Ceremony for postal stamps honoring Athens quilter
- Classic City News
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Released by Athens community leader Fred Smith Sr.
Athens S&DC Host Stamp Dedication to Celebrate the Works of Quilter
Harriet Powers
What: The U.S. Postal Service will host a stamp dedication ceremony for quiltmaker
Harriet Powers (1837–1910) with four new stamps. Powers was a formerly
enslaved woman born Oct. 29, 1837, on a plantation near Athens, GA. Her stitched
works are celebrated as masterpieces of American folk art and storytelling.
The ceremony for the stamps is free and open to the public.
Speakers: Michael Benevento, Postmaster, USPS
Fred O. Smith, Sr., President, Athens GA Branch of the Association for the Study of
African American Life and History
When: Thursday, May 14, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. EST
Athens S&DC Host Stamp Dedication to Celebrate the Works of Quilter
Harriet Powers
What: The U.S. Postal Service will host a stamp dedication ceremony for quiltmaker
Harriet Powers (1837–1910) with four new stamps. Powers was a formerly
enslaved woman born Oct. 29, 1837, on a plantation near Athens, GA. Her stitched
works are celebrated as masterpieces of American folk art and storytelling.
The ceremony for the stamps is free and open to the public.
Speakers: Michael Benevento, Postmaster, USPS
Fred O. Smith, Sr., President, Athens GA Branch of the Association for the Study of
African American Life and History
When: Thursday, May 14, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. EST
Where:
Athens Sorting & Distribution Center
Media Only - Please RSVP to tiffany.c.rowland@usps.gov no later than May 13
RSVP:
Background: at 5:00 p.m.
It is believed that Powers learned to sew as a child. At 18, she married Armstead
Powers, an enslaved farmhand. They would go on to have nine children. After
emancipation, they bought four acres in nearby Sandy Creek, GA, where they
raised cotton and vegetables.
Along the way, Harriet Powers began creating quilts and completed at least five. Of
the five, it is known that two are referred to as story quilts because each of theirpanels features a pieced, appliquéd, and embroidered scene from a familiar story
drawn from local lore or the Bible.
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 initially turned her
down but sold her the quilt a few years later.
Smith displayed the piece in the Negro Building of the 1895 Cotton States and
International Exposition in Atlanta, and 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, Charles Cuthbert Hall.
The “Pictorial Quilt,”
completed in 1898, remained in the Hall family for 62 years.
Derry Noyes, an art director for USPS, had worked on previous stamps featuring
quilts but never thought of these works of fabric art as canvases for telling stories.
“This is what is extraordinary about Harriet Powers’s quilts,” she said. Noyes chose
details that would hold up well at stamp size and still communicate the stories
Powers was trying to tell and looked for variety and color combinations that worked
well together.
Each of the four stamps in the pane of 20 features a panel selected from Powers’s
“Pictorial Quilt.” Noyes took a novel approach to arranging the panels. “I wanted the
pane to look as if there were more than just four different scenes,” she said. “By
changing the starting order at the beginning of each row I was able to create the
impression of a multitude of scenes.”
Powers’s other existing work, the “Bible Quilt,” now belongs to the Smithsonian
National Museum of American History. The donor shipped it to the museum in 1968
through the U.S. Mail.
The Harriet Powers stamps are being issued as Forever stamps and will always be
equal to the current First-Class Mail 1-ounce price.
Postal Products
Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through the The Postal Store at
usps.com/shopstamps, by calling 844-737-7826, by mail through USA Philatelic or at Post Office locations
nationwide. For officially licensed stamp products, shop the USPS Officially Licensed Collection on
Amazon. Additional information on stamps, first-day-of-issue ceremonies and stamp-inspired products can
be found at stampsforever.com.