MAKING HISTORY

Quilts tell stories and the quilts of Gee’s Bend tell the story of a people and their country,

Quilts tell stories and the historic quilts of Gee’s Bend in Alabama tell the amazing story of a people and their country, says Lynette S Warren

Quilts are what propelled the small community of Gee’s Bend into the headlines, so it is fitting their quilts tell the Gee’s Bend tale…

DRESDEN PLATE: NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE

Long before the quilts of Gee’s Bend hung in museums of Fine Art, the women of Boykin, Alabama were making quilts. It was in 1937 the area informally known as Gee’s Bend was first noticed by the rest of the world. Photographed for the Roosevelt Administration, these quilts were initially nothing more than a passing mention on a photo caption in a New York Times article.

In 1937, the town of Boykin, Alabama was one of the poorest in the United States.

The entire country was coming out of the Great Depression and the South had been particularly hard hit. The Federal Government employed artisans throughout the United States to document various aspects of life.

Sent to document life in the south, one of the places photographers Marian Post Wolcott and Arthur Rothstein were sent to was Gee’s Bend. Named after Joseph Gee, the original owner, Gee’s Bend is a piece of land that forms a peninsula in the Alabama river. The land now known as Gee’s Bend has had three main owners, Charles and Sterling Gee, Mark Pettway and Mr. Adrian Sebastian Van der Graaff. As the land is bordered on three sides by water, the population has remained isolated and comprised mainly of descendants

of those enslaved by Pettway, the landowner after Joseph Gee.

The ‘bend’ in the Alabama river made Boykin accessible either by ferry, or a bridge several miles away. The people of Gee’s Bend grew and sold cotton to make a living, and when the Great Depression hit, the cotton price dropped so low it was worthless. The residents of the ‘Bend’, as it is also known, borrowed against the inevitable rise of cotton prices. When their lender died, the loans were foreclosed, plunging Gee’s Bend into abject poverty. In 1935, the residents became ‘clients’ of the United States Resettlement Administration – a branch of the US Government helping impoverished communities affected by the Depression get back on their feet. The United States Government bought the land from the Van der Graaff estate and redistributed it to the residents of Gee’s Bend. Throughout these tough times, the women of Gee’s Bend quilted.

CAROLINA LILY: THE GEE'S BEND FERRY

The Gee’s Bend Ferry carried people and items across the river to the city of Camden. Camden is the county seat and as such, the centre of commercial and political activity in the area. Cotton was a cash crop all over the southern part of the United States, and the residents of Gee’s Bend raised cotton and took it to the county seat across the river to sell it. The proceeds from the sale of the cotton provided income to the residents of the community.

In 1966, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to speak to the people of Gee’s Bend, and Dr. King encouraged the people of Wilcox County to vote in the upcoming election. People took the ferry across the Alabama River to the county seat, Camden to cast their vote and the next day, the ferry stopped running. The ferry was an important part of life for the people of Gee’s Bend as it enabled them to get to Camden in minutes by crossing the Alabama River. Without the ferry, residents would have to drive a 40-mile route around the river instead of the seven miles it took to cross it – and in the 1960s, most residents did not have a car. Life would go on with no ferry, but with few cars, life would be

“THROUGHOUT THESE TOUGH TIMES, THE WOMEN OF GEE’S BEND QUILTED” "LYNETTE S WARREN