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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.