Let’s talk about the Underground Railroad and quilts. This lovely quilt, based on the Log Cabin pattern, is actually a coded symbol to slaves on the run. It would have hung on a clothesline of a safe house. The traditional log cabin pattern, which emerged in the 1830s, featured a red square at the center…
Above: Delores St. Armand as Harriet Tubman at 1978 National Portrait Gallery exhibit “Portraits in Motion.” Map courtesy Seaford Museum. Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) made no less than 19 trips to the south between 1850 and 1860, freeing 300 slaves during that fruitful decade. None were ever recaptured. Between 1852 and 1857 Tubman…
Solomon Bayley, newly on the run, woke in terror to see two slave hunters walking straight toward the thicket where he’d spent the night. “I was struck with dread,” he wrote in his autobiography, “afraid to move hand or foot. I sat there and looked right at them; and thought I, here they come right…
