Sampler

Peggy Ingraham’s sampler is one of two in The Met’s collection from an appealing group of Bristol, Rhode Island samplers that are attributed to the school of Anne Bowman Usher (1723-1793). The four known samplers worked at Mrs. Usher’s school between 1790 and 1793 share several embroidered motifs -- animated courting couples, a serenading flute player reading from a score on a music stand, and long-tailed birds, as seen on both Peggy’s sampler and that of her classmate, Martha “Patty” Coggeshall (14.26). Also characteristic of Mrs. Usher’s school, both samplers display a streaky sky, and in the worked alphabet, the letter “V” precedes the letter “U”. Peggy inscribed her name, birth date, and “Bristol” in a cartouche at the bottom of her sampler. Unlike the other Usher school samplers, she added a carefully worked three-bay Federal house with the first-floor windows open to bring in fresh air; and left her black background largely unfinished.

Peggy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on May 18, 1778, during the American Revolution, and was a member of the first generation of young women to grow up in the New Republic. Many of Peggy’s relatives were Bristol residents and she may have lived with them while attending the Usher School.

Between 1789 and 1793, one-third of Rhode Island’s merchant ships sailed from Bristol and the town’s booming economy was driven by the transatlantic slave trade. Hezekiah Usher, the husband of schoolmistress Anne Usher, owned an enslaved man named York who lived in the house shared with the students. Among the Usher School rules of behavior that were circulated to the students was the dictum: “You are to speak to the servant with mildness & if you have a request to make let it be with—will you be so kind as to do this or that.”

The eldest of four children, Peggy was the daughter of Providence housewright Simeon Ingraham (1749-1840) and Elizabeth Granger Ingraham (1754-1803). When she was twenty-one, Peggy married Charles Walter Spooner Jr. (ca. 1769-1809), a sea captain, on June 19, 1796. Charles was a direct descendant of William Spooner (1621-1684) who immigrated from Essex, England, to Massachusetts around 1637. Peggy and William lived in Newport, and later in Providence where they owned a house on a lot between Arnold and Transit Streets. Period advertisements record that Captain Spooner sailed to the Suriname on the northeast coast of South America and returned with molasses that he sold to Providence retailers for Bristol’s rum distilleries.


The Spooners had three daughters and two sons, born between 1800 and 1809. A month after the birth of their youngest child, on September 21, 1809, Captain Spooner died at sea on a return trip from Suriname. Insolvent, the following year, in October of 1810, Peggy’s Providence house and property were sold at auction by court order. She remained a widow and died nine years later in Newport on December 11, 1818, and is interred at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence near her husband and parents. Her five children, Ann, Joseph, Elizabeth, Susan, and Charles lived to adulthood. Her youngest son, Charles Stockman Spooner (1809-1890), married Amanda Malvina Rose (1813-1886) and they lived with their five children in Brooklyn, New York, where he was a prosperous jeweler.