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Harriet Powers, First Day of Issue Stamps Dedication ceremony was held on February 28 in Washington, DC at the JW Marriott. The ceremony was co-sponsored by USPS and Association for the Study of African American Life and History  (ASALH).  

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Born October 29, 1837, on a plantation near Athens, Georgia, the future quilter is believed to have learned to sew as a child. At 18, she married Armstead Powers, an enslaved farmhand. Eventually they would have nine children. After Emancipation, they bought four acres nearby in Sandy Creek, Georgia, where they raised cotton and vegetables.

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Along the way, Harriet Powers began creating quilts, and completed at least five. The two we know are referred to as story quilts because each of their panels features a pieced, appliquéd, and embroidered scene from a familiar story drawn from local lore or the Bible.

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In 1886, Powers entered her “Bible Quilt” in a local fair, most likely the second annual Northeast Georgia Fair, in Athens. There, a young white art teacher named Jennie Smith fell in love with it and tried to purchase it. Powers turned her down but ended up selling it to her a few years later. After Smith displayed the quilt in the Negro Building of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, several Atlanta University faculty wives were so impressed they decided to commission a new quilt from Powers as a gift for the vice president of the university board, Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall. The “Pictorial Quilt,” completed in 1898, remained in the Hall family for 62 years.