Once again, ages have past since my last post. The wheels of discovery turn ever so slowly! But I'm pleased to say, there is a discovery!
In my book, I My Needle Ply With Skill, (available for purchase at the Saco Museum website ;>)  )
there are photographs of a small group of very attractive samplers that I speculated may have originated at the Gorham Academy, or perhaps in Portland, Maine at the female academy of Misses Charlotte and Sarah Paine who were from Limington, Maine--or just possibly in Limington itself, although Limington was (and remains) a rather small town. The samplers were made by Rosetta Libby:

who was born in Limerick, Maine but moved to Limington as a child;
Louisa Otis:

who was the youngest of the three children of Captain David Otis and his wife, Anna Small Libby, who was born April 7, 1807 in Limington; and of Mary Skillings.

Mary was born in West Gorham, Maine--the adjoining town to Limington--on May 10, 1816, the fifth of the eleven children of farmer Joseph Skillings and his wife, Susan Clark Skillings. She died, unmarried, on September 11, 1857. Her sampler belongs to the Baxter House Museum in Gorham. The others are in two separate private collections.
Now the Hubers have sold a fourth in the group!
This is the sampler of Julien Clark:

It turns out that she was also a Limington, Maine girl. It's very likely that she was Julia Ann Clark, who was the daughter of Nathaniel Clark, a shoemaker, and his wife, Martha Small of Limington. Julia died November 21, 1829, and given her place in the birth order of her family, was probably born about 1811. Later Nathaniel and his second wife would have another Julia Ann, but since she wasn't born until the 1840s, she is unlikely to be the sampler maker.

Given your now excellent sampler detective-ing skills, I know that you will need no prompting to see the elements that connect this small group of related samplers. Not all of the elements appear in each sampler, but there is sufficient commonality to make me quite convinced that the same teacher instructed all five girls. New owners of Julia Ann Clark--I would so love to hear from you!

I now think that since three out or the four girls were from Limington, the school was very likely located there. And even though the Paine sisters in Portland were from Limington, I now tend to doubt that they are the source since their school was said to have been rather expensive and none of these four girls came from particularly wealthy families, in fact, rather the opposite. 

I wonder how many more related samplers are out there? The Limington Historical Society is hot on the trail. Stay tuned for more discoveries!
 

I promised to get back to the detective-ing on the Wells, Maine sampler group once I had some good pictures of the three samplers that I "found" at the Androscoggin Historical Society, and courtesy of David C. Young, the director, I can now give you a look at them.

I first contacted the Androscoggin Historical Society--a small gem of a museum located upstairs in the courthouse in Auburn, Maine with a diverse collection of really neat stuff--because I discovered that they owned  the Flavilla Barker sampler which was a twin to the one worked by her twin sister, Mary Jane Barker. Perhaps in the excitement of the moment, or maybe because I really, really wanted to borrow that sampler and didn't want to ask for too much and end up with no loan at all--pressing my luck, so to speak--I'm pretty sure I never asked them about what other needlework they might happen to own. When I returned Flavilla's sampler in late March I was stunned to see that they had three Wells, Maine samplers. Egads!

So here they are, along with photos of the two I already knew about, and my research about the sampler makers:

 

This one was worked by Olive Gooch in memory of her two deceased elder brothers.

Olive Jane Gooch was the daughter of John Gooch and Olive Winn who married 19 June 1802. Olive Winn was the daughter of Daniel Gooch and Olive ? b Oct 14, 1778. Olive and John's children were

Sarah b. 4 May 1803

Samuel b 2 Feb 1806 and d Dec. 1 1822

William b 1 Jan. 1809

John b 9 May 1812 d Sept. 12 1830

Olive b. 19 Aug 1822

Therefore: Olive stitched sampler in 1832, although she seems to have picked ou the year she did it, so as not to reveal her age in later years. It seems possible that there may have been more children born between John in 1812 and Olive a full ten years later, but Wells vital records don't mention them. On November 7, 1848, Olive married Walter Littlefield. Remember that, as it's about to become significant! They relocated to Melrose, Massachusetts, where she died on September 28, 1902.

 

 



 

Since Littlefield just about HAS to be the single most common surname in Wells, Ann was a little harder to track down then Olive Gooch. Ann's sampler, although very clearly related to the other four in the group by the interesting and intricate narrow black border also has flower elements in the wider border that have much in common with those used by Hannah Hill in her work. Ann Isabella Littlefield was the daughter of Walter Littlefield and his distant cousin, Isabelle Littlefield who married on September 27, 1817 in Wells. Their children were:

Albert born January 17, 1818 and died February 2, 1820

Walter born December 17, 1819--and who married Olive Gooch, and who died July 16, 1885

Mary Abby born June 22, 1821 who married first Andrew Jackson Webster and 2nd, Ralph Holmes

Ann Isabella born March 8, 1824, married Nahum Morrill, an attorney, relocated to Auburn, Maine and died after 1900, when she appeared on the census for the last time

Joshau born September 28, 1826, married Elizabeth Mitchell and died July 17, 1893

Emily Amanda born November 21, 1829 and died June 26, 1880.

 

The third AHS sampler was worked by Mary Abby, Ann's elder sister:

 

 

Hers, ever-so-delightfully--is the near twin of the one that was worked by Abigail Bragdon and is owned by Strawbery Banke--except it includes a pair of the quirky things--pinecones, perhaps?--that are a prominent feature of Hannah Hill's.

 

 

All of the samplers date between 1827 and 1832. All of them were completed between July and October, with three with September completion dates. Was it a school that was only open in the summer and fall, or is this just a coincidence?

 

As I have previously mentioned, this is a substantial body of work for a Maine academy, especially taking into consideration that it surely is not all that was done there. It's certainly possible that sisters of these sampler makers also completed works of their own and that more are tucked away or proudly displayed somewhere.

 

The identity of the teacher remains unknown, but may be discoverable with further research...

 

And here are the works of Abigail Bragdon and Hannah Hill:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn't the connection between them a joy: a style that evolved in the most charming way to create a delightful body of work?

 



 

Investigations and an Unexpected Find!

In my last post, I talked about the missing Fairfield coat of arms.  Since then, there has been a significant bit of progress, in that I have heard from the daughter-in-law of one of the children of the man who owned the coat of arms when Wynn Cowan Fairfield visited him, sometime before he printed the Fairfield genealogy in 1953--does that sound complicated, or what? Both of those two children are alive and well, and the family share an active connection, so I am ever so hopeful that one of them will remember seeing the coat of arms and recall what became of it.  And, of course, that it will be re-found (if missing at all!) and that it will relate to the Cutts family coat of arms that we have in the Saco Museum collection that we know was stitched at the Boston female academy of Eleanor Druitt.

But yesterday I made an unexpected find, as well.  For many years, I have known about the lovely family register sampler owned by the Wells Public Library, made by Hannah Hill. It was included in I My Needle Ply With Skill. Late last fall I learned of a related Wells, Maine sampler stitched by Abigail Bragdon and owned by Strawbery Banke. Although the two samplers are not nearly identical, they share a common dividing band and alphabets and enough other similarities that I believed they had been made under the instruction of the same as yet unidentified teacher in Wells. When I dropped the Flavilla Barker sampler off yesterday at the Androscoggin Historical Society in Auburn, the lady there very kindly showed me the rest of their samplers (which I hadn't previously known about.)

One was a rather plain marking sampler, badly faded, but the other three...egads! One is the twin of the sampler made by Hannah Hill. One is the twin of the sampler made by Abigail Bragdon and the third is an interesting hybrid of the two. I came unprepared for discoveries and didn't have my camera along. I tried to photograph them with my aged cell phone, but the pictures are wretched. I have asked the AHS people if they would please send me the girls' names and related dates, and to take a look back to see if they know who donated the samplers and when. Two of the AHS girls were Littlefield daughters, Littlefield being pretty much the most common surname in Wells. The third was (I believe it says) Olive I. Gooch. The fact that all three of these ended up in Auburn (not especially close to Wells) implies that they may have all been owned by the same family and passed down together, and that the three girls were most likely related.

As soon as I have the names, I'll get busy on the research on the girls. It would be particularly telling if they are also somehow related to Hannah Hill and Abigail Bragdon--although in my first go-round of research I found no connection between those two. If the whole group of girls turned out to be closely related, then I might begin to wonder if the samplers are not evidence of an academy, but that perhaps instead the whole group of girls were taught by some kindly--and talented--maiden aunt or something. Hannah's was made in 1827, Abigails in 1832, one of the ones at AHS in 1836, one I can't read, and the last made by Olive Gooch was stiched when she was ten, which would have been 1832, all of which says that if an academy was the source, it lasted for close to ten years--and I ought to somehow be able to find some record of it! Below are the two from our exhibit. As soon as I have presentable pictures of the other three, I'll post those as well.

 

The detective-ing continues!

Last fall I "discovered" that Wynn Cowan Fairfield in his book The Descendants of John Fairfield of Wenham described a pair of embroidered coats of arms that he had seen in around (I presume) 1953, since the book was published in 1954. One was incomplete but the other, worked by Betsey Fairfield, was in the possession of Dr. Mark Hopkins Fairfield of Newton Heights, Massachusetts. Betsey just happens to have been the sister of Sally Fairfield who worked this unfinished sampler that is owned by the Brick Store Museum in  Kennebunk, Maine. And Sally was from here--Saco, Maine.

 



Sally's work is very closely related to several others, including the Betsey Bentley sampler that sold here in Maine back in around 2009. Another very similar sampler was done by Grace Welsh in 1774 and was pictured between pages 74 and 75 in American Samplers (Bolton & Coe.) They felt that the also pictured Abigail Mears' work and the work of Elizabeth Pecker were sufficiently similar as to be connected. However, Mears' and Pecker's samplers, while they have a similar scene at the bottom as the others, are alphabet samplers. The dogs-chasing-stag is such a popular motif that I don't think it alone is enough to make a couple of samplers certain to be from the same academy--however much I'd like them to be! Sukey Makepeace's (also pictured in American Samplers) however, is defintely one of the group.
     It's probably likely that Sally Fairfield and her sister Betsey attended the same school, so, if we could find it, seeing a coat of arms that was worked there might go a long way toward telling us a little more, since the teaching of the embroidery of coats of arms was less common than that of samplers. I continue to believe that all of this work may have emerged from the school of Eleanor Druitt. Unfortunately, the reason I think that is hardly set in concrete. We know from letters and receipts here in Saco that Thomas Cutts and Seth Storer of Saco both sent their several daughters to Druitt's at the same time their very good friend John Fairfield, father of Sally and Betsey, (and also a resident of Saco,) was sending his daughters to a Boston female academy. There is no proof positive that they all sent their girls to the same school, but I could believe that it may have happened that way. Since we own--and several others are documented--a coat of arms worked at Druitt's, if Betsey's could be found, and if it were very similar, well, oh joy!
     But Dr. Mark Hopkins Ward's offspring are hard to trace! His daughter, Anna B., was born in around 1928, and his son Robert in about 1932 (both appear on the 1940 census in Newton Heights), but I have not been able to find death, or burial records for either Mark Ward or his wife, Anna Rathbun Ward, or any other records for their children, who may well be alive and somewhere.
     I have tried the Fairfield family genealogy website and contacted a person who had some info about Mark on a Genforum site, without luck. I'm waiting to hear back from the Newton Historical Society and I have posted a comment on the page of a person who put Mark's passport photo up on Ancestry.com, but who doesn't have an email link.
     It's always ironic how much easier it can be to track down someone born two hundred years ago that someone born only eighty or so years past.

A quick note: having fixed the problem, I just went ahead and "published" the draft I had been working on when I first encountered the difficulty. So now the last two posts are out of order. Sorry about that!

Once again, too long a time has lapsed since I last posted. That time was taken up by Christmas--and very welcome visits home from all of our (now grown) children. Immediately afterward, we had to rush to get our big Christmastime fundraising exhibit, the Festival of Trees, taken down so that we could begin to hang the sampler exhibit.

The samplers had been in our dark storage room, awaiting the big moment. On shelves, it was easy to lose track of just how large a collection 114 samplers really is. It took us--me, our new museum director Tara Raiselis, Collections Manager Camille Smalley and Education Manager Anna Kelly, about three hours just to carry them all up, one at a time, and position them around the big rear gallery of the museum. Our initial plan was to not install any of our portable walls, as we thought they might interrupt the "flow" of the exhibit--and because they are NOT at all portable. (New, really portable walls are on our wish list!)

It quickly became very clear that, even though the rear gallery is very large, we would have to hang the samplers one above another, three inches apart, all the way around the room, without the portable walls. That would mean that people would not be able to get a good close look at the stitchery because it would either be too high or too low. And where would we put the object labels?

Out came the portable walls--all of them. With all that additional wall space, what we ended up with is the samplers hung about six inches apart, all the way around the room, and three or four of the smaller ones hung one above another--and then they all fit. It looks so wonderful.

One of the more moving moments for me (and there were many) was when I hung the samplers of Sarah Jane and Julia Ann Patch next to each other. These two young women were first cousins who were born and raised in what was once and still remains a very small town: Otisfield, Maine, located over in the foothills of the White Mountains. Sarah Jane (1819-1847) and Julia Ann (1807-1848) died within a few months of each other, and are buried within ten feet of each other in a small, sunny cemetery that slopes down away from the road in Otisfield. I imagine Julia Ann watching over her younger cousin when they were children, and how Sarah Jane must have looked up to her as a role model. Perhaps this is a romanticized view of the two girls, but it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch for me. Neither ever married. Julia Ann's sampler belongs to the Otisfield Historical Society; it has never traveled far from home, since it was discovered not too many years ago in a trunk in the attic of her father's still-standing home. Sarah Jane's work traveled a different, more uncertain (at least for me) route, being purchased at auction several years ago by someone who lives in the Williamsburg, Virginia area.

When I hung the samplers side by side on the wall, I had to wonder when the last time these two pieces had been near each other. It was an amazing moment!

 

The Last Days of the Exhibit; A New find

The exhibit at the Saco Museum, "I My Needle Ply with Skill" runs for only two more days after today. After all the hard work, it's pretty sad to see it ending. Attendance has been very strong, especially given the time of year and the fact that we are in Maine. And that we've had a few snowstorms to compete with, as well.

If you have followed this (sadly negelcted) blog then you know that one of the outcomes of my research was to identify a very large--from my point of view--group of related Portland, Maine samplers. Yesterday, a friend brought me an unexpected gift, a copy of the book Samplers by Rebecca Scott who seems to be an antiques dealer in England. The last chapter of the book deals with American samplers and it includes a photograph of the sampler of Eliza Manley, completed in 1808, and yet another one for "my group" that I have, so far, attributed to the academy of Rachel Hall Neal.

Eliza Manley seems to have been the daughter of Daniel Manley, probably born in 1774 in Easton, Massachusetts. He married Catharine Fergeson and they were the parents of two children born in Easthampton, Massachusetts, Eliza on June 22, 1797. By the early 1800s, Daniel had relocated to Portland and Catharine had apparently died. [A quick observation here is that Easton is in far eastern Massachusetts, Easthampton is in western Massachusetts--not especially close by, and then we have Daniel appearing in Portland. Given his unsavory later history, perhaps he was a man who needed to get out of town--FAR out of town--frequently.] He married second Mehitable, and Portland vital records lists the birth of three more children with her before she died at age 35 in 1818. On September 2, 1816, Eliza Manley married George M. Gilliard of Eastport, Maine. She had given birth to two children by the time of her early death July 23, 1820. One of the interesting little tidbits that I discovered is that when her father died in 1837 in Portland the epitaph carved onto his gravestone read, "Portland's first bank robber"!

That sounded intriguing. Google being what it is, naturally I was able to get the backstory on Daniel with very few clicks. If you visit this link, you can read the tale, as well: strangemaine.blogspot.com/2006/06/portlands-first-bank-robber.html

Assuming that the blog is correct, it also provides some information about Daniel's employment: that he ran a small, bottom end store near the water. It seems that the men that sent their daughters to this female academy weren't always of the wealthiest sort. They were nearly always living in Portland, so Mrs. Neal perhaps didn't board her scholars but offered instruction to day students--a cheaper prospect for their parents.

Like most other samplers in the group, especially those made before 1817, Eliza's has a queen stitch border, her name is boldly spelled out, she includes the precise date of completion, and names Portland. About a third of the group have a cross stitch scene near the bottom. In almost every case where there is a scene, it features a three-storey house, a fence, and a pastoral scene. All of the samplers also include either one or two floral sprigs near the girl's name, and even after the teacher began having her students work the border in satin stitch, the sprig(s) always were done in queen stitch.

I had hoped to find a connection between Eliza and some of the other girls, or with Rachel, but I was not able to--not that that is especially surprising.

So I am back in the writing and researching mode and hopefully will be--now that I have somehow managed to fix a technical difficulty I was having with this blog and photos--writing lots more.
Don't forget that the book I My Needle Ply with Skill is available for sale on the Saco Museum website : www.sacomuseum.org