The UGRR Secret Quilt Code Museum
(Formerly Located in Underground Atlanta)

Welcome ! Bienvenido, Bienvenue, Willkommen, καλώς όρισες , स्वागत, ברוך הבא , Benvenuto, bun venit, Добро пожаловать, مرحبا

Now scheduling for Spring 2012 - June 2015 Exhibits!
To contact us to schedule an exhibition
Click on the Traveling Exhibit Tab to your left to plan your exhibition.

Since we closed the Underground Atlanta Museum location in April 2007, we are working to digitize our collection and make them available to the world. We had 850,000 patrons that signed our guest book from 81 countries an d 42 states! We will be updating the website daily so check back often.

Truly we have a global audience!

Since I closed the museum 2007 (when I had cancer), I have recieved many request to do a on-line gallery so below I added photos from our African & Plantation Galleries.

I added this updated preview page of photos from our African and Plantation Life Museum Galleries so you could see why it is our love and passion. Below are photos from the Latino, Irish and other festivals held at Underground Atlanta. We love to celebrate!

Did you know in Africa, tree bark was and can be used as fabric? This tree bark map (above) of slave routes in Zabia South Africa was donated to the museum by the Handicraft Association of Zambia & Joseph Kosa.

Any available fabrics were used to make quilts including tree bark, cotton that was picked, tobacco sacks, feed sacks, scraps of old clothes passed down from their masters and wool or cotton fabrics slaves would weave. Quilting and weaving houses on large low-country plantations (500 to 1,000 slaves) sometimes ran 24 hours a day to meet the demands. These quilts also tell stories.

There are examples of quilts that were made with silks and velvets from that era also.

Below is one of my grandmother's Mary Eva McDaniel-Strother's crazy quilts. This is called a Crazy Quilts since there are many pieces randomly hand-sew together but you may noticed that there are distinct blocks that are then pieced into strips then assembled in strips. (Organized the same way the West African tribes of her great grandparents assembled their textiles.)

Below is one of the 80 textiles we had on display in the UGRR Secret Quilt Code Museum. This crazy quilt is made by my aunt Viola. We displayed 8 generations of my families quilts, photos and artifacts in the 5,000 sq. ft. museum facility.

African men, women and children have quilted for centuries.

Pictured below is a photo of a Flying Geese Quilted horses garment and other coverings used at African festivals and for war. The Zambian solid wood carving shows many musical instruments were used to celebrate one of the South African village's annual festivals. Zambian tribes of South Africa were primarily hunter-gathers and had slaves for agricultual purposes. They were also taken and sold into American slavery. At the museum, we also exhibit West African instuments also.

Featured in this photo below is the brown, black and white Mud Cloth Strip quilt top
made by the Dogon tribe from Mali, West Africa. It is part of the permanemt collections of the UGRR Secret Quilt Code Museum's African Gallery. 

Here is a link to the National Geographic Web page so you can find out more information on the Dogon culture. This ancient people performed math, astronomy, as well as, strip quilting on mud cloth. There are examples of quilting back to early Egyptian civilizations. Intricate pre-civil war handwork pieces of quilted textiles have survived on every continent in the world.

We showed people around the globe with quilts.
Quilting was not done first in Civil War Era America!

GALLERY ACTIVITIES AT THE QUILT MUSEUM

The school group pictured below is doing geometric piecing of shapes for the math activity, just one of the gallery craft activities during their tour.

Group science activities, tie dye, Ghana's Adinkra stamp, doll making, arts & crafts activity photos of the UGRR Quilt Museum patrons are shown below.We also offered quilting, fabric stamping, preservation, grant writing and american folk art classes for patrons of the museum.

Doll Making Classes were for ages 8 and up our senior groups loved this activity, many had never owned a doll! Ages 7 and under did paper dolls (many teens and adults wanted to participate also).

Below are photos of Dr. Maddy's (from the Republic of Sierra Leone) tie dye workshop pictured are some of the students and their work!

Adrinkra Stamp Activities 

Students were taught the symbolic language and use of the West African Ghanaian Adinkra symbols and their meanings.

 DWENNIMMEN "ram's horns" symbol of humility together with strength
The ram will fight fiercely against an adversary, but it also submits humbly to slaughter, emphasizing that even the strong need to be humble.

Where can I see the UGRR Secret Quilt Code Exhibit?

January 23rd to Feb.20th, 2012 Concord University in Athens, WV in the Alexander Art Gallery.

Feb 21st to March 2nd, 2012 Bluefield State College, Bluefield WV

Feb 29th, 2012 Atlanta Fulton County Library Atlanta, GA 2:00 pm Basement Alcove

March 8-10th, 2012 Gwinnett Civic Center (Metro Atlanta, GA) at the Quilt & Sew Expo daily 10:00am to 6:00 pm

March 13th, 2012 at the College Park Library in College Park,  GA 11:00 am Youth Program

 June 28th to 30th, 2012CMD Quilt Show in Sharonville OH (Cincinnati area), 

On-going Booker T. Washington's boyhood home and church properties in Malden, WV near Charleston and we have a small UGRR Quilt Code exhibit there.

WVSU Foundation, Inc. 200 Erickson Alumni Center,
P.O. Box 1000 Institute, WV 25112

For more information Phone: (304) 766-3130 toll free 1-800-987-2112 or
e-mail rakescm@wvstateu.edu 

 We love Festivals! Here are some photos from the Latino Festival.

Participants wrote about abolishionist and slavery in their countries across the globe in our journals they signed.

 The Irish Festival

Many museum guest did not know Irish people were also slaves here in the Americas and Europe in 1800's and before.

Not indentured, many were auctioned, families separated, slaves for life and often worked to death! Over 850,000 visitors signed our Museum guest book and visited our exhibits on world wide slavery.

Though I do not agree with everything on these links, they do have some good information and the main point is to get you to discover the beauty of other view points and research cultures of the world also.

http://www.revisionisthistory.org/forgottenslaves.html

An excert from

"The Proclamation of 1625 ordered that Irish political prisoners be transported overseas and sold as laborers to English planters, who were settling the islands of the West Indies, officially establishing a policy that was to continue for two centuries.

In 1629, a large group of Irish men and women were sent to Guiana and by 1632, Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat in the West Indies.

By 1637, a census showed that 69% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves, which records show was a cause of concern to the English planters. But there were not enough political prisoners to supply the demand, so every petty infraction carried a sentence of transporting and slaver gangs combed the countrysides to kidnap enough people to fill out their quotas."

Although African Negroes were better suited to work in the semi-tropical climates of the Caribbean, they had to be purchased, while the Irish were free for the catching, so to speak. It is not surprising that Ireland became the biggest source of livestock for the English slave trade.