Alamo descendants are stitched into history at Susanna Dickinson Museum

Texas Standard listener Jeanne Henry was the education coordinator at the Joseph and Susanna Dickinson Hannig Museum in Downtown Austin until she retired in 2013. She shared this history for the Standard’s Texas Museum Map series:

Susanna Dickinson and her daughter, Angelina, were survivors of the Alamo battle where her first husband, Almaron Dickinson, died in the battle. Her last of five husbands was a German furniture maker named Joseph Hannig, and the museum is the home he built for her in the mid-1850s.

The building was most recently a barbecue restaurant in Austin. Under the direction of curator Valerie Bennett, the restaurant building was purchased by the City of Austin and opened as a museum in 2010.

As a part of the adult education program, I taught a class in hand quilting because the women of the 1850s traditionally made all of the quilts for each family member. We made a signature quilt by hand in which we collected 69 signatures of descendants of the Alamo Battle and sewed their names into the quilt. The design of the quilt was from the mid-19th century.

Any descendant who visited the museum and who could document their descendency could sign our quilt. We had signatures from a woman in her 80s who was the third great-granddaughter of Susanna and Almaron Dickinson, and a child who was only 3 years old and was the sixth great-granddaughter of the Dickinsons. The quilt itself became an artifact of the museum and is on display today in Susanna Dickinson’s bedroom.

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