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

Although I am a "mature" woman, I vividly remember giving birth (x5!). Getting the catalogue for our coming exhibition out the door to the printer, a goal still not yet achieved, is turning out to be a very similar experience, only far more protracted. Every time I *think* everything is pretty much set to go, there's another fly in the ointment...

Here are a few of the things that have been involved, and several of the pitfalls. The first thing--which goes back to a beginning, a couple of years ago--was locating and deciding on the samplers that would be included in the exhibit (and catalogue). My goal, however lofty, was to try to track down as many examples as possible of needlework styles from all across the state of Maine, but ones that were disctinctive enough to constitute separate bodies of work from particular teachers or academies. A high percentage of basic marking samplers just don't make that cut. They are lovely, but lack the ornamental elements that make a group distinctive. Not surprisingly, even when I found unique works that would help define groups, the owners were not always willing to loan. That has proven to be one of the most major of pitfalls. I had, for example, through the kindness of the collector, located a substantial group of first rate Maine pieces, several of which seemed to me to be of critical importance to the exhibit, if we were to meet the goal. In the end, the collector decided not to loan them. Ouch.

The second thing involved was to get good photographs of the works that would be in the catalogue. Prior to beginning this eneterprise, I had heard of dpi, but it meant little or nothing to me. Now it haunts my nightmares. The photos HAVE to be 300 dpi, (dots per inch) or they will look like murky messes on the printed page. Collecting the photos turned out to be another difficult problem. I needed them in order to get the pages set up. Sometimes it was very near impossible to get the photos in a timely fashion. I, in my innocence and--greater issue--ignorance, believed that I should set a goal of getting either the needlework here so we could have the photographs taken OR the photographs taken by the owners and sent to me, by mid-November. Stupid. These were two entirely different aspects of the project and the timeframe for them should also have been different. It would have been far wiser to aim for getting the photos of samplers owned by institutions last summer; then if there were delays, as there almost always are, I would have had plenty of time.

A secondary photography issue was that I wanted to include the photos of those wonderous pieces that were not going to be loaned, which I had taken photos of last winter=for research purposes--never intending them to be included in a catalogue. Those samplers ought to have been rephotographed by a professional, but a combination of factors eventually made that impossible. Worrying over that whole issue was really awful and it ending up coming down to the wire, making final formatting impossible until very late in the game.

The third thing was the writing. I write a lot. I like to write. I loved doing the research for the 125 or so bios of the sampler makers and perhaps another 20 or 30 of their teachers. In fact, now that all of the research is done, I'm experiencing some sad kind of withdrawal pains. But all of that took an enormous amount of time, and sadly, right in the midst of it, two key staff members left. That meant that a) they were no longer here to help with the bio research, b) time had to be spent finding replacement people, and c) I and one other remaining museum staff person had to try to do their work, in addition to our own.

Writing, Part B, involved that nasty business of editing, for which I confess to having only an average eye, or ability. As the issues, above, mounted, I found it harder and harder to sleep at night. Partly it was because I was working very late many nights; if I wasn't working late, I was fretting late (almost as much fun, right?) The less sleep I got, the worse I became at spotting the missing commas. One of the former staff people very kindly donated her time to edit the thing--no small feat--and sent all of her changes, neatly encapsulated within that Track Changes feature of Word. I think, somehow, that in accepting the changes, I "lost" a LOT of them, and then, unknowingly sent it back off to the designer still really needing an edit. That meant, when it came back again, for a final quick loo(!), it was still in need of a lot of attention.

I have signed a contract with virtualbookworm.com Publishing, who are very nice to work with so far, and the only on-demand publisher I could find that used 60 lb. paper, but I still don't have a book in their hands to print and the exhibit is really only a bit more than a month away right now. Egads! In a couple of days,when the manuscript is finally off to them--I HOPE!--I will write again about new sampler discoveries, which is a lot more fun for readers than my whining.

More than a month has gone by since my last post. This is a reflection of just how busy I have been preparing for the coming exhibit, rather than a show of a lack of interest. It's amazing how many "moving parts" all have to come together to get about 115 pieces of needlework here from all over the country, get bios written for all those embroiderers and for as many of their teachers as I can identify, AND make arrangements for the photography that has to happen for the publication. Another time-consuming element has been shopping between various on-demand publishers, trying to identify the best deal, and now, the final editing of all the publication materials. I did discover that, while the publication will be available for purchase on Amazon.com., it will be much more financially satisfactory (read that as we will make more money) if we can primarily sell them on-site. Amazon is an expensive but highly necessary piece to selling our publication.  But any profits from the book are going to help us defray the costs of the exhibit. I didn't expect such a large difference between Amazon sales and gift shop sales.

Since last I wrote, I have had the opportunity to visit and borrow needlework from the Pejepscot Historical Society in Brunswick, Maine and the Lincoln County Historical Society in Wiscasset, Maine, both coastal communities "downeast" of Portland. I knew I was borrowing from Pejepscot a sampler that was made, (according to the very early label on the back written by the sampler maker's daughter,) at Miss Hall's Infant School in Portland. Tracking down Miss Hall has so far eluded me. There was Martha Hall that appeared on the 1830 census as a head of household in Portland. A clue? Maybe, or maybe not. There were several male Hall heads of household in Portland that year, as well, and Miss Hall may have been the daughter of any of them.

But I came away from the Pejepscot's museum with a fabulous (totally unexpected!) example stitched by Frances Niles, probably made in Topsham, Maine. She had to add her name and verse sideways when she ran out of room on her meticulously stitched sampler. Or maybe she planned it that way all along? It doesn't match with any others I've seen so far. For another (unrelated) example of sideways stitching, see below.

Another recent and exciting discovery is of a sampler owned by Strawbery Banke, and being loaned for the exhibit. We were already borrowing a sampler owned by the Wells Public Library, which was the only one of its style I had seen. It turns out that there is ample evidence that the Strawbery Banke piece was stitched under the instruction of the same teacher.



The upper one is from the Wells Public Library. Take a look at the alphabets on both and the use of the black narrow border seen at the bottom of the upper sampler and throughout the second one. They are both spectacular and document an issue (question?) that I have previously reffered to when discussing Portland samplers. How similar do two peices have to be to attribute them to the same school? In Portland, that is a complicated question because there were many teachers with very closely related styles. Wells is a much smaller place; to date I have found no advertisements for female academies there, but these two works have enough features in common to make it highly likely that the same still-anonymous instructor taught both girls.

The most important thing to come to light in the last month, however, was that we were notified by the Coby Foundation, Ltd., of New York City that we would be receiving a grant of $18,000 in support of the exhibit and publication. That piece of news made me cry. The Saco Museum is not a large place. Between the Dyer Library and Saco Museum--both run by the non-profit Dyer Library Association--we have a staff of twenty. Most of those work at the library. The museum has only two full-time staff members. This exhibit would have gone forward, no matter whether we received any grant to support for it or not, but having the backing of the prestigious Coby Foundation not only seems like recognition for the hard, in depth work we are doing, but also means that we can do a better job.

Here is what the Coby Foundation says about itself on the website:

The Coby Foundation, Ltd., located in New York City, funds projects in the textile and needle arts field. Its funding is limited to non-profit organizations in the Mid-Atlantic and New England.

The Coby Foundation was established in 1994 by Irene Zambelli Silverman in honor of her mother, Irene Meladakis Zambelli. Mrs. Silverman described her mother as "the finest needlewoman in New York."

The majority of the Coby Foundation's support goes to exhibitions and education programs that combine excellent scholarship and effective interpretation. Projects may be in the arts or humanities, contemporary or historical, but all must have a public benefit. Such projects may include research and documentation, conservation, publication and Web projects. The Foundation supports only the direct costs of projects.

 

We are very grateful to Lynne Anderson for telling us about the foundation's work. We are thrilled to receive a grant from the Coby Foundation.

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.

Today my quest for the nugget of information that would somehow prove or disprove the attribution of the largest group of Portland samplers to the school of Rachel Hall Neal took a rather thought provoking twist. In order to fully understand the nature of the twist, we have to go all the way back to 1920 and the publication of American Samplers by Bolton & Coe.

All of you sampler people who might be reading this blog are familiar with Bolton & Coe. Those two ladies made a Herculean effort to identify and catalog all American samplers that they could find. The book is reproduced on the internet and reprints are also available. On pages 124-5, the book describes the Mary Jane Barker familiy register sampler made in 1818 in Portland. At the time it was owned by Mrs. Jesse B. Thomas who was in her late eighties. She reported that "Mary Jane went to Mme. Niel's School in Portland with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, hand in hand. They were playmates and near neighbors."

That information had also been picked up by Betty Ring who thought that the Barker sampler, if it could be found, would help to establish what samplers made in the Neal school might look like. It is the only sampler in Bolton & Coe that has a Neal attribution. Knowing that, a couple of months ago I began trying to find out what had become of the sampler. Surprisingly, I was able to determine that it had been sold at auction by Butterfields in 2000. It took me quite a while to track down the present location of the auction house as it had changed hands more than once in the intervening years, but eventually I did find them and they were kind enough to send me the auction catalog with a photo of Mary Jane's work. My hands were shaking (really!) when I opened the envelope and paged through the catalog looking for the sampler.

I was so disappointed when I found it! I was convinved that it would match well with the others I believed had been stitched at her school. It didn't. It has a queen stitch rose border and the roses are very like ones that had previously been made at the school in question, but by 1818 the work coming out of that school was so much more sophisticated and attractive than Mary Jane's. I tried to convince myself that perhaps this effort was plainer because of Mary Jane's youth (nine-years-old)  or that it was just a variation on a theme, but I didn't feel terrifically convinced. Here is a picture of it:



It's not a very good picture since it's scanned from a little one in the auction catalog, but you can look back on a previous posting and see Joanna Poole's work and notice all of the various differences.

As I mentioned, Mrs. Jesse Thomas, the sampler's owner, was an elderly woman when she met with either Bolton or Coe--or reported to them. She had been born in 1833 and was one of the younger children of Mary Jane Barker and Timothy Eastman. According to the provenance given at the auction, the sampler had first been inherited by Sarah Jane, Mary Jane's oldest daughter. At some point, perhaps when Sarah Jane died in 1900, it then passed to Abigail Eastman Thomas, who was 87 in 1920. By that time, no one seems to have remembered that Mary Jane's twin, Flavilla, had also worked a sampler.

After I first saw the sampler, I began to wonder a bit about the school attribution. I thought that perhaps H.W. Longfellow's sisters might attend the same school as he did and might also have worked samplers which would be proof positive of something. Maine Historical Society quickly straightened me out: they attended the Misses Mayo's school. It never, at that time, occured to me to wonder if H.W. Longfellow actually went to Mrs. Neal's. Today I found out that he DID NOT! Actually, he attended the school of Abigail Fellows, of whom I had never previously heard, and he only went there as a very young child.

I found further mention of Abigail Fellows in a very old book called Mothers of Maine that reported that she 1) taught H.W. Longfellow when he was very young, and 2) operated a school in a brick schoolhouse on Spring Street in Portland. I found her on the 1810 and 1820 census, living alone, and found in old newspaper records that she was the widow of Nathaniel Fellows of Boston who had had a sugarcane plantation in Havana, Cuba. He died in 1806. She seems to have relocated to Portland shortly thereafter as she was teaching Longfellow by 1807. She died in 1820 while on a visit to Havana where there were still Fellows living.

So, here's the question: Who taught Mary Jane and Flavilla? Mrs. Thomas apparently had one part of the story wrong, but which part? Either she was right about the name of the teacher but wrong about Longfellow being there, or she was right about Longfellow attending the same school, but didn't remember the name of the teacher correctly. The trouble is, we don't know what information, if any, might have been provided by anyone to "jog her memory"--if it needed jogging at all. (Or perhaps the girls first attended school with Longfellow at Fellows' and then without him at Neal's?)

Right now, I'm going with the theory that this sampler represents the work of Mrs. Fellows school. There's a fun little postscript to this tale, either way. A couple of weeks back I discovered the sampler of Flavilla Barker--identical to Mary Jane's--at the Androscoggin Historical Society in Lewiston. If the loan request is approved, it will be included in the exhibit. The whereabouts of Mary Jane's work are once again unknown. And that is why a database of these samplers would be a good idea; it's merely an extension of what Bolton & Coe were trying to accomplish in 1920!

Today, and for the past several days, I have been working on the biographies of the various sampler makers whose works will be included in the exhibit. Sometimes I get very lucky and when I Google a girl's name with some tidbit of objective information about her, like a birthdate, I come up with some fully researched family tree that takes me from cradle to grave of the young girl's life.

Other times, it's truly a stumper. Today I've had one of those days. The sampler in question is this one that is owned by the Newburyport Historical Society which is very generously loaning it for the exhibit. Clearly, it was made by Nancy Cushing. But who was Nancy Cushing? Partly, that's a little hard to find out because the Cushing name is a relatively common one in New England. We know that she was born about 1802. It looks to me like it says that her father's name was Joseph. She notes the births of two Williams who were her siblings, and the death of one. Intriguing is the death of Mehitabel Cobbet (or does that say something other than Cobbet--which is not at all a common name?) I thought that that Mehitable was likely her mother and that the Mehitabel Cushing was a sister named after her mother, which would be a rather likely possibility. So does the tombstone say Lydia Cushing nee Cobbet or Ldia Cushing McCobbetor McCobb et? I've tried most of my usual resources, but now I'm going for one last attempt, to randomly "fish" the census for the various Joseph Cushings to see if I can find some that seem like good prospects, and then hope to track down some vital records for those towns.

Nancy's sampler is one of a group of at least four I've found that are nearly identical and terrifically charming and artful. Another of the group was worked by Sophia Dyer who was the daughter of Caleb Dyer and Mary Randall. She was from Cape Elizabeth, a town very close to Portland, Maine. Her outstandingly preserved work is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was featured in all its splendid glory in an article by Betty Ring in The Magazine Antiques in 1988.

The period of time covered by this group is very brief, less than four years. Does that imply a school that was only open for some short period of time, or that I just haven't seen other samplers like these that span a greater range of years, or does this represent a style that evolved from an earlier one? There are some very interesting similarities between these four and some others, but it's very hard to know what their significance--if any--is.  And how many times will I say that?

Today is the day I have been looking forward to all week. I have spent the money to buy a one day subscription to Prices4antiques.com, as suggested by one of the couples who will be loaning needlework for "I My Needle Ply With Skill."  I already knew that this database contained records for about 2,000 antique samplers so it was with a great sense of anticipation that I signed on.

Of course, only a small portion of those were going to turn out to be Maine samplers, but still...the possibilities!  In the end, I first searched for "samplers" that named Maine, then I searched for "needlework" that named Maine, and finally I just went through all 2000 of them looking at the small photos, searching for ones that had not named a place but had Maine characteristics. Now my eyes hurt.

I came up with about 50 new samplers that I hadn't seen before. One of them almost certainly belongs to my largest group although it doesn't exhibit all of the characteristics I've come to associate with the them. But it so strongly resembles the others that I feel it must be related. I also found a few that connected to other samplers I have seen, which is always a nice find. What that appears to give me is--new groups!



This is Sarah Jordan's sampler. One of the ideas I have been considering is how connected a group of samplers must/should be in order for me to believe that they have a common source. ALL of the others in the group that I would like to add Sarah's to have a unique way of naming the girl's age (as I mentioned in a previous posting)" Aet 10 years" for example, followed by "Portland" and then the precise date when the sampler was completed. Clearly, Sarah's has none of these features, and what is a bit more interesting (oh, and intriguing--once again) is that she hasn't left room to add that information. For now, I'll have to call this one a definite maybe. Without the additional information like age and date, it's hard to be sure who this Sarah Jordan is.  Could she be the Sarah Jordan of Cape Elizabeth who died in Portland November 14, 1811? More research is needed. What I do feel certain of is that this is a Portland sampler and likely dates from ca. 1803 to perhaps as late as 1815.