Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Boykin, AL

Boykin is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Wilcox County, Alabama, far better known by its historic name, Gee's Bend.

The community occupies a large horseshoe bend of the Alabama River that encloses the land on three sides, in the heart of Alabama's Black Belt.

Gee's Bend was named for Joseph Gee, a large landowner from North Carolina who settled there in 1816 and established a cotton plantation.

The plantation later passed to the Pettway family, and many of today's residents descend from the enslaved people and sharecroppers who worked the land; the Pettway surname remains common in the community.

The 2020 census counted 208 residents in Boykin, about 94 percent of them Black or African American, down from 275 residents in 2010.

The Boykin post office was established in 1949 and remains active, serving ZIP code 36723.

During the 1930s the federal Resettlement Administration documented Gee's Bend, bought the old Pettway plantation, and enabled local families to purchase their own farms; photographs by Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott made the isolated community nationally known.

The women of Gee's Bend are world famous for their bold, improvisational quilts, a tradition carried forward by the Freedom Quilting Bee during the civil rights era.

A 2002 exhibition of Gee's Bend quilts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which traveled to the Whitney Museum in New York, hailed the quilts as some of the most miraculous works of art America has produced.

In 2006 the United States Postal Service issued a sheet of ten commemorative stamps bearing images of Gee's Bend quilts.