Around the age of 11, Andrea Robinson painted these quilt squares in honor of her mother, Mary Ann Hairston, a coal miner. Her grandmother, Anna Mae (Townzy) Hairston Cook, finished the quilt. Mary Ann was one of 35 women hired in December 1973 by Beth-Elkhorn Coal Company in Kentucky, the first corporation to employ women as miners. Mary Ann is believed to be one of the first female and Black female underground coal miners. Her husband died in 1972, leaving her a single mother of eight children facing significant debt. She worked the “hoot-owl shift”—midnight until 8am—as a GI (General Inside), or an unspecialized laborer. In a 1975 magazine article published by The Courier-Journal, she stated, “…things were tight, and I saw that the only way I could get out of debt was to go to work.” The quilt squares depict: a coal car, a coal miner silhouette, a boot, a pair of gloves, a drawing of Mary Ann with the text “Mother of Eight” and the names of her eight children, a piece of coal, a crossed shovel and pickax, a coal bucket, a silhouette of a kneeling miner, a hard hat, and a lunch box. The center rectangle includes a handwritten inscription that reads: “Mother in the Mines / Mary Ann Hairston / Meet a woman who went underground to get her family out of debt / A hoot-owl shift worker with eight children.”