KY flood victim’s ‘beautiful’ quilts were found in muddy water. Now they’ve been restored

Ruth Ann Baxter was volunteering in the Troublesome Creek area a few weeks ago helping to salvage keepsakes from the mud-filled home of a woman who died in the Eastern Kentucky floods when she found a quilting tool.

Wearing gloves, a mask and a headlamp in the darkened Breathitt County house, Baxter headed for a closet in a room where she suspected that 83-year-old Gilla Miller had made quilts. That day, in late August, volunteers were trying to find and return treasured items to flood victims or their families.

Baxter found two large bins in the closet and opened one.

“I took the lid off and it was full of black water all the way to the top,” said Baxter, who lives in Nicholasville.

Don’t put your hand in there, a co-worker cautioned.

Baxter persisted. She pulled the first neatly folded quilt from the black water. She carefully took each quilt from the bin and passed it to another volunteer through an open window to the yard. One by one, she said, the quilts and crochet blankets were unfolded and spread out on the grass.

Baxter said she knew in that moment she had come upon “a treasure of love.”

“I said a little prayer. ‘If these things can be saved, please help me find a way,’” she said.

It was hard to see the destruction in Eastern Kentucky, said Baxter. At the same time, she saw strangers coming together to help strangers.

“The hope that was restored to me was just phenomenal,” she said.

Baxter was in the volunteer group called Helping Hands, organized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that has worked to clean hundreds of flood-damaged homes, said Stacy Heilig, a spokeswoman for the church.

More than a month after the floods and loss of 39 lives, Miller’s daughter, Ronda Combs, said she still finds the disaster and death hard to believe.

“It’s hard to process,” she said. “It was just so cruel and massive.”

She gave permission for Baxter to take Miller’s quilts and try to save them. Quilting was a hobby her mother enjoyed.

Baxter knew about a “recipe” of various detergents that often worked when cleaning vintage quilts.

She took the quilts to the laundromat and a couple of people came to help her. They washed each of the quilts four times in the “recipe” and put sanitizer in the last rinse.

“It was just kind of miraculous in my mind when I pulled the first one out, it was like, oh my goodness. Look at these. These are beautiful,” Baxter said.

Many were hand stitched, some brightly colored.

Baxter said at first, she didn’t know anything about Miller. But she knew if she had been Miller’s daughter or granddaughter she would have wanted the quilts.

“I was amazed,” Combs said about her mother’s restored quilts that will be shared among family members.

“I was,” said Baxter, “a link in a long chain of people that helped that journey of those quilts to get back to the family. And I was just hoping they could have some comfort.”