Member-only story
Gee’s Bend Quilts — Doing Itself Proud
A tiny community preserves its heritage and leverages artistic brilliance
My hike was magical. A patch of primeval prairie had survived in western Ohio, untouched and pristine. I walked on the protective boardwalk along the Stillwater River. Rare wildflowers nodded in the sun, scattered among the grasses. Land in my part of Ohio has been divvied up along straight lines since the first European settlers came. For the most part, natural features are ignored; ninety-degree angles are the rule. The Stillwater had curved across a corner of a parcel of land, creating a few acres not easily reached by the owner. Midwesterners respect boundaries. The neighbors left the land be. No one plowed it. The relict prairie survived.
Gee’s Bend, Alabama — like the prairie — has been isolated and protected by a river. Named after plantation owner Joseph Gee, the five- by seven-mile area is looped on three sides by the Alabama River. In 1815, Gee bought the land and through the labor of enslaved Africans, raised cotton.
By the Depression, most of the seven hundred people in Gee’s Bend were tenant farmers descended from the formerly enslaved. The price of cotton crashed in 1931. Life for them went from tough to terrible. Sixty families had their property seized in the late winter of 1932. One family recalled drawing the line: no, they would not…
