Begun in 1856 when she was seventeen and finished around 1867, the quilt includes the autographs on top of the blocks of many known celebrities and politicians of the day including the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, and eight United States Presidents; Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Ulysses S. Grant.

[4] The editor of Godey's Lady's Book, Sarah Josepha Hale, wrote with admiration of the quilt:[5] In short, we think this autograph bedquilt may be called a very wonderful invention in the way of needlework.

After that we rise to the moral, when human deeds are to live in names, the consideration of the celebrities, who are to be placed each, the centre of his or her own circle!

To do this well requires a knowledge of books and life, and an instinctive sense of the fitness of things, so as to assign each name its suitable place in this galaxy of stars or diamonds.The quilt was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995.

[6] It featured in the 2021–22 Anna Wintour Costume Center exhibition "In America: Lexicon of Fashion" at the Met, and provided the inspiration for its interior architectural display design.