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.