When Ella Martin—a coal miner’s wife from Mercer County, West Virginia—wrapped this NRA quilt in brown paper to mail to the White House as a gift for President Roosevelt in December 1933, she included in her letter, “I believe this is the first quilt of this kind to have been made.” She called the quilt a “cover for the nation” and said she wanted to give it to the president “out of appreciation of the National Recovery Act, and what it means to the people, and as an expression of confidence in the NRA.” Ella clearly wanted the president to know the actual time she had labored over her Blue Eagle quilt, and, perhaps symbolically, wanted to also convey the dire conditions she and many fellow Americans faced in these early years of the Depression. To her, the stitches in the quilt equated with the larger sacrifices many Americans endured.