Quilts of Gee's Bend

Gee's Bend (officially called Boykin) is an isolated, rural community of about seven hundred residents, southwest of Selma, in the Black Belt of Alabama.

The area is named after Joseph Gee, a planter from North Carolina who acquired 6,000 acres of land and established a cotton plantation in 1816 with seventeen enslaved people.

[3] The following year, Pettway relocated to Gee's Bend, transporting his family and furnishings in a wagon train while 100 enslaved men, women, and children were forced to walk on foot from North Carolina to their new life in Alabama.

When his estate foreclosed on their debts and raided Gee's Bend for anything of value, including livestock, farm equipment, and stored food, the impoverished community was driven into complete destitution.

[8] In March 1966, more than 60 quiltmakers from Gee's Bend, Alberta, and surrounding communities met in Camden's Antioch Baptist Church to found the Freedom Quilting Bee.

In August 2006, the United States Postal Service released a sheet of ten stamps commemorating Gee's Bend quilts sewn between c.1940 and 1998 as part of the American Treasures series.

[10] In 2007, two Gee's Bend quiltmakers, Annie Mae Young and Loretta Pettway, filed lawsuits alleging that curator and art collector William Arnett cheated them out of thousands of dollars from the sales of their quilts.

[14] Throughout the post-bellum years until the middle of the twentieth century, Gee's Bend women made quilts primarily to keep themselves and their families warm in unheated houses that lacked running water, telephones and electricity.

[3] Due to the scarcity of resources, the majority of early twentieth-century quilts were made out of old work-clothes and other used materials such as fertilizer and flour sacks.