Sampler

Eleven-year-old Emily Ann Kittredge completed her sampler on September 5, 1826, two months following the July 4th celebration of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. John Quincy Adams was president of the United States and his father, John Adams, America’s second president died on that same July 4th anniversary, as did Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president. Even in the quiet bucolic farming community of Nelson, New Hampshire, where Emily lived and stitched her sampler, these historic events would have been celebrated and acknowledged.

In its finely executed, spare classic design, Emily’s carefully stitched sampler addressed this time and her community. Emily used a variety of stitches and includes a beautifully developed floral three-sided border of scrolling vines and open-blossomed pink roses. A second sawtooth border surrounds two alphabets and a four-line verse. Below that is a five-bay white clapboard Federal house with double chimneys, a fanlight over the front door, and a decorative balustrade. The house is flanked by leafy trees with a bird perched on the top branches. At the bottom of the sampler Emily signed and dated her sampler: "Emily Kittredge aged 11 years Nelson NH Sept. 5, 1826."

The verse Emily stitched is common to many New England samplers. The last sentence admonishes young women to divide their "youthful years" between "the book, the needle and the pen" and reflects the importance of educating young girls. Three other samplers in the Met collection have the same verse (Priscilla T. Glover (Salem, 1798: 1984.331.1) and Rebekah Munro (Providence, ca. 1791: 1984.331.13) and Betsey Alden (Cornish, NH, 1826: 1984.331.4). When Emily was of school age the area around Nelson had several schools, but her teacher and her school remain unknown.

Emily was born on February 2, 1815, the youngest of four daughters and four sons born to Joshua Kittredge (1761-1834) and his second wife Beulah Baker Kittredge (1768-1827). Her father ran a sawmill in Nelson, in southwestern New Hampshire and homesteaded a large farm on Center Pond Road where a culture of self-sufficiency engaged all the family members. Three years before Emily’s birth her father built a five-bay clapboard Federal house on this property using lumber he milled himself. The house is nearly identical to the one depicted on Emily’s sampler and is still lived in today.

When she was twenty-four, Emily married John Hopkins Ramsey (1815-1896) on November 19, 1839 in a ceremony conducted by the Rev. Josiah Ballard who served as the minister of Nelson’s Congregational Church from 1836 to 1839. By the time of the birth of their only child in 1844, Emily and John lived in Rockingham, Vermont, where John was a joiner and house carpenter. The 1870 U.S. Census records that John had retired and their son Alvah K. Ramsey (1844-1871) was living with them and employed at a woolen factory. Alvah died the following year at age 26 and Emily and John continued to live in their house, later attended to by a servant, Sarah Rand. John died in 1896 and Emily died nine years later at age 89.

Emily’s Will records the value her estate at $2,072.75. Both her home and personal property were auctioned off and Emily’s sampler was likely one of the lots sold with her personal property. The provenance or line of ownership of her sampler is unrecorded until it was purchased by the noted sampler collector, Barbara Schiff Sinauer. A twentieth-century New York City sampler collector, in 1984 Barbara Sinauer loaned three samplers to the American Wing’s exhibition, Rhode Island Needlework, and soon after donated her entire American and European sampler collection to the Metropolitan Museum.