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!