Quilt dated 1876 by Drusilla Showalter Cole,
Mound Ridge, Kansas. Kansas Quilt Project.
The Missouri/Oklahoma/Kansas/Arkansas quilt study group (MOKA) is meeting in Leavenworth this weekend April 1 and 2nd, 2016. See the program and registration form here:
It's been over thirty years since we started the Kansas Quilt Project and over 25 since we began publishing our findings. I thought I'd revisit the research and see if I'd found anything to contradict that information.
Nancy Hornback and I were particularly interested in quilts made in Kansas between 1854 (when the Territory was opened to European and African-American settlement) and 1880. We hyposthesized we'd see quilts made here that looked much like the quilt styles people had known back in the east.
This is supposed to be the first house built in Lawrence, 1854.
What kind of quilts were made in frontier Kansas?
The lecture will tell you how many we found that could reliably be
attributed to a Kansas quiltmaker before 1880---which can be considered
the end of the frontier in most of Kansas with the coming of the railroads.
Spoiler Alert:
1
Lots of families brought in quilts they thought were made by
pioneers but we only found one date-inscribed example
where we had evidence the maker actually lived in Kansas.
Thank you, Drucilla, for dating your quilt.
We published our findings in our book
Kansas Quilts & Quilters
and in a 1990 issue of Kansas History.
Read my article on "Quilts on the Kansas Frontier" here:
The link doesn't seem to work. Try a web search for these words:
textile diaries kansas history
and it should come up.
If your hypothesis turns out to be completely wrong --- you spend your allotted timed telling people why you think you didn't find what you were looking for. And that's what I'll be doing.