Events and Activities : We Meant to do that CP Log Cabin Fest The Underground RR Quilt Code Myth 8/28

It's not that the Center Point Historical Society believes the Underground Railroad quilt code myth like gospel or wants to promote historical untruths at its Aug. 28 annual Log Cabin Festival. But the excuse for a quilt display was just too good to pass up.

The theme for the Sunday, Aug. 28, 2-4, free Log Cabin Festival at the Depot Museum is the Underground Railroad which helped enslaved people escape to freedom in the North and Canada before the Civil War.

Jenny Barnett, of the African American Museum of Iowa, will give a presentation on the Underground Railroad at 2 in the Depot Museum. A traveling exhibit on "The Underground Railroad in Iowa" will be on view. (The exhibit can be seen at the Andersen Center Point Public Library all this month preceding the Cabin Festival.)

The 1850s Strait Log Cabin will be open, standing in for "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the title of the 1851 book by Harriet Beecher Stowe that promoted the anti-slavery movement. There will be a quilt display in the Museum, overflowing to the cabin if the weather allows.

The quilt display will include a look at the Underground Railroad Quilt Code, "a thing" loved by quilters and non-quilters, Blacks and non-Blacks, for about the last 25 years. The idea gathered steam with the 1999 book "Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad." Most historians think the book went a little off the rails, but who can resist the idea that enslaved people had escape plans showing right out in the open under their enslavers' noses?

For more information on the Cabin Festival, call 319-721-6948.