. Technology plays an important role in helping us remember these remarkable people from a different century. 

The Centennial Quilt stands as a work of art, a visual record of this moment in the school’s history, blending fabric shapes in maroon, gray, and ivory with new and old images and the logo made just for the Centennial. As both a repository of memory and a maker of memory, the quilt is harder to describe, but just as beautiful to behold.