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Georgia Quilt Museum
Martha Hefner Mulinix
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By Susan Fisher
Martha Hefner Mulinix was born in Zone, Georgia. Her mother
was the postmistress in the little Walker County hamlet located in a valley in
the mountains. Because there was no railroad close by, the mail came by
horseback from Calhoun and then by a Model T Ford from La Fayette. During the
Depression Martha’s father worked for the Central of Georgia Railroad. She says,
“We lived wherever the railroad sent him.”
She went to high school in Rome at the Berry School where she
met her husband, Eugene, who she has always called Mulinix. Both started college
at Berry, but while Martha continued on to graduate in 1944, Mulinix dropped out
to join the Army Air Force. The two eloped in December of 1943, but kept their
marriage a secret. In those days a married woman could not remain at the school.
“Little Hef” as she was known then because her older sister was also at Berry,
didn’t disclose her real wedding date to her classmates until decades later at a
class reunion!
During the war while Mulinix was overseas and her father was
foreman of a construction gang that followed big jobs around, Martha and her
mother moved to a farm near her childhood home. This was when she began
quilting.
Her mother’s family considered quilting a “Salvage Art”. She
remembered, “They grew cotton and worked up scraps. I wanted to do something
productive while Mulinix was overseas.” As a child she had made a stack of 9
Patch blocks that she had kept through many moves and life experiences. With the
help of a neighbor, she finally finished that quilt during Mulinix’s absence.
The blocks were of various sizes, but her neighbor simply cut them all to the
smallest size and Martha finished the quilt. “It’s a peculiar looking quilt, but
it’s hanging on a rack in our guest room and is still used.” Martha remembers
those early quilting days as “good times”. She would plan the quilts and her
mother would make them.
The Mulinixes moved to his childhood home in Bartow County,
where they still live, in 1945. Martha worked as a counselor in public schools
from 1949 to 1968. She was involved with the art council in Cartersville, ending
up on the Craft Committee. Each committee had to do something for the community.
Someone suggested that Martha teach quilting. When she protested that she
certainly wasn’t qualified she was told, “You can teach and you can quilt so you
can teach quilting!” Martha calls that first class an independent study. “We all
learned together.” She went on to teach for the Bartow County Parks and
Recreation Department and eventually in her home where her students included
Rosie Wade, founder of the Georgia Quilt Council.
Martha’s son Victor built her a quilting frame copied from
one his grandfather had made in the 1920s. Martha, Mulinix and the freestanding
frame went to various needlework shows where she conducted “Audience
Participation Demonstrations”. She had people put in some stitches and then sign
a notebook. Meanwhile people liked the frame and placed their orders. Victor,
who made reproduction furniture for craft shows, soon tired of making an endless
number of frames, so Mulinix stepped in to fill the orders. For years he and
Martha delivered every frame and put in the buyer’s first quilt. “He can still
put a quilt in a frame better than I can.”
A week’s demonstration at the 1982 Knoxville World’s Fair led
to another booking during the final Best of Festival week. The Mulinixes
traveled to workshops, festivals and quilt shows demonstrating quilting. They
produced quilt shows in Cartersville and Barnsley Gardens and well remember the
blizzard of 1993 that they weathered in their motor home parked behind Bulloch
Hall where they were participating in the annual quilt show.
Vision problems now prevent Martha from quilting. She calls
herself a “quilting has-been” which is far from the truth. Rather, she is a
“quilting treasure” who has contributed immeasurably to the quilting history of
Georgia.
December 2004
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