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!