Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt, Eleanor Bourassa Ziegler; Carrie Holland

This quilt pattern has been called honeycomb, hexagon, six-sided patchwork, French bouquet, and grandmother’s flower garden. The pattern, consisting of hexagon pieces arranged in florets, dates to the early 19th century but has been particularly popular since the mid-1920s. This quilt was made by the donor’s grandmother, making it a grandmother’s flower garden quilt by every definition.

Eleanor Bourassa Ziegler grew up on a Potawatomi reservation along the Kaw (Kansas) River just west of what would become Topeka. Her father, Jude Bourassa, was of Métis ancestry, a combination of French and Potawatomi heritage. Her father, along with other Potawatomi, was forced to move to Indian Territory (present-day Kansas) in the 1830s and 1840s by the United States government. He operated a water-powered mill on a creek near the Kaw and might have owned the only piano in the Territory. When Ziegler made this quilt in her late 70s, she had long since left her childhood home, married, raised children, and lived in Oklahoma, southeast Kansas, and southwest Missouri. Carrie Holland, along with the ladies’ quilting group from Bronough Christian Church in Missouri, quilted this for Mrs. Ziegler.