Family Heirloom of St. Andrew's Student Part of Exhibit in New Museum

A handmade skirt that once belonged to the ancestor of a St. Andrew’s freshman is one of the artifacts that will be on display when the National Museum of African American History and Culture opens this weekend.
The skirt, a linen and cotton blend decorated with small flowers, is believed to have been worn by Lucy Lee Shirley, an enslaved African American girl born in Leesburg, Va. in 1854. Shirley is the great-great-great-grandmother to Edward (E.J.) Douglass, ’13, and Ella Douglass, ’20.

“You go to museums and you see something that belonged to that person, but to go to a museum and say, ‘This belonged to someone in my family”—that’s pretty amazing,” Ella Douglass said.

The journey of the skirt from its acquisition by the Black Fashion Museum to its installation at the new Smithsonian Institution museum is chronicled in the September 18 edition of the Washington Post Magazine.

The Douglass family is featured in an accompanying article that explores the life of Shirley, who writer Elizabeth Chang found to be a woman of “obvious grit” that ascended from being enslaved as a child to being able to leave her children $1,650—more than $23,000 in today’s money—when she died in 1929.

Ella Douglass said she only found out about the skirt’s existence in August. Before that she hadn’t heard about Shirley, but said she is now looking forward to learning more about her and the skirt during Thanksgiving break, when she and her extended family plan to visit the exhibit.
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St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.