a program on quilts for the Heritage Division of the Faculty Women's Club at Iowa State University. As part of the program she wrote a play on the history of quilting. Aunt Mary's Quilting Party was performed around a quilt frame for the Faculty Women's Club on January 8, 1969. The lack of collected and published resources on fabrics and quilts impelled Barton towards collecting. Barton collected far more than just finished quilts. She created extensive notebooks to document a collection that also included fabric scraps, patterns, magazines, photographs, family letters and diaries, newspaper clippings, fashion illustrations and catalogs. She studied the manufacture of fabrics and their use in clothing, quilts and household textiles. By researching the companies that had produced dated materials, and comparing fabrics to other dated materials and garments in her quilt and clothing collections, she was able to create references that showed what fabrics looked like and how they were used at different times. As a result it became possible to use the references to date quilt pieces and determine not only when they were individually made, but also when they were combined into quilts. Barton was invited to lecture at major events, including the Kansas Quilt Symposium (1978) and the Missouri Quilt Symposium (1980). She served on the planning committee of Iowa's first statewide quilting event, the Heirloom to Heirloom Quilt Conference (1983). There, and again at the Continental Quilting Congress in Arlington, Virginia in 1984, she set up innovative Study Centers. There, people could use items from her collection, arranged by decade, to comparatively date other works. Interviewed in 1984, she described herself as an "independent researcher" and a "conservator" who was "just trying to save things for future historians." At the Continental Quilting Congress in Arlington, Virginia, on September 29, 1984, Mary Barton was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame. Quilting Barton created many quilt study panels comparing fabrics and patterns from her collections. She also made a number of complete quilt tops, often reproducing antique quilts that she particularly liked. Barton may have begun working on her "Heritage Quilt" as early as 1966, although some sources suggest 1968. In this quilt, she created a historically accurate visual record of the tools, activities, places, people and quilt patterns involved in her pioneer family's migration across America. The fabrics "worn" by the women and children in the quilt are heirloom materials. Completed in