User:Historygirl67/Draft Nedra

Nedra Bonds is a Kansas City quilting artist. Some of her work has to do with slavery pre-civil war, time period and civil rights. Her recent work has to do with Cancer."I grew up near Quindaro, an abandoned settlement on the outskirts of Kansas City. In the 1850s, Quindaro sat on the brink of Kansas Territory, and just across the river lay Missouri, a slave state. According to oral tradition, the township became an important staging post in the Underground Railroad - the network of routes that black people used to escape slavery - and the runaways hid with farmers in Kansas before escaping to Nebraska and freedom. Quindaro was abandoned during the civil war, and it never properly recovered. Then in the 1980s the authorities in Kansas City thought it would be a good idea to put a sanitary landfill dump on the site. I was one of a group of people who decided that we couldn't let that happen.""I don't really know why I chose to make a quilt as part of this campaign, which went on for eight years. Perhaps it was because there was no visual record of the railroad. Also, I had it in mind that a quilt might be a good way to engage the kids at Quindaro school with their history.""So I created this quilt that showed the history of Quindaro, starting with a picture of John Stuart, the minister who preached to the Wyandot Indians who later settled the area, and turned some of them into abolitionists.." 