• Introduction
• The Underground Railroad
• Secret Signals
• The Underground Railroad Quilt Code Patterns
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Secret Signals

This is how the Quilt Code worked as far as we know it:
African American slaves combined common quilt patterns and sewing methods with traditional African symbols and images to make bed quilts that would display messages. The messages themselves were part of a language that held meaning only for people who had somehow learned it from any of a number of teaching methods – in worship services, through storytelling or in secret sessions with elders.

Slaveholding families and white supervisors had no cause to suspect anything unusual about slave women making quilts, either for white families or for themselves. Likewise, it was common practice to hang quilts outdoors during daylight to freshen them in the air, especially during the spring and summer months when most escapes occurred so that slaves could reach Canada before cold weather. The quilts acted as billboards, sending encoded messages to slaves intending to flee as well as to those on the run. Slaves who did not know the code most likely traveled with guides who did.

Most often, the quilts displayed a single design made of several squares of the same pattern. For example, a quilt showing the Monkey Wrench design (also known among quilters as a Square and Compass or Carpenter’s Square) signaled slaves to “prepare the tools” they would need to carry on their escape. Slaves seeing the Monkey Wrench quilt hanging in plain view some spring day would know to get ready to leave, and to collect not only the hardware they would need, but also the mental and spiritual tools to fortify them. The pattern also resembled a ship’s wheel and in coastal areas could carry the message that a black seaman or boat pilot was prepared to transport slaves.

As Ozella Williams told it, the first message in the Quilt Code was “The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bear’s paw trail to the crossroads.” Slaves who knew the code would know this phrasing as well as the four symbols within it: the Monkey Wrench, the Wagon Wheel, the Bear’s Paw and the Crossroads. And each of the four symbols is a quilt square pattern.

After noticing the Monkey Wrench quilt on display, advising them to prepare for the journey, slaves would then look for the Wagon Wheel quilt hanging somewhere, telling them to “load the wagon” or prepare to board a wagon coming to pick them up or simply to go. The Wagon Wheel is a common quilt pattern and appears in many forms, but always as a wheel.
Seeing a Bear’s Paw quilt when setting off or somewhere along the may have told the slaves to follow the trails the bears take in spring and summer – in the South it very likely would have been a route through the Appalachian Mountains. The mountain trails were safer than roads more commonly traveled. Following bear tracks in the woods would not have been especially difficult for people who did not know exactly where they were going. And the animal tracks also could help fugitives find water and food along the way.

As Jacqueline Tobin says, quilts displaying the Code served as road maps on the route to freedom. They flashed visual messages “hidden in plain view.” Along the several routes of the Underground Railroad, enslaved blacks in the South and free blacks in the North knew the Code and hung quilts to report local conditions to the runaways who they knew would be traveling in certain seasons. One message was to seek shelter, another to continue to a church, another to take on a disguise. The well-known five-pointed Star quilt pattern told fugitives to follow the North Star. Even the stitching on the reverse side of a quilt contained a secret road map code, indicating, for example, the number of miles between safe houses along the route.