Mary Ross is from Canton but she’s happy to see progress being made on a quilt museum in Carrollton.

Ross was one of several quilting enthusiasts who traveled to Carrollton earlier this month to celebrate quilting culture and promote the future Southeastern Quilt and Textile Museum. The convention, which was hosted by the West Georgia Quilters Guild, was held here Oct. 9-10 to build excitement about the planned museum.

“Being in Carrollton was so wonderful, we were hanging on every word,” said Ross. “Our tongues were hanging out listening to all this information.”

Ross has been involved from the beginning, starting with the Georgia Quilt Project in 1991. The project found more than 10,000 quilts in 76 locations across Georgia in an effort to document Georgia’s quilting culture as thoroughly as possible.

“I think they did a wonderful job,” said Sue Hardin, a past president of the Georgia Quilt Council and member of the West Georgia Quilters Guild.

There is currently no quilting museum south of Paducah, Ky., and Carrollton is centrally located to serve Georgia and the surrounding states. Since the bulk of the nation’s quilting museums are in the north, Carrollton’s museum will focus primarily on quilts from the Southeast, although curators will also display traveling exhibits from other regions.

This month’s convention raised nearly $1,000 for the museum at a silent auction, and garnered commitments from prominent community members and small business owners.

Doug Mabry, unofficial Carroll County historian, took a group of 30 to 40 women on a tour of the museum’s future home at a former warehouse on Bradley Street and challenged members to participate in the “Southern Quilt Trail,” which is growing in popularity. The Trail is to be a quilting facsimile of the popular “See Rock City” campaign. Participants paint plywood squares with quilting patterns and post them on historic buildings throughout Georgia.

Mabry recently completed an economic impact study which found that nearly 40,000 museum visitors per year will pump an additional $20 million into the Carrollton economy.

“These ladies spend about $1,000 for each trip when they go to these workshops at other museums,” said Mabry. “With 27 million quilters across the country, the demographics will certainly be a benefit.”

He is now working on finalizing a floor plan, which he will bring before the Carroll County Board of Commissioners for approval.

Kimber Pepper, president of the West Georgia Quilters Guild, said the convention succeeded in its goal of raising awareness about the museum.

“We raised understanding that this museum is going to be an effort not just by Carroll County, it’s going to require everybody’s assistance,” said Pepper.

As part of that group effort, Pepper said, many West Georgia residents have already offered to donate family heirlooms in the form of old textile equipment or valuable quilts to the future museum.

“What I’ve been experiencing is people saying ‘my grandmother has this old quilt or this old frame,’ or ‘I’ve got these scales that they used to weigh the cotton,’” said Pepper. “They want to see their family treasures in the museum.”

Pepper sees the museum as an opportunity not only to exhibit important quilts and educate the community, but also as a way to protect a part of Georgia history.

“It’s more than education, it’s protecting, it’s providing a home. If you have a collection where the family has died off and they’re these extraordinary quilts, the museum is there to provide that protection and provide that home,” said Pepper.

Although excitement around the museum has been building to a fever’s pitch, progress has slowed somewhat following the convention.

“I really don’t know what the next step is,” said Pepper. “We actually start a new year in January in the guild with new officers. We will have new goals next year.”

Beverly Hammack, chairwoman of The Friends of the Southeastern Quilt and Textile Museum, is optimistic about feedback garnered from the convention but is unsure what will happen next.

“We’re still very infant in this, we’ve only had two meetings, we’ll have another one fairly soon, but I’m not sure when we’ll have that one yet,” said Hammack. “We’ll have to meet again and see if we can go from where we are.”

Marilyn Osterkamp, chairwoman of the museum’s board of directors, says the next big step is incorporation of the museum as an entity and filling out the necessary paperwork to get 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. She plans to work with Mabry and Carroll County Commission Chairman Bill Chappell to get things moving again.

“The county is willing to work at developing the building,” said Osterkamp. “We’re kind of in that interim space as far as setting things up.”

At present, Osterkamp jokingly refers to her spare bedroom as “the museum,” due to the number of quilts that have already been donated, so she’s more focused on setting up an organizational structure to support future plans.

“The quilts will come, that’ll be no problem. We’re trying to put a timetable together as far as the physical part, as well as the governance part,” said Osterkamp. “We need to talk about operations, applying for operation dollars, and there are several organizations that will be open to grants.”

Recently, Osterkamp formed the Southeast Quilt and Textile Museum as a separate entity from the Georgia Quilt Council.

“It is now an entity. The museum will be an employer and the council doesn’t want to do that kind of thing, they don’t want to be an employer and deal with taxes and such,” said Osterkamp.

Besides dealing with tax and legal questions, the issue of how to proceed on the building itself remains to be resolved.

“We’re working with Doug [Mabry] and the architects, and we’ll get this building in place,” said Osterkamp.

One advantage for which she’s grateful is the building itself. The former cotton warehouse on Bradley Street has no furnishings or extraneous walls that need to be removed, so museum planners can focus on their own needs and won’t be bound by the previous owner’s design, as is often the case.

“Our vision is there will be a main entrance area, there will be a quilt store, we want to have a couple of galleries, we will need a quilt safe hiding in there someplace, and we will need classrooms that can be used by outside groups,” said Osterkamp. “Because we can build from scratch, we can build them wherever we want.”

She plans to make the classrooms and meeting rooms available to the community, and wants the museum to be a model of environmentally-conscious design and operation.

Mabry and Osterkamp will consider options like installing a rainwater collection system or covering the large roof with solar panels, which could attract grant writers and federal stimulus funding. But they have to hurry.

“There’s a time limit on this stimulus money, so if it’s out there we better get it,” said Mabry.