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.