An Ancestral Quilt, Completed

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Ellen Lofland, of Houston, Texas, discovered the most astonishing beginnings of an ancestral quilt. She accepted the task of completing it in honor of the makers. When Jack Jensen offered her a box of quilting materials found in his grandmother’s house, Ellen Lofland expected the usual assortment of unfinished projects and vintage fabrics. “For the most part, that’s what I found,” says Ellen. “Near the bottom of the box, though, was something different.”

There were 8 quilt squares made from flour sacks in the box, each appliquéd with a design similar to a Dresden Plate. Names were embroidered around the edge of each “plate.” Due to the handwriting, Ellen determined that two people made these squares. Some of the names were misspelled and the letters were labored, while others clearly came more easily. The flour sacks made Ellen think this had been started in the late 1890s or early 1900s. That’s when Ellen realized she was holding the beginnings of an ancestral quilt, one with historical significance.

Connecting the Dots

“I knew that Jack was a direct descendant of Waubonsie, Chief of the Potawatomi Indian Nation,” she says. “I contacted Jack to tell him what I’d found. He had no idea that this item even existed much less that he had given it to me!” Jack and his wife, Allison, came over to Ellen’s house to see the squares. “I laid them out on the dining room table, matching them up as well as I could. It was obvious that one square was missing, or perhaps had never been made,” she says. Jack contacted his cousin, Judy McCasey Arnold, to tell her about the squares. They conferred on the names and identified which ones were missing.

Next, Jack and Ellen discussed how an ancestral quilt like this could be completed. “The first thing I needed to do was to wash the squares. They were covered with a fine, powdery substance that had to be removed before I could work on it,” Ellen says. Jack gave her permission, understanding that they were taking a bit of a risk by washing them. “They washed beautifully,” Ellen says. “Most of the foxing [red-brown spots] and other stains came right out.” In order to complete the genealogy, Ellen needed to make the missing square.

Time to Stitch

She tea-stained some muslin, matching it to the rest of the squares as best she could. For the plates, she used what fabrics she could from the box, supplementing with reproduction fabrics from her stash and the neighborhood quilt store. “Since two different people worked on this, the squares didn’t fit together perfectly. I decided to focus on the plates, more than worrying about squaring things up.” Her aim was to respect the work already done. Rather than re-doing anything, Ellen would simply mend where needed. Provisioned with the list of missing names, Ellen embroidered the new square, duplicating the style of the other squares.

As Ellen worked, Jack and his cousin tracked down the names of the two women who made the squares.The quilt was started by Jack’s great grandmother, O-Zoush-Quah (aka, Maggie Hale), who was born in 1847 and died in 1943. “She was a very powerful spiritual healer who was in conflict with the Indian agent,”says Ellen. “The Indian agent wanted her removed from the reservation, so he had her declared insane and taken to an asylum for Indians in Canton, North Dakota.” Denied from practicing her healing arts, O-ZoushQuah began this quilt sometime after she was institutionalized, which was in February 1908.

The Power of a Name

Rather than embroider her family’s Potawatomi names, O-Zoush-Quah stitched their anglicized names, likely on the insistence of the asylum. Using her mother tongue would have been discouraged, if not outright banned. The labored letters hint that English writing did not come naturally to her. On December 21, 1933, the Bureau of Indian Affairs transferred O-ZoushQuah and 68 other people to Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC.

Despite sustained efforts from her family to have her released, she died there on July 18, 1943. At some point, the quilt squares came into the custody of Jack’s grandmother, Pah-Kish-Ko-Quah (aka, Mary Hale Jensen), who continued her mother’s work. After her death in 1968, the quilt squares remained untouched. “It’s very likely that the squares have been in that box for more than fifty years.” Ellen’s respect deepened as she learned more about the women.

A Multi-Generational Project

“I started to feel connected to them as I worked.” Ellen thought about O-Zoush-Quah, stitching a link to the family from which she was separated, and she thought about Pah-Kish-Ko-Quah, living on the Potawatomi Indian reservation in Kansas, carrying on the work her mother had started. And she also thought about Jack, and his desire to see the quilt through to completion. “We always considered this to be a multi-generational project, not a restoration,” says Ellen.

As this generation’s contribution to the quilt top, Jack and Ellen decided to embroider information about the makers—including their Potawatomi names—and their tribe. The quilting used to finish the quilt was minimal. “I quilted around the plates just enough to stabilize the top. I had already warned Jack that this quilt was too old and fragile to be used for anything but display, so I didn’t worry too much about needing additional quilting.”

An Ancestral Quilt, Finally Whole

Once tucked away in a box, the quilt squares were brought out in to the light to became a completed ancestral quilt, now a cherished family heirloom that holds a valued place in Jack’s home. “Now that it’s finished, I think the ladies would be pleased,” says Ellen. “It was such an honor to be involved in this piece of their family history.”