With some helpful advice and sampler searching from Lynne Anderson, the head of the Sampler Consortium project—more about that in a bit—I have put together another small group of related samplers, this time from well up the state of Maine, and inland.

 As you are surely aware, Maine is a very large state—at least by our paltry New England standards. While the female academies along the coast were apparently the most prolific—and have consequently captured most of the glory for Maine Federal era schoolgirl needlework—there were smaller, energetic and thriving schools scattered all across the state. These schools are often very hard to discover for several reasons, the first of which I just named. They were often very small: one teacher, a scattering of students, perhaps over the course of several years, and most critically for researchers, a lack of local newspapers in smaller, rural towns make it impossible to find the teachers through advertising, often our very best tool of discovery. These women quite frequently “flew under the radar,” not appearing in local history books, not managing to pop up on the census records since they often were not heads of households (and individuals except heads of households were not named on a federal census until 1850), and not having a place to advertise without local newspapers.

 So how do we find them? Generally, that involves a good deal of luck. Sometimes, they were named on samplers—the very best type of luck for researchers since all at once we acquire a teacher’s name, a pupil connected with her school and (presumably) a typical work. Less commonly, teachers are discovered through diaries, invoices, letters, mentions in local history or family genealogical books, or from advertisements in more distant newspapers.

 For the new “small group of related samplers” I mentioned above, the information source that led to the discovery was a book called, Mothers in Maine, which was published in 1895 and features the florid prose that was typical of the era.  In the chapter on educators, the author mentioned Miss Catharine Lyman who “taught a young ladies’ school for several years in Norridgewock, soon after Maine became a state, in 1820. She was a native of Northfield, Massachusetts. She married Rev. Thomas Adams of Vassalboro, and continued her teaching for a few years.” I will be including an 1820 Norridgewock sampler in the exhibit that we are borrowing from Historic New England. Given the size of Norridgewock, (small!), I think this work could likely be attributed to her.

 In a conversation with Lynne Anderson, she reminded me that awhile back she had sent me  photos of two samplers in a private collection she discovered that were made in Norridgewock in 1818 and 1820 by Hadassah Thompson. Here they are:

 

 

 

I did a little more research on Catharine Lyman and found that she was the daughter of Caleb Lyman and Catharine Swan of Northbridge, Massachusetts, (near Interstate 91 in western Massachusetts, not far from the Vermont border) born March 19, 1797. According to Mothers of Maine she came to Norridgewock around 1820 and opened a school there that she operated for several years. She may have moved to that area because her uncle, William Lyman, had relocated there more than ten years before. On August 16, 1829 she married Reverend Thomas Adams; he had been married previously to her first cousin who had died three years earlier. They lived in Vassalboro where she continued to teach for several more years. While being married to a minister involved frequent moving, to as far away as Ohio, by about 1860 the Adams had returned to Maine. For the last several years of her life, Catharine was confined to the Augusta Lunatic Asylum, suffering from a mental illness that she was said to have inherited from her grandfather. She was the mother of two sons. She authored at least eight religiously oriented books. She died in the asylum November 28, 1870.

I said that there is a group of related pieces, so here are the rest. The first made by Elizabeth Freeman in Norridgewock in 1820, is owned by Historic New England and is being loaned for the exhibit.

 

 

 

This one is owned by Maine State Museum, was made by Susan Crosby in Norridgewock in 1822, and sadly, can’t be loaned as it has recently been exhibited quite a lot. My version of this one is very poor. Try visiting the Maine State Museum website for a better image. www.mainestatemuseum.com

 

 

This one is owned by a private collector, was made by Lydia Cartland in Vassalboro in 1833, where Lyman moved to and resumed teaching, and will be included in the exhibit, as well.

While none of these are nearly identical to each other as some of the other sampler groups I’ve shown you are, there are common features that some share, with enough overlap to make a group attribution. Note the interesting deeply arcaded border that some of them have. That is a common stylistic element of Essex County, Massachusetts samplers. I’d love to say that Lyman had her schooling in Essex County, but Northbridge, her home, is not in or near Essex County. However, for what it’s worth, many of her immediate ancestors were from northeastern Massachusetts so she may have been exposed to that influence.

And remember how I mentioned the Sampler Consortium? That is a grant funded project to discover and thoroughly document American samplers, their makers and the teachers behind those wonderful works.

More About the Mystery...
I just had a nice email today back from Laura Fecych Sprague who must be the expert on the Misses Martins' School for Young Ladies, which was surely regarded as the premier school for young women in Portland in the Federal era. My primary question to her was regarding the list of students that attended the school. As I have previously mentioned, the list is "believed to be incomplete"; the issue for me is how incomplete? While she noted that even the omission of 10% of the girls would result in more than 50 missing names, she agreed that finding fully 15 samplers made by girls whose names don't match up with the list is certainly beginning to constitute good evicence that the samplers did not originate there.

The other question that we have exchanged emails on is whether or not samplers (not just these, but any samplers) were even made at Misses Martins. Again, considering the vast number of known students and the near total failure to date in my research of discovering a body of sampler work associated with the school, that is beginning to look rather like a likelihood.

That raises an inteersting idea.  How many times have I said that??? Might Portland girls have attended smaller, less famous schools initially to acquire the simpler skills a well-turned-out young woman ought to possess--plain sewing, marking skills, introductory academics--and then gone on to Misses Martins (money permitting) to learn the higher level arts: painting (which we know was done there,) the fancier embroidery of mourning pieces, perhaps elaborate calligraphy, and more advanced academic work? If so, that would tend to imply that the average age for Misses Martins' students would be a little older than for the other academies? Certainly, the 15 related samplers I have identified, the average age is not particularly young: they run from ten to eighteen but are concentrated in the eleven to thirteen-year-old range.

For an eighteen-year-old (one of the earliest dates of creation, also) this school must surely have been the last she attended. For the others, further education would have been a real possibility, especially taking into consideration that the length of time a girl attended a school was quite often just a year or less. I must begin to wonder how much "cross-pollination" was going on. How often did girls attend more than one Portland academy? Or sisters attend different academies? I don't think that we can draw easy conclusions that since a particular work by one girl is documented to a certain school, that not especially similar works by her sisters can therefore also be attributed to the same school.

Portland, by today's standards, was only a large town in the Federal era, not a thriving metropolis. Parents would have had familiarity with all the schools, all the teachers and with the daughters of friends and connections who had been pupils in a variety of places. Even given a loyalty factor, it's probably safe to assume quite a lot of switching around!

  A Mystery Solved?

For many months, I’ve been operating under the working hypothesis that Mrs. Rachel Hall Neal and her daughter, Rachel Neal were the instructors for the largest group of samplers that I have identified. (I have blogged on this topic before so I’m sorry to be dwelling on it again, but new information has arisen.)

The primary reason for identifying these two ladies as the source for this iconic group of Portland samplers is that the dates when the samplers were made stretch from 1804 through at least 1820. That range of years automatically eliminates most of the potential Portland schools. The very well-recognized and well-documented Misses Martins’ school would fit and so do the Neals. No other known school works. One of the Misses Martins very helpfully published a list of pupils of their school. The list is “known to be incomplete” but no one is quite sure how incomplete it might be. Up until now, none of the samplers I’ve identified as being in the group was made by a girl who is on the list, which appeared to me to make it very likely that they were NOT the source.

That all changed late last week when I realized that a thumbnail photo of a sampler that I had received from Stephen and Carol Huber was one of the group and that the maker’s name appeared to be on the Misses Martins’ list. The problem was, I couldn’t read the date on the sampler—given that it was a tiny picture. The maker was Eliza Clapp. Appearing on the Misses Martins’ list are the three sisters, Betsey, Frances and Mary Clapp who were the daughters of wealthy Portland merchant and mariner Asa Clapp. It seemed very probable that Betsey and Eliza were one and the same. Betsey (Elizabeth Clapp) was born, I discovered, August 25, 1796.  If the sampler had the “right” date, then that would be a fairly good sign that the Misses Martins were a probable source for the samplers, even though none of the makers appear on their list.

This morning, in my email inbox, was a full-sized photo of the sampler ever so kindly sent by the Hubers. The sampler was completed January 5, 1805, clearly like the others in the group, and listed the maker’s age as ten! Asa’s daughter Elizabeth (Betsey on the list) would only have been eight and a half in January of 1805. That left three possibilities: Betsey’s birthdate was listed wrong, the age on the sampler was wrong, OR there was another Elizabeth Clapp in Portland at the same time, born a bit earlier.

I believe Asa’s daughter’s birthdate to be correct. She is one of a rather famous family and the date is documented in numerous places. It seems *unlikely* that she would be so wrong about her age on a sampler. Could there be another Elizabeth? I noticed that on the 1810 census there were two Claps in Portland: Asa and Alkanah, so I began to research Alkanah to see if he could have had a daughter Elizabeth of the right age. First I found records of the deaths of Elkanah and his wife, Elizabeth in Portland in 1810. Then I found records for the two marriages of their daughter Elizabeth (!) to John Blagge and George W. Cooley (December 5, 1835 in Portland.) Digging a bit deeper, I found her death record, March 4, 1864 in Roxbury, Mass. (Cooley was aid to have been “of Boston” which listed her birthplace as Mansfield, Mass.  Finally, Mansfield vital records and a genealogy of the Clapp family revealed that Elkanah and Elizabeth Clapp had relocated to Portland shortly after 1800. Their daughter Elizabeth—first cousin of the three daughters of Asa Clapp—was born in Mansfield November 3, 1794, making her aged ten on January 5, 1805 when SHE completed her sampler.

Unfortunately—she seems to appear on the list anyway!!!! The Misses Martins lists another set of girls with the last name Clap as being from Bath, Maine: Betsey, Almira, Abigail and Mary. Elkanah had daughters Almira and Abigail, born in Mansfield. (There’s no record for Mary but she may have been born after the Maine relocation—if she is their sister at all.) The spouses listed on the Misses Martins’ list for Almira and Abigail are the right ones for the daughters of Elkanah—so these are clearly Eliza’s sisters. BUT there is no mention of Elkanah Clap ever  living in Bath in local histories or the census. He and his family are clearly delineated on the Portland census in 1810 (the year he and his wife died.) That makes it hard for his daughters to be “from Bath” prior to his death and when Eliza’s sampler was made in 1805.

However, living in Bath, according to several local histories, was Elizabeth’s (wife of Elkanah) brother Ebenezer Clap (she was a Clap by birth, distantly related to her husband.) Ebenezer was a local lawyer and later judge and though he married in 1812, never had any children. The Clap daughters must have gone somewhere after their parents’ sudden deaths; it seems likely that they went to live with their uncle, Ebenezer, who has one girl aged 16-25 living with him in 1820 (besides other members of the household.) Both Abigail and Almira would have fit into this age category in 1820. Almira married in 1820; her sister Abigail was not wed until 1822, making it possible that she alone resided there of the three sisters (Eliza having married in 1816).

Another long-winded journey, right? What does this prove about the samplers and the school to which they can be attributed? Absolutely nothing, once again. Eliza might well have attended a Portland school prior to living in Bath and before her parents’ deaths. Her sisters and she may have attended the Misses Martins’ school after 1810 and after the sampler we know of, seen here, was made.  Or not.

I have had 173 page views! That sounds pretty exciting.

I am fresh back from a week of vacation alongside a lake well up in Maine. At the end of the vacation we dropped our youngest (of five) off at the University of Maine in Orono (go Black Bears!) to start her freshman year. On the way up to Great Pond I used some of the ride time to go through my Bolton & Coe American Samplers once again to see what I might have missed on previous read-throughs. I had also brought along my copy of the list of students that attended the Misses Martins' school in Portland.

 

 I continue to be frustrated that that school operated for so many, many years, with so many, many girls in attendance, and yet such a paucity of samplers potentially connected with it. I wanted to cross check to see if I might have missed some. As it stands now, here are the names of the girls who made samplers (of which I have never seen) and who also attended that academy--which is NOT to say that they made the samplers there...Narcissa Lyman. We will be borrowing her linsey-woolsey work from the Museums of Old York. It's a very atttractive sampler with good color and features the verse, "The Orphan," which sometimes appears on samplers. Narcissa's sampler does not have a Portland "look" to it at all. Instead it has a southern Maine/coastal New Hampshire style, that is to say, no floral border, no buildings with tall trees, no genealogy, etc. Here it is:



The heart motif--used by Narcissa as a border, seems to be a particularly common element of samplers from the far soughtern Maine area (Kittery, the Berwicks, Eliot.)

Another girl whose name appears on the list and whose sampler I've seen is Eliza Elden who was from the Buxton, Maine area--just west of Saco. Her sampler sold at auction last November will presumably appear in the exhibit. This is a photo of it:

Eliza's work is notably lacking in artfulness--which sounds unkind, but it really lacks any feel of a strong plan of design. I have seen no others samplers like it, which may mean that it represents a work that was crafted at home under the eye of a loving mother or aunt.

The next one I know of is Priscilla Purinton 1805, Harpswell, Maine which appears on page 211 of Bolton & Coe. Here is the description: "5 alphabets Eyelet, stem, satin, and cross stitch Strawberry-vine border outside and saw tooth desing inside Strawberry-vine cross border at bottom Also at bottom large tree with birds on several branches, and under tree are sheep, dog, man and woman in Colonial dress shaking hands In center is a large basket filled with flowers, and on the right side a large bush with a bird on top and a cage hanging from a branch Various cross borders" It was owned by Mary Chapman Stetson.
That description caused me to go back through all the many photos of Maine samplers I'e saved to my poor burdened computer over the past couple of years, looking for anything that resembled it. I have found nothing, but here is a photo of a sampler that's owned by the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, Maine. The sampler was donated but nothing is known of its background. What this sampler reminds me of is English samplers which quite often seem to have a rather intense and kind of "busy" design feel--lots squeezed in and quite a bit going on.



Notice the ladies, the trees, the animals, etc. I wonder if Priscilla's sampler may have had the same sort of appearance, and given that the Martin family were quite newly arrived from England, I suppose that it might be logical to expect that IF samplers were made at their school, at least in the beginning, those samplers might have had a very English design to them.

The final sampler I know of that was worked by a Misses Martins' student is that of  Mary Stone. There were several Stone sisters and not all were Misses Martins' students. However, they all made samplers and all the samplers are owned by the Portland Museum of Art, and will be on loan for the exhibit. They have many characteristics in common and were likely all made at the same school, and I do not think that it was Misses Martins' primarily because 1)not all the sisters attended there, 2) the samplers are all very similar, and 3)Narcissa Stone, one of the sisters, was the assistant of teacher Caroline Hunt Putnam in Brunswick--where the Stones were from, and she operated a school there from 1808-1829 which more than spans the years of the Stone samplers.

So that brings us all the way around and back to "Square 1"--no samplers that I can definitely attribute to the Misses Martins' school except, perhaps, the unseen Priscilla Purinton, perhaps English-like sampler.