January 29, 2007
Celebrate Kansas! at the Kaw Mission

Celebrate Kansas! is an open house, free and open to the public, held at the Kaw Mission State Historic Site on Kansas Day, Tuesday, January 29, 2008 from 10 am to 5 pm. Guests will be greeted and served refreshments by Friends of Kaw Heritage members dressed in period clothing. Jeremiah Hershberger on accordion and Charlie Laughridge on fiddle will provide live music playing patriotic songs with a distinctive Kansas flavor. The Mission Trio will lead visitors in group singing.

The day’s festivities will include a quilt show, Kansas Quilts. Hand-stitched quilts featuring Kansas related patterns will be on display in the Kaw Mission Education Center from 10am – 5pm. Of particular interest is a sampler quilt containing twenty different historic Kansas quilt patterns. Other quilts in the show are made totally of a single pattern selected from this sampler. Several quilts are made of various sunflower fabrics. All quilts in this show were handmade by Helen Ericson of Emporia, KS. Ericson enjoys a long and illustrious history with the art of quilting. Honored with the title of “Master Folk Artist” by the Kansas Historical Society in 1984 through a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Ericson taught ten apprentices who have gone on to make quilts, teach, and promote quilt history and quilt making. The Kansas Quilts show is only one of several quilt shows she has presented at the Mission. In 1985, during Wah Shun Gah Days, she showed quilts in a tent on the Kaw Mission lawn. In 1996 she produced a quilt show at the Kaw Mission as a feature of the Santa Fe Trail 175th birthday celebration. In 2007 Yesterday’s Creations: Today’s Treasures quilt show was part of Celebrate Kansas! and the Red, White & Blue quilt show was held during Wah Shun Gah Days. In June Ericson will hold her sixth Kaw Mission quilt show, Flowers of the Prairie, during Wah Shun Gah Days 2008. Ericson welcomes guests to bring quilts to the show for her to date and identify patterns.

Charles Robinson, elected in 1860 to serve as the first governor of Kansas, aka. first person reenactor Kenneth McClintock, will deliver his 1886 Kansas Day speech several times during the day. John Martin, then governor of Kansas portrayed by Don Jenkins, will introduce Robinson. One of the turbulent territorial era’s most active and decisive participants, Robinson was alarmed by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Concerned about the prospect that the new territory of Kansas might become a slave state, he helped the New England Emigrant Aid Society locate its first free-state settlement in a place they named Lawrence. Robinson represented the abolitionist wing of the day, but was also a coalition builder who became a founder and leader of the Free State Party established in the summer of 1855.

The Friends of Kaw Heritage, Inc. and the Kansas Historical Society co-sponsor Celebrate Kansas!

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