Latimer Quilt & Textile Center

Fridays at the looms

In the West Room of the old Maple Leaf School on Wilson River Loop Road, anywhere from one to nine looms are in use at once. One of them, an AVL loom donated in October 2024, is kept busy making tea towels that are sold in the building. Spinning wheels stand on display. A public loom is set up for anyone who wants to try it. Tapestries from the center’s own collection run along the ceiling and are changed every couple of months.

The Latimer Weavers sit at the looms every Friday from 10 to 4, and anyone may come in to ask questions and see what weaving looks like. On the same Fridays the Ocean Breeze Rug Krafters meet from 10 to 2, with a lunch brought from home. Thursdays belong to Cordelia’s Knitters, who began at Cordelia’s shop in downtown Tillamook and moved here when the shop closed in 2008. The day knitters meet from 1 to 3 and the night knitters from 5:30 to 7:30. The Tillamook County Quilters Guild meets at 10:30 on the third Thursday of each month, and the Oregon Coast Fiber Artisans hold a weekly day of spinning, quilting and knitting. One report on the center names a Tillamook spinner, Carole Reichert, who helps others with their projects. It also names a knitter, Candy Allen, starting a plain-weave sampler under Shirley Medsker, and a flight attendant, Jon Rodriguez, who brings his knitting in on his days off.

Marilyn Anderson, a volunteer and weaving instructor, has been with the center since it opened in 1991. “People come in here and ask us how long it takes,” she told the Headlight Herald in 2016. “And we tell them we haven’t the slightest idea. We just know we started doing (a project), and we’re still here.”

Drawers, a stage and a stencil-dyer

Across the building, the East Room hangs antique quilts from the Latimer Collection beside contemporary and art quilts. One wall is lined with a bank of glass-covered drawers installed in 2001. Each drawer holds a small exhibit of cigar silks, buttons, guild pins and souvenirs, purses, needle keepers, hankies, tatting and hardanger. One quilt here, “At First Light,” came from a 2010–2011 challenge. A photograph of Portland by Dale Archer was divided into six sections, and each section was interpreted by a different maker: Jo Barry, Sally Hopkins, Nancy Harvey, Cheri Jolivette, Meg Shaw and Robin Hill. The room also serves as the meeting hall for member guilds.

The school’s auditorium is now the gallery, with a new exhibit every two months. Through October 31, 2026, it holds the katazome work of Karen Illman Miller, who was for many years a marine biologist at Oregon State University. Katazome uses a paper stencil to lay down a rice-paste resist before the fabric is dyed or painted. Miller was introduced to it in 1994, and her interest in all things Japanese traces to her grandfather, a zoologist who lived and worked in Japan at the turn of the century. La Rayne Woodward’s “Something to Treasure” follows for November and December 2026, with an open house on November 7. That same day the center’s First Saturday stitch-in resumes, a monthly social day when visitors may bring a quilting, spinning or other fiber project and pay no admission.

Behind the stage, where the library moved in 2011, are books, many rare and out of print. The shelves also hold a large collection of quilt patterns, newspaper needlework clippings, and pamphlets on everything from rug hooking to basketry, all for use on site only. The library is closed from October 13 to November 10, 2026, while the books are taken down and the room rearranged. Beginners’ classes under the Textile Discovery Project meet on Saturday mornings: embroidery on October 10, paper piecing with Helene Knott on November 14, and English paper piecing with Kim Schauss on December 12. In 2016, associate manager Gail Grier recalled a teenager from the alternative high school who learned basic sewing here. “He was so excited and said, ‘Now I can wear my pants!’” she said. He ran home at lunch and came back with a torn pair to mend.

Outside, the building carries the first mural of the Tillamook Quilt Trail, painted in 2012 to a design by Breanna Moran. It shows a quilter sewing before an agricultural landscape, bordered by images of Tillamook’s historic creameries.

Turning the beds

Most of the collection lives out of sight in the La Rayne Woodward Quilt Repository, built in 1996. It has conservatorial lighting, hermetic temperature control and acid-free boxes, and its holdings are catalogued in Past Perfect. It holds quilts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, along with coverlets, clothing, looms and spinning wheels. The Bromleigh and Mary Louise Lamb Collection has quilts of the Hall and Faulders families dating from the mid-1800s to about 1930. A 2016 newspaper account put the oldest items back to the 1700s. Other holdings include crochet of the 1930s and 1940s and hand-woven samples with drafts prepared by Wallace Hickman in the 1950s and 1960s. The repository is visited by appointment, when volunteers are free.

The collection reaches the public mainly through the bed turning, which is arranged in advance. Robert G. Russell described one held for the Tillamook County Historical Society in 2022. The hosts, Carol Weber and Lorraine Woodward (the center’s own pages spell the name La Rayne), led the group down into storage rooms shelved floor to ceiling with bagged quilts. Woodward explained that wool and silk had been frozen to rid them of molds and critters. In the last room stood a single bed. “A bed turning is how we show quilts and tell their stories,” Woodward said, peeling back the top quilt, a crazy quilt that took more than two years to make.

Next came a quilt said to have been made by Rosa Kilchis. A paper with it identified her as the daughter of Chief Kilchis, though the group discussed whether that was accurate. “The story goes that the lines in this piece represent important pathways the tribe used as ways of escape,” Weber said. Over 45 minutes the two showed another 15 or 20 quilts, pieced from late-1800s shirt fabrics, flour sacks and old curtains. Weber, Linda Machuta and La Rayne Woodward later took a bed turning to the “Quilts by the Sea” show in Newport in 2025.

Maple Leaf University

The quilts are kept in what was a country school on James and Permelia Latimer’s homestead. He was born in Missouri in 1841 and she in Indiana in 1843, and they married in Kansas in 1863. When the school began is uncertain. The center believes some form of school existed about 1870. Margaret Frances Elliott is thought to have begun teaching at Wilson River School in 1872 as its first certified teacher. Born in Nashville in 1854, she had crossed the plains to East Portland with her family and came over the Trask River Trail to Tillamook at seventeen. The second teacher, Thomas H. Goyne, arrived in Tillamook in August 1876 by the center’s timeline and family pages. Its Maple Leaf School page gives August 1886, at age 22. He married Daisy Evelyn Latimer in 1888.

In 1892 the Latimers gave a parcel for a school. The deed required that the land return to their heirs when it was no longer used as one. A one-room building was hauled to the site by wagon, and there is some evidence it came from the Buttz place. Goyne described it in 1896 as “a one room building with little furniture, no books, or maps or other equipment.” Around then the name changed from Wilson River School to Latimer School. In March 1899 the Headlight Herald complained that the stove was a fire risk and that children had been “almost smoked out,” asking: “Who is gritty enough to start a subscription on a new stove?”

An L-shaped two-room school followed around 1900, and the center’s timeline gives it the name Maple Leaf. Fire destroyed the old building in 1917. School reopened in one room in 1918, and a three-room schoolhouse was completed in 1920. The accounts of the present building differ. The center’s family page says it went up with two rooms and gained a third near 1930. Its “About Us” page dates the current building to the 1930s. A 2016 newspaper article said the schoolhouse was originally built in the 1880s.

The teachers left the stories. Rose Tilden Anderson, who taught there from 1923 to 1926, recalled that the school board would not buy fire equipment. Then a fire in the basement sent flames up through the wall registers, and the older boys, with no hose or buckets, put it out with water carried in their boots. The purchase was then authorized. The Wilson River flooded the basement often enough to give many unscheduled winter holidays. Rose Schild, who taught twelve first- and second-graders from 1930 to 1934, said the gym was a long walk off on “plain, packed dirt,” so in the rain her pupils “often played around a large, sturdy, raised sand box at the back of the classroom.” In 1939 a WPA project added a stage and auditorium to the northernmost classroom, which had been the primary room.

Harold V. Lewis taught the upper four grades from 1939 to 1941 and served as principal and head janitor. “On my first school teaching job we jokingly called the school ‘Maple Leaf University,’” he wrote. The softball team of boys and girls practiced in a neighbor’s cow pasture, where “very early on in the game everyone learned not to slide in to second base.” He boarded with August and Dorothy Boquist until he married in December 1940. “I didn’t have to do dishes at the Boquist’s,” he recalled.

Forty heirs and a museum employee

The last classes met in 1959, taught by Orella Chadwick, Marie Simmons and Gloria Rickward. The district used the building for storage and repairs until 1985. In 1989 the gymnasium, built in the late 1930s, was so far gone that it was burned. The property reverted under the old deed to more than forty Latimer heirs, none of whom lived in Tillamook County. Thomas W. Goyne, son of the second teacher and Daisy Latimer and once a pupil at the school, gathered deeds from them all. The heirs gave the property to the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum Foundation, in 1985 by the center’s timeline and in 1989 by its other pages.

Clara Fairfield, an employee of the Pioneer Museum, saw a place where fiber artisans could demonstrate, teach and produce their work. The Friends of Latimer Quilt & Textile Center formed in 1991 and opened the building on Memorial Day that year. A memorial dedication on 30 May 1993 honored the Latimers and Fairfield. Half the roof was replaced in 2005 and the other half in 2012. Walls, windows, siding, gutters, heating and the front stairs were redone between 2013 and 2016, and every light in the building was changed to LED in 2026. The center still sits in a flood zone; when the river rises, the closing is posted on the doors. Van Moe, a local broadcaster, said of the old school, once overrun by blackberries and birds, that its supporters “have not disappointed anyone but the birds and the blackberries.”