When Aisha Lumumba signed on in 2019 to create a quilt to celebrate Stockbridge’s 100th birthday, she didn’t expect it to be a four-year project.
At the time, Lumumba, whose art has been exhibited at galleries and festivals across the nation, was getting help from local Henry County volunteers to put the 130-piece, roughly 90-inch by 120-inch quilt together. They were meeting monthly and used the time to reminisce about growing up in the community and how much it has changed in recent years.
Then production was put on hold when the pandemic hit in April 2020.
“We had not gotten very far along as a matter of fact,” said Lumumba, owner of Atlanta-based O.B.A. Quilts. “We had a nice crew of people volunteering. We had all the fabric and we had started cutting. That was where we left off when we packed up that day.”
Flash forward to 2023, the quilt was finally finished in May and stands as a testament to never giving up, even when best made plans falter, Stockbridge leaders say. The pandemic’s disruption of the project may have delayed it for years, but it did not force the city to abandon it.
“We thought of this as a time capsule because it was intended to be a celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the city’s incorporation,” said Lisa Fareed, Main Street Stockbridge program coordinator. She added that one of the most pleasing aspects of the project is that it was embraced by residents of different religions, races and socio-economic backgrounds.
Credit: LISA FAREED/CITY OF STOCKBRIDGE
Credit: LISA FAREED/CITY OF STOCKBRIDGE
“This quilt represented the evolution of Stockbridge,” she said. “One hundred years ago, most of these people wouldn’t have sat in the same room together or wanted their names on the same quilt. But people were very eager to get their names on it. People from all over the community wanted to somehow have input.”
The quilt, which travels to different spots throughout Stockbridge for display, is designed in a kaleidoscope pattern, with stars unfolding from the center outward in vivid teals, marigolds and reds. Patches of blue, polka dots, stripes and gray florals are thrown in to add visual texture.
Stitched into each star is a variety of names — more than 300 — including deceased residents, newborns, businesses and community leaders.
Lucrecia Fernandez, born in 1989, donated a piece of her pink, green and red baby blanket for the quilt, while downtown Stockbridge home furnishings business Barn Beautiful, which harvests wood from old barns, is immortalized in one of the artwork’s few square pieces.
“This is a piece of the denim that the carpenter wore,” Fareed said pointing to the blue denim Barn Beautiful patch that represents the business founded by Greg Horton. “Earlier this year he passed away in an accident, so we’re glad that we have that on there.”
Carrie Mae Hambrick’s name is emblazoned on a teal star near the quilt’s center. For more than 50 years, Hambrick operated the Green Front Cafe, the place where Stockbridge’s black community went to catch up with old friends from school when they came back to town after moving away.
Christine Banks, whose family tree is represented both by the Banks family — into which she married — and her birth family, the Lemons, said the quilt memorializes residents whose roots go back to when Henry County wasn’t a suburban community of Atlanta, but a distant rural community. At that time, much of Stockbridge was still unpaved.
“When we moved here in the ‘50s, we had dirt roads,” Banks said. “We didn’t have street names, we had routes.”
Lumumba said she returned to working on the quilt solo in 2022, putting in eight-hour days to finish it by early 2023. It was grueling work she said, especially as Lumumba — whose work has been collected by former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young — was working on other commissioned pieces as well as her own exhibits.
“The pattern calls for a certain number of colors, and we had a lot of fabric that people brought that belonged to them,” Lumumba said. “I had to try to have a consistent pattern and then a patchwork pattern with lots of colors. It was a lot to think about, to calculate and to put together.”
Alcelia Y. Scott-Ford, the wife of Mayor Anthony Ford, pitched in also by embroidering the names to each star.
The delay did have at least one positive aspect: It gave Cheryl Baugh purpose at a time when she was in crisis. Baugh had been recruited to crochet a quilt that would be mounted on the back of the main piece to make it double-sided. Baugh’s creation was a large steam train that commemorated the city’s railroad heritage.
Baugh, however, lost her job and her home after the pandemic started. She looked for new employment and housing for more than a year with no luck and ended up working on the quilt while living in her car.
She said working on the quilt gave her a chance to focus on the project instead of her travails.
“It seemed like the odds were insurmountable,” Baugh said of her situation at the time, but she has since found a home.
“I couldn’t control any of it,” she said. “And the only thing I could control was one stitch at a time as I crocheted that train. My goal was to finish and not keep them waiting.”
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