Although I am a "mature" woman, I vividly remember giving birth (x5!). Getting the catalogue for our coming exhibition out the door to the printer, a goal still not yet achieved, is turning out to be a very similar experience, only far more protracted. Every time I *think* everything is pretty much set to go, there's another fly in the ointment...

Here are a few of the things that have been involved, and several of the pitfalls. The first thing--which goes back to a beginning, a couple of years ago--was locating and deciding on the samplers that would be included in the exhibit (and catalogue). My goal, however lofty, was to try to track down as many examples as possible of needlework styles from all across the state of Maine, but ones that were disctinctive enough to constitute separate bodies of work from particular teachers or academies. A high percentage of basic marking samplers just don't make that cut. They are lovely, but lack the ornamental elements that make a group distinctive. Not surprisingly, even when I found unique works that would help define groups, the owners were not always willing to loan. That has proven to be one of the most major of pitfalls. I had, for example, through the kindness of the collector, located a substantial group of first rate Maine pieces, several of which seemed to me to be of critical importance to the exhibit, if we were to meet the goal. In the end, the collector decided not to loan them. Ouch.

The second thing involved was to get good photographs of the works that would be in the catalogue. Prior to beginning this eneterprise, I had heard of dpi, but it meant little or nothing to me. Now it haunts my nightmares. The photos HAVE to be 300 dpi, (dots per inch) or they will look like murky messes on the printed page. Collecting the photos turned out to be another difficult problem. I needed them in order to get the pages set up. Sometimes it was very near impossible to get the photos in a timely fashion. I, in my innocence and--greater issue--ignorance, believed that I should set a goal of getting either the needlework here so we could have the photographs taken OR the photographs taken by the owners and sent to me, by mid-November. Stupid. These were two entirely different aspects of the project and the timeframe for them should also have been different. It would have been far wiser to aim for getting the photos of samplers owned by institutions last summer; then if there were delays, as there almost always are, I would have had plenty of time.

A secondary photography issue was that I wanted to include the photos of those wonderous pieces that were not going to be loaned, which I had taken photos of last winter=for research purposes--never intending them to be included in a catalogue. Those samplers ought to have been rephotographed by a professional, but a combination of factors eventually made that impossible. Worrying over that whole issue was really awful and it ending up coming down to the wire, making final formatting impossible until very late in the game.

The third thing was the writing. I write a lot. I like to write. I loved doing the research for the 125 or so bios of the sampler makers and perhaps another 20 or 30 of their teachers. In fact, now that all of the research is done, I'm experiencing some sad kind of withdrawal pains. But all of that took an enormous amount of time, and sadly, right in the midst of it, two key staff members left. That meant that a) they were no longer here to help with the bio research, b) time had to be spent finding replacement people, and c) I and one other remaining museum staff person had to try to do their work, in addition to our own.

Writing, Part B, involved that nasty business of editing, for which I confess to having only an average eye, or ability. As the issues, above, mounted, I found it harder and harder to sleep at night. Partly it was because I was working very late many nights; if I wasn't working late, I was fretting late (almost as much fun, right?) The less sleep I got, the worse I became at spotting the missing commas. One of the former staff people very kindly donated her time to edit the thing--no small feat--and sent all of her changes, neatly encapsulated within that Track Changes feature of Word. I think, somehow, that in accepting the changes, I "lost" a LOT of them, and then, unknowingly sent it back off to the designer still really needing an edit. That meant, when it came back again, for a final quick loo(!), it was still in need of a lot of attention.

I have signed a contract with virtualbookworm.com Publishing, who are very nice to work with so far, and the only on-demand publisher I could find that used 60 lb. paper, but I still don't have a book in their hands to print and the exhibit is really only a bit more than a month away right now. Egads! In a couple of days,when the manuscript is finally off to them--I HOPE!--I will write again about new sampler discoveries, which is a lot more fun for readers than my whining.

More than a month has gone by since my last post. This is a reflection of just how busy I have been preparing for the coming exhibit, rather than a show of a lack of interest. It's amazing how many "moving parts" all have to come together to get about 115 pieces of needlework here from all over the country, get bios written for all those embroiderers and for as many of their teachers as I can identify, AND make arrangements for the photography that has to happen for the publication. Another time-consuming element has been shopping between various on-demand publishers, trying to identify the best deal, and now, the final editing of all the publication materials. I did discover that, while the publication will be available for purchase on Amazon.com., it will be much more financially satisfactory (read that as we will make more money) if we can primarily sell them on-site. Amazon is an expensive but highly necessary piece to selling our publication.  But any profits from the book are going to help us defray the costs of the exhibit. I didn't expect such a large difference between Amazon sales and gift shop sales.

Since last I wrote, I have had the opportunity to visit and borrow needlework from the Pejepscot Historical Society in Brunswick, Maine and the Lincoln County Historical Society in Wiscasset, Maine, both coastal communities "downeast" of Portland. I knew I was borrowing from Pejepscot a sampler that was made, (according to the very early label on the back written by the sampler maker's daughter,) at Miss Hall's Infant School in Portland. Tracking down Miss Hall has so far eluded me. There was Martha Hall that appeared on the 1830 census as a head of household in Portland. A clue? Maybe, or maybe not. There were several male Hall heads of household in Portland that year, as well, and Miss Hall may have been the daughter of any of them.

But I came away from the Pejepscot's museum with a fabulous (totally unexpected!) example stitched by Frances Niles, probably made in Topsham, Maine. She had to add her name and verse sideways when she ran out of room on her meticulously stitched sampler. Or maybe she planned it that way all along? It doesn't match with any others I've seen so far. For another (unrelated) example of sideways stitching, see below.

Another recent and exciting discovery is of a sampler owned by Strawbery Banke, and being loaned for the exhibit. We were already borrowing a sampler owned by the Wells Public Library, which was the only one of its style I had seen. It turns out that there is ample evidence that the Strawbery Banke piece was stitched under the instruction of the same teacher.



The upper one is from the Wells Public Library. Take a look at the alphabets on both and the use of the black narrow border seen at the bottom of the upper sampler and throughout the second one. They are both spectacular and document an issue (question?) that I have previously reffered to when discussing Portland samplers. How similar do two peices have to be to attribute them to the same school? In Portland, that is a complicated question because there were many teachers with very closely related styles. Wells is a much smaller place; to date I have found no advertisements for female academies there, but these two works have enough features in common to make it highly likely that the same still-anonymous instructor taught both girls.

The most important thing to come to light in the last month, however, was that we were notified by the Coby Foundation, Ltd., of New York City that we would be receiving a grant of $18,000 in support of the exhibit and publication. That piece of news made me cry. The Saco Museum is not a large place. Between the Dyer Library and Saco Museum--both run by the non-profit Dyer Library Association--we have a staff of twenty. Most of those work at the library. The museum has only two full-time staff members. This exhibit would have gone forward, no matter whether we received any grant to support for it or not, but having the backing of the prestigious Coby Foundation not only seems like recognition for the hard, in depth work we are doing, but also means that we can do a better job.

Here is what the Coby Foundation says about itself on the website:

The Coby Foundation, Ltd., located in New York City, funds projects in the textile and needle arts field. Its funding is limited to non-profit organizations in the Mid-Atlantic and New England.

The Coby Foundation was established in 1994 by Irene Zambelli Silverman in honor of her mother, Irene Meladakis Zambelli. Mrs. Silverman described her mother as "the finest needlewoman in New York."

The majority of the Coby Foundation's support goes to exhibitions and education programs that combine excellent scholarship and effective interpretation. Projects may be in the arts or humanities, contemporary or historical, but all must have a public benefit. Such projects may include research and documentation, conservation, publication and Web projects. The Foundation supports only the direct costs of projects.

 

We are very grateful to Lynne Anderson for telling us about the foundation's work. We are thrilled to receive a grant from the Coby Foundation.

With some helpful advice and sampler searching from Lynne Anderson, the head of the Sampler Consortium project—more about that in a bit—I have put together another small group of related samplers, this time from well up the state of Maine, and inland.

 As you are surely aware, Maine is a very large state—at least by our paltry New England standards. While the female academies along the coast were apparently the most prolific—and have consequently captured most of the glory for Maine Federal era schoolgirl needlework—there were smaller, energetic and thriving schools scattered all across the state. These schools are often very hard to discover for several reasons, the first of which I just named. They were often very small: one teacher, a scattering of students, perhaps over the course of several years, and most critically for researchers, a lack of local newspapers in smaller, rural towns make it impossible to find the teachers through advertising, often our very best tool of discovery. These women quite frequently “flew under the radar,” not appearing in local history books, not managing to pop up on the census records since they often were not heads of households (and individuals except heads of households were not named on a federal census until 1850), and not having a place to advertise without local newspapers.

 So how do we find them? Generally, that involves a good deal of luck. Sometimes, they were named on samplers—the very best type of luck for researchers since all at once we acquire a teacher’s name, a pupil connected with her school and (presumably) a typical work. Less commonly, teachers are discovered through diaries, invoices, letters, mentions in local history or family genealogical books, or from advertisements in more distant newspapers.

 For the new “small group of related samplers” I mentioned above, the information source that led to the discovery was a book called, Mothers in Maine, which was published in 1895 and features the florid prose that was typical of the era.  In the chapter on educators, the author mentioned Miss Catharine Lyman who “taught a young ladies’ school for several years in Norridgewock, soon after Maine became a state, in 1820. She was a native of Northfield, Massachusetts. She married Rev. Thomas Adams of Vassalboro, and continued her teaching for a few years.” I will be including an 1820 Norridgewock sampler in the exhibit that we are borrowing from Historic New England. Given the size of Norridgewock, (small!), I think this work could likely be attributed to her.

 In a conversation with Lynne Anderson, she reminded me that awhile back she had sent me  photos of two samplers in a private collection she discovered that were made in Norridgewock in 1818 and 1820 by Hadassah Thompson. Here they are:

 

 

 

I did a little more research on Catharine Lyman and found that she was the daughter of Caleb Lyman and Catharine Swan of Northbridge, Massachusetts, (near Interstate 91 in western Massachusetts, not far from the Vermont border) born March 19, 1797. According to Mothers of Maine she came to Norridgewock around 1820 and opened a school there that she operated for several years. She may have moved to that area because her uncle, William Lyman, had relocated there more than ten years before. On August 16, 1829 she married Reverend Thomas Adams; he had been married previously to her first cousin who had died three years earlier. They lived in Vassalboro where she continued to teach for several more years. While being married to a minister involved frequent moving, to as far away as Ohio, by about 1860 the Adams had returned to Maine. For the last several years of her life, Catharine was confined to the Augusta Lunatic Asylum, suffering from a mental illness that she was said to have inherited from her grandfather. She was the mother of two sons. She authored at least eight religiously oriented books. She died in the asylum November 28, 1870.

I said that there is a group of related pieces, so here are the rest. The first made by Elizabeth Freeman in Norridgewock in 1820, is owned by Historic New England and is being loaned for the exhibit.

 

 

 

This one is owned by Maine State Museum, was made by Susan Crosby in Norridgewock in 1822, and sadly, can’t be loaned as it has recently been exhibited quite a lot. My version of this one is very poor. Try visiting the Maine State Museum website for a better image. www.mainestatemuseum.com

 

 

This one is owned by a private collector, was made by Lydia Cartland in Vassalboro in 1833, where Lyman moved to and resumed teaching, and will be included in the exhibit, as well.

While none of these are nearly identical to each other as some of the other sampler groups I’ve shown you are, there are common features that some share, with enough overlap to make a group attribution. Note the interesting deeply arcaded border that some of them have. That is a common stylistic element of Essex County, Massachusetts samplers. I’d love to say that Lyman had her schooling in Essex County, but Northbridge, her home, is not in or near Essex County. However, for what it’s worth, many of her immediate ancestors were from northeastern Massachusetts so she may have been exposed to that influence.

And remember how I mentioned the Sampler Consortium? That is a grant funded project to discover and thoroughly document American samplers, their makers and the teachers behind those wonderful works.

More About the Mystery...
I just had a nice email today back from Laura Fecych Sprague who must be the expert on the Misses Martins' School for Young Ladies, which was surely regarded as the premier school for young women in Portland in the Federal era. My primary question to her was regarding the list of students that attended the school. As I have previously mentioned, the list is "believed to be incomplete"; the issue for me is how incomplete? While she noted that even the omission of 10% of the girls would result in more than 50 missing names, she agreed that finding fully 15 samplers made by girls whose names don't match up with the list is certainly beginning to constitute good evicence that the samplers did not originate there.

The other question that we have exchanged emails on is whether or not samplers (not just these, but any samplers) were even made at Misses Martins. Again, considering the vast number of known students and the near total failure to date in my research of discovering a body of sampler work associated with the school, that is beginning to look rather like a likelihood.

That raises an inteersting idea.  How many times have I said that??? Might Portland girls have attended smaller, less famous schools initially to acquire the simpler skills a well-turned-out young woman ought to possess--plain sewing, marking skills, introductory academics--and then gone on to Misses Martins (money permitting) to learn the higher level arts: painting (which we know was done there,) the fancier embroidery of mourning pieces, perhaps elaborate calligraphy, and more advanced academic work? If so, that would tend to imply that the average age for Misses Martins' students would be a little older than for the other academies? Certainly, the 15 related samplers I have identified, the average age is not particularly young: they run from ten to eighteen but are concentrated in the eleven to thirteen-year-old range.

For an eighteen-year-old (one of the earliest dates of creation, also) this school must surely have been the last she attended. For the others, further education would have been a real possibility, especially taking into consideration that the length of time a girl attended a school was quite often just a year or less. I must begin to wonder how much "cross-pollination" was going on. How often did girls attend more than one Portland academy? Or sisters attend different academies? I don't think that we can draw easy conclusions that since a particular work by one girl is documented to a certain school, that not especially similar works by her sisters can therefore also be attributed to the same school.

Portland, by today's standards, was only a large town in the Federal era, not a thriving metropolis. Parents would have had familiarity with all the schools, all the teachers and with the daughters of friends and connections who had been pupils in a variety of places. Even given a loyalty factor, it's probably safe to assume quite a lot of switching around!

  A Mystery Solved?

For many months, I’ve been operating under the working hypothesis that Mrs. Rachel Hall Neal and her daughter, Rachel Neal were the instructors for the largest group of samplers that I have identified. (I have blogged on this topic before so I’m sorry to be dwelling on it again, but new information has arisen.)

The primary reason for identifying these two ladies as the source for this iconic group of Portland samplers is that the dates when the samplers were made stretch from 1804 through at least 1820. That range of years automatically eliminates most of the potential Portland schools. The very well-recognized and well-documented Misses Martins’ school would fit and so do the Neals. No other known school works. One of the Misses Martins very helpfully published a list of pupils of their school. The list is “known to be incomplete” but no one is quite sure how incomplete it might be. Up until now, none of the samplers I’ve identified as being in the group was made by a girl who is on the list, which appeared to me to make it very likely that they were NOT the source.

That all changed late last week when I realized that a thumbnail photo of a sampler that I had received from Stephen and Carol Huber was one of the group and that the maker’s name appeared to be on the Misses Martins’ list. The problem was, I couldn’t read the date on the sampler—given that it was a tiny picture. The maker was Eliza Clapp. Appearing on the Misses Martins’ list are the three sisters, Betsey, Frances and Mary Clapp who were the daughters of wealthy Portland merchant and mariner Asa Clapp. It seemed very probable that Betsey and Eliza were one and the same. Betsey (Elizabeth Clapp) was born, I discovered, August 25, 1796.  If the sampler had the “right” date, then that would be a fairly good sign that the Misses Martins were a probable source for the samplers, even though none of the makers appear on their list.

This morning, in my email inbox, was a full-sized photo of the sampler ever so kindly sent by the Hubers. The sampler was completed January 5, 1805, clearly like the others in the group, and listed the maker’s age as ten! Asa’s daughter Elizabeth (Betsey on the list) would only have been eight and a half in January of 1805. That left three possibilities: Betsey’s birthdate was listed wrong, the age on the sampler was wrong, OR there was another Elizabeth Clapp in Portland at the same time, born a bit earlier.

I believe Asa’s daughter’s birthdate to be correct. She is one of a rather famous family and the date is documented in numerous places. It seems *unlikely* that she would be so wrong about her age on a sampler. Could there be another Elizabeth? I noticed that on the 1810 census there were two Claps in Portland: Asa and Alkanah, so I began to research Alkanah to see if he could have had a daughter Elizabeth of the right age. First I found records of the deaths of Elkanah and his wife, Elizabeth in Portland in 1810. Then I found records for the two marriages of their daughter Elizabeth (!) to John Blagge and George W. Cooley (December 5, 1835 in Portland.) Digging a bit deeper, I found her death record, March 4, 1864 in Roxbury, Mass. (Cooley was aid to have been “of Boston” which listed her birthplace as Mansfield, Mass.  Finally, Mansfield vital records and a genealogy of the Clapp family revealed that Elkanah and Elizabeth Clapp had relocated to Portland shortly after 1800. Their daughter Elizabeth—first cousin of the three daughters of Asa Clapp—was born in Mansfield November 3, 1794, making her aged ten on January 5, 1805 when SHE completed her sampler.

Unfortunately—she seems to appear on the list anyway!!!! The Misses Martins lists another set of girls with the last name Clap as being from Bath, Maine: Betsey, Almira, Abigail and Mary. Elkanah had daughters Almira and Abigail, born in Mansfield. (There’s no record for Mary but she may have been born after the Maine relocation—if she is their sister at all.) The spouses listed on the Misses Martins’ list for Almira and Abigail are the right ones for the daughters of Elkanah—so these are clearly Eliza’s sisters. BUT there is no mention of Elkanah Clap ever  living in Bath in local histories or the census. He and his family are clearly delineated on the Portland census in 1810 (the year he and his wife died.) That makes it hard for his daughters to be “from Bath” prior to his death and when Eliza’s sampler was made in 1805.

However, living in Bath, according to several local histories, was Elizabeth’s (wife of Elkanah) brother Ebenezer Clap (she was a Clap by birth, distantly related to her husband.) Ebenezer was a local lawyer and later judge and though he married in 1812, never had any children. The Clap daughters must have gone somewhere after their parents’ sudden deaths; it seems likely that they went to live with their uncle, Ebenezer, who has one girl aged 16-25 living with him in 1820 (besides other members of the household.) Both Abigail and Almira would have fit into this age category in 1820. Almira married in 1820; her sister Abigail was not wed until 1822, making it possible that she alone resided there of the three sisters (Eliza having married in 1816).

Another long-winded journey, right? What does this prove about the samplers and the school to which they can be attributed? Absolutely nothing, once again. Eliza might well have attended a Portland school prior to living in Bath and before her parents’ deaths. Her sisters and she may have attended the Misses Martins’ school after 1810 and after the sampler we know of, seen here, was made.  Or not.

I have had 173 page views! That sounds pretty exciting.

I am fresh back from a week of vacation alongside a lake well up in Maine. At the end of the vacation we dropped our youngest (of five) off at the University of Maine in Orono (go Black Bears!) to start her freshman year. On the way up to Great Pond I used some of the ride time to go through my Bolton & Coe American Samplers once again to see what I might have missed on previous read-throughs. I had also brought along my copy of the list of students that attended the Misses Martins' school in Portland.

 

 I continue to be frustrated that that school operated for so many, many years, with so many, many girls in attendance, and yet such a paucity of samplers potentially connected with it. I wanted to cross check to see if I might have missed some. As it stands now, here are the names of the girls who made samplers (of which I have never seen) and who also attended that academy--which is NOT to say that they made the samplers there...Narcissa Lyman. We will be borrowing her linsey-woolsey work from the Museums of Old York. It's a very atttractive sampler with good color and features the verse, "The Orphan," which sometimes appears on samplers. Narcissa's sampler does not have a Portland "look" to it at all. Instead it has a southern Maine/coastal New Hampshire style, that is to say, no floral border, no buildings with tall trees, no genealogy, etc. Here it is:



The heart motif--used by Narcissa as a border, seems to be a particularly common element of samplers from the far soughtern Maine area (Kittery, the Berwicks, Eliot.)

Another girl whose name appears on the list and whose sampler I've seen is Eliza Elden who was from the Buxton, Maine area--just west of Saco. Her sampler sold at auction last November will presumably appear in the exhibit. This is a photo of it:

Eliza's work is notably lacking in artfulness--which sounds unkind, but it really lacks any feel of a strong plan of design. I have seen no others samplers like it, which may mean that it represents a work that was crafted at home under the eye of a loving mother or aunt.

The next one I know of is Priscilla Purinton 1805, Harpswell, Maine which appears on page 211 of Bolton & Coe. Here is the description: "5 alphabets Eyelet, stem, satin, and cross stitch Strawberry-vine border outside and saw tooth desing inside Strawberry-vine cross border at bottom Also at bottom large tree with birds on several branches, and under tree are sheep, dog, man and woman in Colonial dress shaking hands In center is a large basket filled with flowers, and on the right side a large bush with a bird on top and a cage hanging from a branch Various cross borders" It was owned by Mary Chapman Stetson.
That description caused me to go back through all the many photos of Maine samplers I'e saved to my poor burdened computer over the past couple of years, looking for anything that resembled it. I have found nothing, but here is a photo of a sampler that's owned by the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, Maine. The sampler was donated but nothing is known of its background. What this sampler reminds me of is English samplers which quite often seem to have a rather intense and kind of "busy" design feel--lots squeezed in and quite a bit going on.



Notice the ladies, the trees, the animals, etc. I wonder if Priscilla's sampler may have had the same sort of appearance, and given that the Martin family were quite newly arrived from England, I suppose that it might be logical to expect that IF samplers were made at their school, at least in the beginning, those samplers might have had a very English design to them.

The final sampler I know of that was worked by a Misses Martins' student is that of  Mary Stone. There were several Stone sisters and not all were Misses Martins' students. However, they all made samplers and all the samplers are owned by the Portland Museum of Art, and will be on loan for the exhibit. They have many characteristics in common and were likely all made at the same school, and I do not think that it was Misses Martins' primarily because 1)not all the sisters attended there, 2) the samplers are all very similar, and 3)Narcissa Stone, one of the sisters, was the assistant of teacher Caroline Hunt Putnam in Brunswick--where the Stones were from, and she operated a school there from 1808-1829 which more than spans the years of the Stone samplers.

So that brings us all the way around and back to "Square 1"--no samplers that I can definitely attribute to the Misses Martins' school except, perhaps, the unseen Priscilla Purinton, perhaps English-like sampler.

Today my quest for the nugget of information that would somehow prove or disprove the attribution of the largest group of Portland samplers to the school of Rachel Hall Neal took a rather thought provoking twist. In order to fully understand the nature of the twist, we have to go all the way back to 1920 and the publication of American Samplers by Bolton & Coe.

All of you sampler people who might be reading this blog are familiar with Bolton & Coe. Those two ladies made a Herculean effort to identify and catalog all American samplers that they could find. The book is reproduced on the internet and reprints are also available. On pages 124-5, the book describes the Mary Jane Barker familiy register sampler made in 1818 in Portland. At the time it was owned by Mrs. Jesse B. Thomas who was in her late eighties. She reported that "Mary Jane went to Mme. Niel's School in Portland with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, hand in hand. They were playmates and near neighbors."

That information had also been picked up by Betty Ring who thought that the Barker sampler, if it could be found, would help to establish what samplers made in the Neal school might look like. It is the only sampler in Bolton & Coe that has a Neal attribution. Knowing that, a couple of months ago I began trying to find out what had become of the sampler. Surprisingly, I was able to determine that it had been sold at auction by Butterfields in 2000. It took me quite a while to track down the present location of the auction house as it had changed hands more than once in the intervening years, but eventually I did find them and they were kind enough to send me the auction catalog with a photo of Mary Jane's work. My hands were shaking (really!) when I opened the envelope and paged through the catalog looking for the sampler.

I was so disappointed when I found it! I was convinved that it would match well with the others I believed had been stitched at her school. It didn't. It has a queen stitch rose border and the roses are very like ones that had previously been made at the school in question, but by 1818 the work coming out of that school was so much more sophisticated and attractive than Mary Jane's. I tried to convince myself that perhaps this effort was plainer because of Mary Jane's youth (nine-years-old)  or that it was just a variation on a theme, but I didn't feel terrifically convinced. Here is a picture of it:



It's not a very good picture since it's scanned from a little one in the auction catalog, but you can look back on a previous posting and see Joanna Poole's work and notice all of the various differences.

As I mentioned, Mrs. Jesse Thomas, the sampler's owner, was an elderly woman when she met with either Bolton or Coe--or reported to them. She had been born in 1833 and was one of the younger children of Mary Jane Barker and Timothy Eastman. According to the provenance given at the auction, the sampler had first been inherited by Sarah Jane, Mary Jane's oldest daughter. At some point, perhaps when Sarah Jane died in 1900, it then passed to Abigail Eastman Thomas, who was 87 in 1920. By that time, no one seems to have remembered that Mary Jane's twin, Flavilla, had also worked a sampler.

After I first saw the sampler, I began to wonder a bit about the school attribution. I thought that perhaps H.W. Longfellow's sisters might attend the same school as he did and might also have worked samplers which would be proof positive of something. Maine Historical Society quickly straightened me out: they attended the Misses Mayo's school. It never, at that time, occured to me to wonder if H.W. Longfellow actually went to Mrs. Neal's. Today I found out that he DID NOT! Actually, he attended the school of Abigail Fellows, of whom I had never previously heard, and he only went there as a very young child.

I found further mention of Abigail Fellows in a very old book called Mothers of Maine that reported that she 1) taught H.W. Longfellow when he was very young, and 2) operated a school in a brick schoolhouse on Spring Street in Portland. I found her on the 1810 and 1820 census, living alone, and found in old newspaper records that she was the widow of Nathaniel Fellows of Boston who had had a sugarcane plantation in Havana, Cuba. He died in 1806. She seems to have relocated to Portland shortly thereafter as she was teaching Longfellow by 1807. She died in 1820 while on a visit to Havana where there were still Fellows living.

So, here's the question: Who taught Mary Jane and Flavilla? Mrs. Thomas apparently had one part of the story wrong, but which part? Either she was right about the name of the teacher but wrong about Longfellow being there, or she was right about Longfellow attending the same school, but didn't remember the name of the teacher correctly. The trouble is, we don't know what information, if any, might have been provided by anyone to "jog her memory"--if it needed jogging at all. (Or perhaps the girls first attended school with Longfellow at Fellows' and then without him at Neal's?)

Right now, I'm going with the theory that this sampler represents the work of Mrs. Fellows school. There's a fun little postscript to this tale, either way. A couple of weeks back I discovered the sampler of Flavilla Barker--identical to Mary Jane's--at the Androscoggin Historical Society in Lewiston. If the loan request is approved, it will be included in the exhibit. The whereabouts of Mary Jane's work are once again unknown. And that is why a database of these samplers would be a good idea; it's merely an extension of what Bolton & Coe were trying to accomplish in 1920!

Today, and for the past several days, I have been working on the biographies of the various sampler makers whose works will be included in the exhibit. Sometimes I get very lucky and when I Google a girl's name with some tidbit of objective information about her, like a birthdate, I come up with some fully researched family tree that takes me from cradle to grave of the young girl's life.

Other times, it's truly a stumper. Today I've had one of those days. The sampler in question is this one that is owned by the Newburyport Historical Society which is very generously loaning it for the exhibit. Clearly, it was made by Nancy Cushing. But who was Nancy Cushing? Partly, that's a little hard to find out because the Cushing name is a relatively common one in New England. We know that she was born about 1802. It looks to me like it says that her father's name was Joseph. She notes the births of two Williams who were her siblings, and the death of one. Intriguing is the death of Mehitabel Cobbet (or does that say something other than Cobbet--which is not at all a common name?) I thought that that Mehitable was likely her mother and that the Mehitabel Cushing was a sister named after her mother, which would be a rather likely possibility. So does the tombstone say Lydia Cushing nee Cobbet or Ldia Cushing McCobbetor McCobb et? I've tried most of my usual resources, but now I'm going for one last attempt, to randomly "fish" the census for the various Joseph Cushings to see if I can find some that seem like good prospects, and then hope to track down some vital records for those towns.

Nancy's sampler is one of a group of at least four I've found that are nearly identical and terrifically charming and artful. Another of the group was worked by Sophia Dyer who was the daughter of Caleb Dyer and Mary Randall. She was from Cape Elizabeth, a town very close to Portland, Maine. Her outstandingly preserved work is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was featured in all its splendid glory in an article by Betty Ring in The Magazine Antiques in 1988.

The period of time covered by this group is very brief, less than four years. Does that imply a school that was only open for some short period of time, or that I just haven't seen other samplers like these that span a greater range of years, or does this represent a style that evolved from an earlier one? There are some very interesting similarities between these four and some others, but it's very hard to know what their significance--if any--is.  And how many times will I say that?

Today is the day I have been looking forward to all week. I have spent the money to buy a one day subscription to Prices4antiques.com, as suggested by one of the couples who will be loaning needlework for "I My Needle Ply With Skill."  I already knew that this database contained records for about 2,000 antique samplers so it was with a great sense of anticipation that I signed on.

Of course, only a small portion of those were going to turn out to be Maine samplers, but still...the possibilities!  In the end, I first searched for "samplers" that named Maine, then I searched for "needlework" that named Maine, and finally I just went through all 2000 of them looking at the small photos, searching for ones that had not named a place but had Maine characteristics. Now my eyes hurt.

I came up with about 50 new samplers that I hadn't seen before. One of them almost certainly belongs to my largest group although it doesn't exhibit all of the characteristics I've come to associate with the them. But it so strongly resembles the others that I feel it must be related. I also found a few that connected to other samplers I have seen, which is always a nice find. What that appears to give me is--new groups!



This is Sarah Jordan's sampler. One of the ideas I have been considering is how connected a group of samplers must/should be in order for me to believe that they have a common source. ALL of the others in the group that I would like to add Sarah's to have a unique way of naming the girl's age (as I mentioned in a previous posting)" Aet 10 years" for example, followed by "Portland" and then the precise date when the sampler was completed. Clearly, Sarah's has none of these features, and what is a bit more interesting (oh, and intriguing--once again) is that she hasn't left room to add that information. For now, I'll have to call this one a definite maybe. Without the additional information like age and date, it's hard to be sure who this Sarah Jordan is.  Could she be the Sarah Jordan of Cape Elizabeth who died in Portland November 14, 1811? More research is needed. What I do feel certain of is that this is a Portland sampler and likely dates from ca. 1803 to perhaps as late as 1815.

Today, between interruptions from the annual book sale which is now on its last day, I worked a little on one of the thoughts that I had over the weekend. Back to the Portland samplers groups!

Here are the names of the girls who made samplers belonging to the largest group I have identified: Eliza Clapp, 1804; Betsey Wheelwright, 1804; Deborah Gordon, 1804; Lydia Dutch, 1805; Sally Adams, 1805; Martha Wilder, 1805; Amelia Lowell, 1806; Joanna Poole, 1807; Mary Richards, 1808; Mary A. Twombley, 1817; Eliza Tukey, 1817; Mary W. Merrill, 1817; Elizabeth Mountfort, 1820. Here is a picture of Joanna Poole's sampler which is very typical of the group.

Hers is owned by the Maine Historical Society which has a very nice collection of Maine samplers. Most--but not all- of the group are genealogical with the format always the the same, naming each child, first and last names, listing the parents, but not the maiden name of the mother. The earliest of the group have a stylized queen stitch border; the later ones have a more naturalistic rose border. Most of the genealogical ones have a pair of tombs at the bottom, some with intitals of deceased. All of them have a queen stich floral swag or other floral motif near the bottom, next to the maker's name. All of them included the girl's age: "Aet", name Portland, and specify the exact date of completion rather than just a year when the sampler was finished.

Some thought provoking points: the samplers span a wide range of years, from 1804-1820 which eliminates many of the teachers that operated schools only briefly--or seems to eliminate them! Look again at the dates listed up above. Is there a significance to the two clusters of dates separated by a full nine years? It's impossible to know. It could just be a quirk of the search. Maybe I just haven't come across any from the missing years. Maybe the teacher started using a vastly different style for nine years and then returned to this (unlikely, I suspect), or maybe she taught, retired for a while and then went back to teaching.

Of more importance, none of the girls appear on the previously mentioned Misses Martins' list of students. It's getting to be a very large group and the fact that none are on the list certainly begins to look like less and less of a coincidence. Ealier today I worked on my new idea that I mentioned at the outset. I wondered if I could connect any of the girls to teacher Rachel Hall Neal through the marriage of her siblings or those of her brothers. I was able to find a very nice list of her eight siblings and found no handy connection there. I'm still working on discovering the siblings of her husband, John. I do know that one of the girls, Amelia Lowell, later married Rachel's brother-in-law after his first wife died. It's another one of those intriguing little coincidences--did Amelia know Rachel's brother-in-law because Rachel was her teacher--or did she know him from some place else?

My current thought on coincidences is that if several accumulate they become more than coincidences. But, unfortunately, right now I don't have several! A bit later this week I plan to buy a one day subscription to www.prices4antiques.com and search there for Maine samplers that have been sold in the past several years. I always have this sense that the Rosetta stone of Portland samplers is just narrowing eluding me and if I press on, there it will be!

The past week has been incredibly busy here at the Dyer Library and Saco Museum. The library has a very large annual book sale that runs for over a week and involves a lot of attention on my part. The good news is that it is doing very well and that I found a nice (although small) collection of textile related books to add to my office reference section. The sad news is that I have neglected this blog while taking care of that business.

Today I received a letter from Carol and Stephen Huber of www.antiquesamplers.com with little photographs of about twenty samplers and eleven silk embroideries from Maine that they have handled in recent years. Amy Finkel of www.samplings.com has also provided nice and ever-so-useful photos. Together, they've greatly expanded the volume of work with which I'm gaining familiarity, and each one I see broadens the story that we will be able to tell next winter in our exhibit. In the Hubers 'group were two more that fit into the largest group of related Portland samplers I've identified, bring it up to about a dozen, and still not a name that appears to be connected with the Misses Martins' academy, making it more and more certain that that very large and longlived school was not the source.

I also had a discussion today with a 19th century American art expert who participated in (and literally helped write the book on) Charles Codman, a now well-known landscape artist who came to Portland from Boston somewhere around 1822. His first advertisement in Portland appeared in a newspaper in October 1822, and December 1822, when he indicated that he was contemplating setting up an academy for young men and women to teach drawing, painting, etc. In 1822 and 1823 he appeared in the Boston, Massachusetts City Directory, but in 1823 he also was listed in the Portland directory. Was he dividing his time between the two places? You may wonder why this might be important.

Charles Codman also advertised that he would create "drawings for lady's needlework." Is it a coincidence that with Codman's arrival in Portland in 1822, silk embroideries from Portland began to feature elaborate and very attractive landscapes the same year? Betty Ring, in her examination of Portland schoolgirl embroidery in The Magazine Antiques, September 1988 discussed the possibility that Codman may have been the artist responsible for some of those designs.

This is one of the silk embroideries attributed to Mrs. Mayo's school, believed to have been worked by either Louisa or Sarah C. Davis and dedicated to the three deceased children of Moses and Mercy Caldwell Davis of Portland, ca. 1823. It's in the collection of Bayou Bend.

Please take a look at the tree on the left side of the embroidery: large, spare, brown and a little less than healthy looking. It turns out that Codman, in his later work, (he was born about 1800 so was still a very young man in 1822-23), is rather well known for his tall, unhealthy looking trees, which often look very much like this tree. That sounds exciting!  Not so fast. Betty Ring included four related embroideries in her article, all clearly from the same school. None of the other three have trees that look the least bit like the one in the Davis embroidery. I've seen at least four other mourning embroideries also from this school--presumably Mrs. Mayo's, but more about that on another posting--and none of those have Codman trees either.

Codman's biographers note that when he arrived in Portland he was the only artist there, so that at least means that IF a professional artist is associated with some Portland needlework, it MUST be Codman. Another tiny intriguing tidbit, for what it's worth, is that beginning in 1827 Codman struck up a very close professional relationship with John Neal who had just returned to Portland from more than a decade away and who was one of America's very first professional art critics, and (here's the fun part!),  he was the son of Rachel Hall Neal, who, of course, operated one of Portland's longest lasting female academies, first alone and later with the help of John's twin sister, Rachel. And that opens up another potential avenue of research. What about the works coming from Neal's school. Do those--whatever they are--show evidence of Codman's hand?

Last night I got quite a bit further into a rather mind-numbing but seemingly necessary project. I'm still trying hard to prove--one way or the other--that the largest group of Portland-made samplers I've identified is or is not connected to the best known school of the era when they were created--1804-1820. The school is the one run by the Misses Martin. I know that none of "my" sampler makers from the group appear on the list, but the project has been to Google each girl on the list with the word "sampler" after her name, and see what comes up. It's a lot like fishing. There are over five hundred girls' names on the list. Every now and then, I get a hit--the girl's name associated with a sampler made by a girl with that name.

The real question is--is it the right girl? Many of the names are a bit ubiquitous.  Not all of them, of course. Unfortunately, I hardly ever get hits on the less common names. I am now coming very close to the end of the list. I have only had one hit that I knew was the right girl and her sampler didn't strongly relate to other Portland samplers. I did make a tiny and interesting discovery, however, but its significance eludes me. Maybe there isn't any.

I mentioned previously the sampler of Deborah Gordon. Hers is actually the earliest in the group I'm focusing on right now. I've had a lot of email correspondence with the owner of that sampler and he's obviously a talented genealogist. He sent me a family tree for Deborah. She died very young, shortly after her marriage. However, Deborah's brother married and had several daughters: Deborah, Margaret, Susan and Huldah, and all of them, it turns out, appear on the Misses Martins' list of day scholars, students who attended during the day but did not board at the school.

The Misses Martin began to take day scholars in 1812--much too late for the Deborah Gordon listed to be "my" sampler maker, so it seems very nearly certain that the Deborah Gordon listed is actually her niece. It would be interesting to draw some conclusion from this discovery like that her brother decided to send his daughters to Misses Martins's school because his sister had previously attended there. I just don't think it's possible to assume that.

Tonight I should be finishing with the list, for what that's worth. It seems more like an exercise in crossing the t's and dotting the i's than one that was likely to lead to some marvelous aha! moment. Hope springs eternal.

On a more cheerful note, this morning I finally finished compiling the list of objects that will be in the exhibit: over 130, with 115 samplers. I think that makes it a rather large exhibit. It's been feeling that way for quite a while: large and complicated, trying to pin down bios on all those girls and discover the connections that link some of them. It's nice to get one more part of the project taken care of.

Today I heard from the owner of one of the samplers that will be included in the exhibit, that of  Deborah Gordon. It's from the largest group I have linked, all likely done in the same Portland school. He told me that he knew little about Deborah except that she married Peter Thacher in 1810. I decided to try to find out a little more about her since each of the sampler makers will have a brief biography for the exhibit and publication. One of the first things I discovered was intriguing. Peter Thacher was the son of Joshiah Thacher and Apphia Mayo.

Mayo is NOT a common in name in Maine, but in the Maine sampler world it's well-recognized. One of the most important of the Portland female academies was the one operated by the Misses Mayo from the early 1820s until well into the 1840s. There were six Misses Mayo, the daughters of Martha Merchant and Simeon Mayo who was an important (presumably that means well-to-do) Portland sea captain and ship owner. He was from Portland, although his father was from Cape Cod. The daughters were Martha (1782-?), Apphia (1785-1839), Maria (1788-1840), Sarah (1793-1886), Eliza (1785-1847) and Mary (1798-1853). While all the family were living together on the 1800 census, in 1810 Martha and her daughters were living separately from Simeon, an unusual situation.

The Misses Mayos' school has been linked to a well known group of both samplers and silk embroideries that can easily be connected to each other by the inclusion of a little cherub drawn on nearly all of them. (There must be more without the cherub because the last known piece with it dates from 1826.) In 1827 daughter Martha married, the only one of the girls to do so, and after that there are no more cherub works, so perhaps she was the artist for this artful group of needlework. The school was last noted on the 1847-48 city directory so it most likely closed shortly after the death of Eliza when just two sisters were left.

After a little further research, I found out that the Apphia Mayo that married Josiah Thacher was the sister of Simeon Mayo and so the aunt of the Misses Mayo. Is that an important or significant connection? I don't think so. Apphia likely died before the Misses Mayo started the school. (I'm still working on that one!) and it also appears probable that Deborah Gordon, too, would have passed away. A record I found said that she died December 7, 1810, only about nine months after her marriage. Peter died the following spring, of consumption. The sampler descended in the Gordon family, through one of Deborah's siblings. The Misses Mayo almost certainly knew of her life and death, but it's hard to see that it would have influenced their instruction. So maybe all of this was just a long trip down a dead end street, but it's an interesting coincidence, and a nice look at the interconnections between southern Maine people of that era.

This morning I spent several hours on an interesting project at a place founded as a women's social society by a Maine author in the late 19th century. They have a vintage and antique clothing collection and I was asked to come out to tell them about what they owned and provide some advice on care and storage.

For many years (since their founding?) they have put on a play that involves the wearing of the clothing by the performers. Many of the clothes had alterations, as many antique clothes do anyway, that sometimes obscured their original appearances in strange and fascinating (but, okay, really sad) ways. There was one very oversized cotton print dress that had Bishop sleeves (large full long sleeves gathered at the cap and the cuff) and a cartridge pleated skirt, but one sleeve showed unusual signs of piecing that might have implied the original seamstress trying to create a dress out of too little fabric, or perhaps an alteration--I took it for the first. I placed it at about 1855-60 but the bodice was strangely short for the time--and shapeless.  Had it begun life in the 1830s and been partially modified?

While my person favorite clothes date to prior to say, 1840, none of their collection went back that far, except, perhaps, a nice white cotton petticoat that had handsewn prairie point deccoration in band after band down a front insert. As most sewers know, this was an arduous tour-de-force of sewing. Wow. Was it intended for the open front style dress of the Revolutionary War era that showed off the decorative petticoat? Maybe.

But what is worth mentioning more was that prior to my visit we had talked about how the clothes were being stored: In speically built drawers between sheets of acid free tissue. Unfortunately, what the volunteer for the society found while I was there was many items that were growing mold, and several that were infested with moths. Yikes! We talked about dehumidifiers and insect control issues. There are a number of pretty good internet sites that deal with these things.

I also suggested to her my personal favorite informational resource for 19th century clothing: Dressed for the Photographer by Joan Severa. Check it out--it's marvelous!

More Sorting Portland Samplers

I need to add a caveat to yesterday's blog. So far as I can tell, to date there are no known samplers from Elizabeth's time at Derby Academy. The silk embroidery done there under her tutelage featured trees that changed colors in horizontal bands that were softly shaded. The trees on the two samplers I included yesterday are not like that. It's very hard to know what that means--if anything.  If you have seen a sampler likely done at the Hingham/Derby Acdemy between about 1796-1803, let me know!

Today I'm going to talk about another group of Portland samplers, slightly larger and much less problematic since one of them very kindly names the teacher, but interestingly, not a teacher that has been previously identified by newspaper ads.

When I first began to plan the sampler exhibit at the Saco Museum, I advertised in Maine Antiques Journal, looking for Maine samplers/needlework in private collections. (I'm still looking!!!) I was very fortunate to hear from several people including the owner of the sampler pictured here:

This sampler, as you probably can see, says that it was made in the school of and for Sally Perry.  Like other early Portland samplers, it has a stylized rose border with a wandering, rather unrealistic stem. It includes an attractive scene, lots of useful genealogical information and the name of the maker. It was apppreantly intended as a gift for her teacher by Mary Lewis. Sally Perry married in August of 1807 and closed the school where Mary did this work.

This next one was made by Eleanor Douglass and was very kindly brought to my attention by her descendant.

The quality of the picture is not good because it as a scan from a book called Father Bond of Kohala by Ethel Damon that was published in the 1920s. The book stated that the sampler was owned by the maker's daughter, Ellen, who married a missionary to Hawaii. At that time (the 1920s) the sampler was said to be in the collection of a museum in Hawaii. I've gone to some length to track it down, without any success. Eleanor's widower father married Sally Perry's sister three years before this sampler was stitched.

The third one in the group is this one made by Abigail Horton. It's pretty easy to see how similar it is to the others. It appears in A Gallery of American Samplers by Glee Krueger, #55 on page 44. I don't know where it is currently located.

The last one I've seen so far is this one which I found for sale at a northern Massachusetts antique shop.

It clearly matches well with the others.

From all of this we now know that Sally Perry was born March 21, 1789 in Milford, Massachusetts. Not too long after her birth the family moved to Waterford, Maine where her father died in 1793. Sometime in about 1805, the date on Eleanor's sampler, Sally opened a school in Portland, probably to help support her mother and siblings. Students at her school made distinctive and very attractive samplers that followed a pattern that may have recently been established at yet another Portland school: Large sized samplers with genealogical information, stylized rose borders, a swag of flowers, a bow, and a landscape scene at the bottom.  The earliest known sampler from that other school, which I have yet to talk about, was completed on December 30, 1804, making it, at least, the one with the earliest date, so far as I know. The other possibility is that both Sally's work and that of the other school are based on the ones I showed you yesterday and attributed to Mrs. Dawes Academy.

Are you aware of others? Please let me know!

Sampler Sorting

     Early on in this project (getting ready for the Saco Museum schoolgirl needlework exhibit) I formed a hopeful hypothesis that it might be possible, particularly with the rather substantial group of needlework associated with Portland, Maine, to group the work by characteristics and then, using the dates of they were made, attribute them to known teachers. If a group of clearly related needlework spanned more years, for example, than a given teacher was known to work, then most likely she would not have been the person responsible for the group. Or such was my plan.
   
     To a certain extent, it has been a successful hypothesis. I have made some interesting, thought provoking discoveries, but I've also had some unexpected results. Today, I'm going to talk about one of those.

     I began with the belief that it was pretty likely that virtually all Portland teachers had been documented, but I found that not to be true--an outcome that really was...exciting. Even though I believed that the teachers were known, one of the first research projects I took on was to go through all the microfilm of early Portland newspapers in the Dyer Library collection--a considerable resource, as it turned out. I began with the earliest newspapers in our collection, right around 1800.

     On August 18, 1804 this advertisement appeared in Portland:
Mrs. Dawes Academy
The subscribers to Mrs. Dawes Academy, which is now full, having been informed that some gentleman have expressed a wish to put their daughters under her instruction, contemplate employing an Assistant; in which case the number of her Pupils will be increased to forty being nine more than now attend--Such gentlemen therefore, whether in town or country, as wish to embrace the opportunity, will please apply without delay to
Samuel Freeman
Hugh McClellan
Daniel Tucker Committee


Wanting to know more about Mrs. Dawes, I began to do research. Unlike many women of her time, there was a narrow trail to follow (instead of none at all.) Mrs. Dawes was born Elizabeth Bailey August 29, 1767 in Hanover, Mass. On June 25, 1789 she married Rev. Ebenezer Dawes who had graduated from Harvard in 1785 and took a ministry in Scituate, a town that was apparently deeply divided at the time. Elizabeth was said to be "a lady of pleasing personal accomplishments." With his office described as "truly a crown of thorns," Ebenezer, who was of weak constitution, sickened and died only months after the birth of their second son in 1791.

Like many widowed young women of her time, Elizabeth was faced with a daunting challenge of finding a way to support her small family. She became the preceptress of the Derby Academy in Hingham. During her tenure, in 1799, the school's students produced at least two silk mourning embroideries that are considered to be among the very earliest done in America (see The Magazine Antiques, June 1979 p. 1243 and the Sotheby's Betty Ring Auction Catalog, p. 18, #518.)

While a brief biography of her second husband published in 1895 reports that Elizabeth left the school in 1804, this seems unlikely since her academy in Portland was already very well established by that summer. Since that biography contains several other inaccuracies, an error in this date is a very good possibility. Likely Elizabeth chose Portland as the location for her school because not only was it an up and coming city, but she had family in southern Maine: both an uncle and one of her brothers had moved here and her dead husband also had family in the area.

Either way, the school was short lived. In April of 1805 Elizabeth became the second wife of widower John Lucas, an older (born 1738) merchant from Brookline, Mass. Whether she married him for love or for a guarantee of financial security, his biography reports, "with all of her accomplishments, she failed to make him happy."!! He died in 1812. In November of 1822, Elizabeth married for the third time to widower Dr. William Williams of Deerfield, Massachusetts. By that time her sons were grown and both living in Taunton, Mass. Shortly after her marriage to Williams, continuing to demonstrate her first rate creative skills, she made a yarn sewn (as opposed to hooked) rug which took first place at a local fair. The rug, pictured here, is in the collection of Historic Deerfield. Elizabeth was widowed again in 1829, probably never taught school again and died in Deerfield February 17, 1844.

Two very closely related samplers, both in the same private collection can probably be attributed to Dawes Academy of Portland.

(Excuse the not-so-great photos! Better ones will be done later.) Dorcas Shaw, above, turns out to be a cousin of Ebenezer Dawes--or a cousin-in-law of Elizabeth, one of the reasons that I believe the attribution to Dawes Academy to be correct. No other related samplers have been found, perhaps supported by the fact that the school closed following Elizabeth's second marriage. Dorcas's sampler has the earliest known version of the meandering rose border that became so popular in Maine and especially Portland. An intriguing area that merits further research is that the very distinctive filled black satin stitch name cartouche with gold diamond border comes up again a few years later on another group of samplers, all of those made in Leominster, Mass. starting about 1806. See Samplers & Samplermakers by Mary Jaene Edmonds, p. 59 for an example of one.  I have seen no others like this except these two from Portland and the somewhat larger group of four from Leominster, but it's so interesting and distinctive that it might not be a random occurrence!

After taking a few days off, I'm back at work with access to the many Maine sampler photos I've saved. One of the things I was thinking about earlier today is that the sewing skills taught at female academies were not limited to just the fancy work that samplers and silk embroideries so clearly and charmingly illustrate.
      Many teachers noted in their advertisements that they also taught "plain sewing." We know that sewing pretty much happened on a daily basis in homes in the early 19th century, as I mentioned on the 3rd. Nearly all clothing was homemade and besides the need to sew new clothes, the existing ones in the family's collective wardrobe (much smaller than today's) would need near constant repair work. Given all of that, it's hard to believe that very many girls arrived at female academies without rather well-developed sewing skills. Eliza Southgate, whom I mentioned on the 4th, wrote home to her mother from a female academy at the age of fourteen, "I shall want a coat and you may send it up for me to make, or you may make it your self." Clearly, this was not a daunting prospect for her. So, why would teachers offer plain sewing and how was it taught?
     I can only guess at the motivation for offering plain sewing instruction. I think, first, that if one teacher offered it, then others in competition with her would feel the need to "jump on the bandwagon" and also do so. Perhaps there might have been a couple of good reasons for offering it. One was that some of the girls came from much more affluent households where all of the plain sewing was being completed by servants and other hired help. In those homes, girls could presumably grow up without any decent sewing skills. While their parents would certainly hope and expect that they would make good marriages and be able to hire servants of their own, being skilled might always become a necessity. And a skilled seamstress would also be able to quickly recognize that her servants weren't doing a good job with assigned sewing tasks. The second reason is that many if not most New Englanders were pragmatic. A school that taught essential as well as fancy unessential skills might look like a better value.

     This is a photograph of a very different type of sewing sampler from my very modest collection. It's an extremely small shirt all hand sewn of a coarse cotton fabric. It includes underarm gussets and very tiny ones at the bottom hem, as well. The style is rather typical of shirts men wore in the early part of the 19th century, but it's made in miniature--only about 8" from shoulder to hem. The stitching is tiny and perfect.  It's way too small to be intended for an infant and very likely represents a plain sewing exercise. I purchased it at auction in Maine several years ago.  A girl who could produce a piece like this had demonstrated that she had a good understanding of many of the skills needed to create her future family's clothing. Still, pieces like this a not common which either means that most teachers weren't tasking girls with making them, or most family's did not view such creations as items to be treasured and saved--or perhaps both!
     The other type of fancy needlework often mentioned in advertisements, at least here in Maine, is tambour work. Tambour embroidery is created when a piece of very fine net is stretched taut in a hoop and them embroidered in a chain stitch. One of my plans for the next few weeks is to search the Saco Museum textile collection for an example.
   

Yesterday I stopped by the Kennebunkport Historical Society which is only about five minutes from my house. A couple of months ago I sent out follow-up emails to nearly all the historical societies in Maine trying to find out what samplers they own. K'port Historical Society hadn't responded so I thought I check in there. It turns out they own just one, but it was done in the Port, which is nice. They are willing to loan it so I will likely send out a loan form next week. The Kennebunk/K'port area had a newspaper right through the middle/late Federal era, and the Dyer Library owns the full run. I have scanned through quite a number of them and noted that there are periodic advertisements for a few teachers of needlework. This may make it relatively easy to attribute both the Port Historical Society piece and a couple owned by the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk to specific teachers--or at least the possibility of them being done under the tutelage of those teachers.

The Port piece is a fairly typical southern Maine sampler with a simple strawberry vine border, baskets and birds on the bottom.

Many of the small Maine towns from which needlework originated were not served by newspapers. Teachers in those towns likely had little need to advertise since everyone locally knew they were there and teaching. Parents seem to have been inclined to send their daughters to the cities, even small ones like Portland, rather than out to other small towns for education. This is not surprising, for many reasons. The city academies were often larger and presumably might have been more sophisticated. Even just being in the city offered the girls access to many different cultural activities outside of the schools. Eliza Southgate Bowne, who sent home a series of letters from Boston to her parents in Scarborough in the very last years of the 18th century described various (often social) activities that presented themselves to her and her classmates. Once she returned to Maine after her school year had ended, she would go on to describe numerous events that she, her cousins and sometimes her brother and next youngest sister attended in Portland.  A lot of those would not have been available in small towns. Finally, there was a certain cache value, I imagine, in having your daughter away--in the big city--at school.

But what that all boils down to is that, without newspapers to document their presence, discovering the names of teachers in the small towns can be very challenging!

While at the K'port Historical Society I learned that a lady from the Port had been by there just the week before looking for samplers. I was told that she was very knowledgeable and owned samplers of her own (from Maine?) so I'm anxious to speak with her. They were going to pass on my contact info, but if I don't hear from her by Monday, I'll try giving her a call.

Next week, when I'm back at work where all my photos are stored, I'll begin posting photos of samplers and talking about their history, attributions, etc.

I have created this blog to begin to describe my efforts in the world of antique textiles. While right now I am primarily focusing on Maine schoolgirl needlework--more about that in a moment--my interests are broader than that and span most of my life, going back to at least my teen years.

First the Maine schoolgirl needlework part...
I am so fortunate as to have the job of my dreams. I am the executive director of the Dyer Library and Saco Museum. The Dyer Library Association, a private non-profit, operates both of those, the first as the public library for the City of Saco, (located on the south coast of Maine,) and the museum as a regional cultrual resource. The museum owns art, furniture and other historic objects related to the history of the Saco River Valley. Among those objects is a goodly collection of a variety of different textiles: clothing, especially 19th century, quilts, hooked rugs, and samplers and other schoolgirl needlework.

Starting in at least the 17th century, girls were tasked with creating examples of the types of stitches that they would need to support a hand-sewn textile world. Generations before the invention of the sewing machine all clothing, bed linens, tablecloths--everything had to be sewn by hand. It was a vast and daunting task that continued on a daily basis for virtually all women for all of their useful lives, from whenever they were deemed old enough to even potentially stitch a seam, until their fingers no longer had the strength to push needle through fabric.

This life-long mission generally began with instruction in the wide variety of stitches that would be needed, from simple cross stitches used to mark linens, to various darning stitches, each appropriate for a different type of mending, to straight stitches for seaming fabric, to purely decorative stitches that would be used to enhance treasured pieces. Girls might work their earliest marking sampler, which was often just a series of different alphabets and numbers, at a remarkably (by our standards) tender age of 6-8 years old. By the 19th century, a marking sampler might be created in a district school or at home under the supervision of an older female in the household. Fortunate girls--those with parents who had more money and could afford it and who valued education for girls,might then be sent to a female academy where they could acquire refinement both in education (math, English, sometimes French, geography, handwriting, music, dance, painting. drawing, etc.) and in handcrafts. The handcrafts would likely include further instruction in both plain (seaming, darning, knitting) and fancy needlework. The fancy needleowrk often involved an artistic sampler and then perhaps a silk embroidered on silk piece.

Betty Ring, collector and researcher extraordinaire, was one of the first to bring a high level of scholarship to the field of schoolgirl needlework. Her groundbreaking research brought attention to a growing body of work concerning the attribution of particular needlework to individual female academies and teachers. While she explored that topic all over the U.S. (and especially in Rhode Island), I am concentrating on Maine. While a coming exhibit at the Saco Museum was the impetus for that work, I find that it's the perfect fit for my interests: textiles, genealogy, women's lives and their work.  So here's the blurb about the exhibit:

“I My Needle Ply With Skill”:
Maine Schoolgirl Needlework of the Federal Era
January 12 through March 2, 2013

Join us at the Saco Museum for an in-depth look at the complex and lovely needlework created in Maine by schoolgirls of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At a time when advanced academic opportunities for young women were limited, private academies—often run by women—offered training not only in academic subjects, but also in the fancy sewing skills that were of critical importance to future homemakers of the Federal era. While many of these schools were well established in southern New England states by the late 18th century, Maine developed private academies a bit later. As these local academies grew and flourished, new styles of samplers and needlework evolved that were unique to Maine.  This exhibit explores that evolution and offers a glimpse of a period of blossoming female creativity and accomplishment that transcended the societal limitations on women of the era. About eighty samplers and other embroideries will be on view, drawn from the collections of the Dyer Library/Saco Museum as well as other public and private collections in Maine and beyond. The exhibition will also be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Dyer Library/Saco Museum Executive Director Leslie Rounds. A FREE public opening reception will take place at the Saco Museum on Friday, January 11, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Saco Museum 371 Main St. Saco, Maine 04072
207-283-3861 www.dyerlibrarysacomuseum.org

What I've found out, over the past year of intensive research, is that there is MUCH to be learned about Maine schoolgirl needlwork!