Map Quilts
Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a movement in the United States between the end of the eighteenth century through 1865 to help escaping slaves leave their owners and find freedom in either Canada where slavery was abolished in 1834 when England passed the Slavery Abolition Act throughout its territories, or establish life in free states which did not practice restitution of slaves. For great information and teacher resources, visit this site.
Quilts and the Underground Railroad
Visit: www.quilthistory.com
Most quilt and historical experts vehemently
deny that quilts were used as a signaling device in the Underground Railroad. (http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews11.shtml)
While a quilt could have been used to signal a safe house, so could any other
common household object. Since most runaways traveled at night, however, it would
not have been wise to tell them or the conductor to look for something like a quilt
with a certain pattern hanging on a line overnight. More likely, escaping
slaves were led or “conducted” by a person familiar with the route and knew the
safe houses.
What do I believe about Map Quilts? Anything’s
possible. I don’t doubt that were certain truths in certain areas. Certainly
blankets and quilts were given to people who had nothing, and these could have
contained messages.
Excerpt:
“Is there no such thing as an Underground
Railroad Quilt, then? Well, this is a trick question. In the late 1800s,
many quilt blocks were named or renamed after political events. These were
blocks such as ‘54-40 or fight’ which referred to the boundary dispute between
the US and Canada in 1846; ‘Burgoyne Surrounded’ which referred to John
Burgoyne’s defeat in the Saratoga
Battlefields; the ‘Lincoln Log Cabin’ named in honor of Abraham Lincoln after
his assignation and the ‘Underground Railroad’ block (also known as ‘Jacob's
Ladder’) which honored the brave conductors and passengers of the Underground
Railroad.”
See also the article, “Deepening Mystery,”
here.
In my research, I
visited the Octagon House in Fort Atkinson and referred to several books,
including:
Freedom
Train North: Stories of the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin, by
Juliea Pferdehirt
Hidden
in Plain View: The Secret Code Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad,
J. Tobin and R. Dobard, PhD, 1998
Stitched
from the Soul, Gladys-Marie Fry, 1989
