Sampler

At just ten years old, Betsey Davidson stitched this highly accomplished sampler as a memorial to her parents. Her mother, Mary Dinsmoor Davidson, died September 7th, 1805, and her father, Jesse Davidson, died a year later in 1806, the same year Betsy completed this work. The embroidered urn in the center of the sampler is inscribed with “M.D.”, her mother’s initials, and sampler’s verse is entitled “My Parents”. The final stanza concludes: “Oh shades of them I held so dear/ Your loved remembrance still I bear/ In my sad heart – thou livest there/ My Parents.”


Born in Windham, New Hampshire, at the time of her father’s death Betsey’s family was living in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where her father had remarried Rebecca Oaks in March of 1806. It is believed that Betsey attended the Charlestown school of M. Tufts, where she created this sampler. Her teacher remains unidentified beyond her name, which appears on another Charlestown sampler of a similar format made by Eliza W. Gale in 1813.


The sampler features three bands of alphabets and a row of numerals, a central decorative block, and the verse dedicated to her parents. She inscribed the center of the bottom reserve, “Betsy N. Davidson Charlestown Agd 10 Charlestown 1806”. A broad stylized floral vine border surrounds the four sides of the sampler, and the four outer corners feature eight-pointed stars.


Charlestown, Massachusetts, where the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on June 17, 1776, had been largely destroyed by British cannon-fire and was still being rebuilt when Betsey and her family lived there. Its rebuilding, led in part by architect Charles Bulfinch, brought the Federal style to the city, and the orderly symmetry, classical urn and eight-pointed stars in Betsy’s sampler reflect the post-Revolutionary American neo-classical aesthetic.


Betsey’s life remains undocumented until her marriage to Jonathan Baker, a New Hampshire native, on June 2, 1817, in Topsham, Maine, when she was twenty-six years old. The couple settled in Windham, New Hampshire, where Betsy was born and likely inherited property. There, Betsy and Jonathan raised their daughter and five sons, all born between 1818 and 1836. Of these, only two—George and James—survived childhood. Widowed in 1839, Betsey outlived both her sons and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 15, 1872, at age seventy-six. She is interred at Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.


The sampler Betsy created in the immediate aftermath of the death of her parents, is a testament to the resilience of a young girl, and the importance her descendants placed on the needlework memorial she created.