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!