Sampler

Mary Ann Stauffer’s large pictorial sampler is one of a group of important Pennsylvania embroideries that are believed to have been made at Mrs. Buchanan’s School in Marietta, Pennsylvania. This attribution is based on shared patterns and overall embroidery techniques found in other Buchanan School samplers. The central area displays a grand two-story Federal public building or church with architectural details including window shutters, a fanlight over the front door and a colonnaded bell tower and spire. A towering willow tree with a curving trunk and feathery leaves is typical of other Buchanan School trees. Mary Ann’s elaborate stitched border features a strawberry vine terminating at the top with a bowknot. The sampler has an attached wide green silk ribbon border, which is decorated with a narrow pink silk ribbon gathered into a serpentine line and sewn down to form ellipses.

Mary Ann’s flawlessly stitched black silk inscription is written in both English and German. The first paragraph records in English that she made the sampler as a present for her uncle and aunt, Henry and Veronica Musselman. The next two paragraphs, written in German, include a Biblical verse taken from Peter 1:24-25. It is uncommon to find German text on an American sampler and even rarer to have a sampler inscribed in both English and German. These anomalies suggest that Mary Ann was bilingual, and interested in emphasizing her cultural heritage.

A nearly identical sampler by Mary Ann Stauffer was discovered in 2016, mounted in its original architectural mahogany frame. Both of her samplers share a building with a spire, a sweeping willow tree, grazing sheep, English and German language inscriptions, and a decorative ribboned border. She added a three-bay house to her second sampler and inscribed it as a gift to another uncle, Andrew B. Kauffman. Dated 1831, a year after The Met’s sampler, the inclusion of the house likely carried significance to Mary Ann and her family.

Born on December 9, 1781 in Hempfield, Lancaster County, Mary Ann was the daughter of Mennonites Martin Stauffer (1778-1873) and Maria Kaufmann Stauffer (1781-1838). She was the fourth-born of seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood. In 1832, Mary Ann married Henry Snavely (1801-1891) a member of another distinguished Mennonite Lancaster County family, and they had two sons and two daughters, Benjamin, Henry, Mary Ann, and Eliza. Henry Snavely owned and operated Snavely’s Mill for thirty years before giving it over to his son Henry, who apprenticed under his father and became a master miller. The close-knit Snavely children remained in the Lancaster area, and in 1860 Mary Ann and Henry lived with their son Henry and his family. The 1870 U.S. Census lists the senior Henry as retired with an estate valued at $10,000. At that time, they were living in their own home with Mary Ann’s father and a fourteen-year-old domestic servant.

“Widely known and universally respected,” Henry died on March 31, 1891, and his funeral was held at Kauffman’s Meeting House, founded by Mary Ann’s relatives. Five years later, eighty-six-year-old Mary Ann died on April 1st, 1896. Both Henry and Mary Ann were interred in Kauffman’s Mennonite Church Cemetery in Manheim, Lancaster County, the town where they had lived their entire lives.