A highly decorative hand-embroidered tapestry, or sampler, on display at Baltimore’s St. James Episcopal Church

Credit: Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University

Threads of history

African American artifacts from antebellum Baltimore are extremely rare. Bringing this tapestry back to Baltimore for the 200th jubilee of the city's St. James Episcopal Church was a multiyear undertaking led by JHU Professor Lawrence Jackson. The sampler—a handsewn gift from the founder of the first Black Episcopal church below the Mason-Dixon Line to the lawyer who donated the land—"could be the earliest or the oldest artifact that we know about," Jackson says. Its loan was coordinated through Inheritance Baltimore, a 3-year-old Hopkins program charged with "using the humanities to transform the relationship between Johns Hopkins University and Black Baltimore."

Read more about this historical artifact.

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