Marking the Country's 250th Anniversary with — Samplers
There is not much in the way of surviving evidence of how girls were educated during the pre- and post-Revolutionary period. However...
There are many ways in which the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is being celebrated. Here's one that may take some by surprise. It is the Vermont Sampler Driving Tour put together by the Vermont Sampler Initiative in cooperation with the national Sampler Archive through which one may visit museums, art galleries, libraries, and historical societies across Vermont to view samplers from those locations. This event runs from May to Columbus Day, October 2025. Among the locations for viewing local samplers is the Thetford Historical Society at the Bicentennial Building on Thetford Hill.
Why samplers, and what are samplers anyway?
A sampler is a piece of embroidery or cross-stitching that carries many implications. Samplers were not the result of mere hobbies; they were produced by girls as "specimens of achievement" demonstrating a girl's skill in needlework, especially among the well-to-do classes. Samplers were sometimes assigned school projects, performing as teaching tools for advanced cross-stitch and embroidery. Their greater goal was to help instill the social expectation that a proper girl was industrious and patient and had good taste and high moral standards. Completed samplers were displayed in the home to celebrate the character and accomplishment of the girl who produced them and, importantly, to serve as evidence of her qualities as a desirable wife.
The tradition of the sampler has a long history in 16th and 17th century England and Europe, but it goes back even further. A sampler was discovered in Peru that dated from around 200 BCE, and Egyptian samplers dating from 400 CE have been retrieved from burial grounds. Samplers are mentioned in texts from the mid 1400s and even in Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream (1595-96): Helena to Hermia "... We, Hermia ... Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler .…" English women carried this tradition to the New World in the 1600s.
The oldest samplers from Europe seemed to serve as "notebooks" for the needleworkers, where they would record new and interesting stitching patterns that they saw. In these works the examples of embroidery were sewn randomly as "spot samplers" and lacked the neatly ordered rows that characterized later samplers.
By the late 1700s in England and Europe, sampler production was moving into schools and academies for the daughters of the well-to-do. Designs changed to incorporate alphabets, numbers, and verses, along with buildings, landscapes, and plants on a square or rectangular piece of fabric. In colonial America, education was not widely available to people. Girls from families who could afford it were instructed in various feminine skills like needlework and painting, either from a private tutor or in a school run by women. After the Revolution, academic studies became more available to girls. Nonetheless, most would still have to learn sewing as one of the basic skills needed to maintain a household.
There is not much in the way of surviving evidence of how girls were educated during the pre- and post-Revolutionary period. However samplers illustrate that girls from families who could afford schooling knew the alphabet and numbers. The verses or other embroidered inscriptions, often religious in nature, spoke of the refinement and moral character of the girls who stitched them, as well as their skill with needle and thread.
A common theme unites the samplers on display at the Thetford Historical Society that marks the 250th Anniversary of the Revolution: the girls who stitched them were from the families of those who had fought in the Revolutionary War.
Take, for instance, the samplers by Luna and Linda Newcomb. Luna was born in Connecticut in 1781 and her parents, Bethuel and Mabel Newcomb, had moved to Thetford by 1784. Linda, the youngest of ten, was born in Thetford in 1802.
Bethuel Newcomb served in the army of the Revolution while in Connecticut in 1775 and fought in the battle of Bunker Hill. His personal account of the battle is remarkable:
"I fired my gun till it became so hot I couldn't hold it; stepped past where a soldier had fallen - caught his gun. We kept hearing someone calling "Retreat", but thought it was someone running away. Soon General Israel Putnam came on horseback - on a dead run, bareheaded, calling out "God curse you why don't you retreat. The British have almost surrounded you." Then we turned and ran up Bunker Hill - the grapeshot cutting down the grass between our legs as we ran. I was never wounded."
Bethuel Newcomb lived until 1826 and is buried in the East Thetford cemetery. His father, Jacob Newcomb, also joined the Revolutionary army. He died while in service after falling ill with camp disease in 1777.
Samplers were also used to provide proof of related-ness. Between 1818 and 1878, various laws were enacted that allotted pensions to servicemen or their widows and children. In order to be eligible, widows or surviving children were required to prove they were related to the former serviceman. This was not an easy task. Marriage records were often kept by the clergyman who had performed the wedding ceremony, rather than with an office of the colony or the state. Military discharge papers were frequently discarded as they seemed to have no further use. The difficult task of proving the validity of a pension claim was often performed by a middleman or agent who sought out additional evidence. People fell back on "unofficial" records like printed family registers, birth and baptismal certificates and, to a smaller extent, embroidered samplers. Conveniently, some samplers recorded names and birth dates while others displayed a whole register of family members.
Samplers are now valued by museums as records of early American female education. They may record locations and names of teachers and schools, as well as the names of the girls who embroidered them. This data can be cross-referenced to collections of letters, account books, newspapers, local history and other published commentary to enhance our appreciation of the lives of women in early America.