SALISBURY — The Salisbury Church is holding a rummage sale on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 26 and 27, and is seeking donations of items that are clean and in good condition. Call Nancy at 351-4375 to arrange drop off of donations. There will also be a bake sale at the same time and baked goods can be brought directly to the church those days.
Absentee ballots and early voting are now available. Come to the town office on Tuesdays from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., or Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., to cast your ballot or call the town office, 352-4228, for more information. Regular voting will be on Tuesday, Nov. 6.
HISTORIC QUILT CELEBRATION
On Sunday, Oct. 7, the congregation and friends of the Salisbury Church celebrated the double gift of an historic quilt and a wall case to house it in the church narthex. The friendship quilt in blue and white was made in 1933 by the Ladies Aid Society of the West Salisbury Methodist Church as a gift to Carrie Noyes in recognition of her twenty years of service as the organization’s president. It contains the embroidered signatures of 104 town women, each of whom paid ten cents to defray the quilt’s cost. It reads as a precious record of the Salisbury community of 85 years ago.
The West Salisbury church having disbanded in 1948, the quilt and the minutes of the Ladies Aid describing its making were presented instead to the church in Salisbury Village by Mrs. Noyes’ grandson, Ralph Noyes, whose mother’s and sisters’ names appear on it. Also included among the names is that of Bonnie Jeanne Lewis, the then four-year-old daughter of the Reverend Donald Lewis (who served both Salisbury churches in the 1930s) and today is the quilt’s sole surviving signatory. Ms. Lewis (the present Mrs. Leon Adkins) and Mr. Noyes, both residents at EastView, collaborated in giving the church the enclosed wall case in which the quilt is mounted and conserved.
Both Mr. Noyes and Mrs. Adkins, who had known each other since childhood, were present at Sunday’s observance, accompanied by three generations of Mrs. Adkins’ family. Over coffee and cake they reminisced about their lives in Salisbury and about their connections to many of the people represented in the quilt. Thanks to their generosity Salisbury possesses some new oral history and a publicly displayed link to its past.