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!