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.