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!