Sampler

This elegant sampler, with silk embroidery thread still retaining its original highly saturated colors, is a rare example of a sampler made by a girl from Delaware. (For another similar, although later piece in the collection, see 2013.957.2). It was made by thirteen-year-old Jane Wilson (1778-1869), who lived in an area called Mill Creek Hundred, situated in New Castle County in western Delaware, near Wilmington. Because New Castle County borders Pennsylvania and Maryland, the origins of Jane’s sampler, and a matching one by Hannah McIntire (1779-1867), dated 1790, in the collection of the Winterthur Museum (93.46), have been debated. It was thought that they might have been made in the larger neighboring states whose major cities had better known girls’ schools. In recent years, however, several examples of “fruit and flower” samplers like Jane’s have been documented to other Delaware girls. Because their design is unlike samplers from the 1790s that are documented to Philadelphia or Baltimore, it is now thought that they were made in a school in Wilmington, perhaps at first under the tutelage of an Abigail Giles. Delaware samplers show an affinity to the lay-out of late eighteenth-century samplers from the Boston area, notably the wide border filled with flowers surrounding a central rectangular reserve, and the zig-zag border. This has suggested that the original teacher might have been a transplant from Massachusetts to Delaware. Unlike the possibly related Massachusetts samplers, which tend to have less overtly religious verses, the pattern of bountiful flowers and lush fruit in Jane’s sampler is in keeping with her verse taken from Hymn 59 written by English Congregational minister and prolific hymn writer Isaac Watts (1674-1748). The hymn celebrates the blooming of lilies and the Rose of Sharon, both flowers commonly associated with Jesus Christ, purity, and rebirth.

Jane was the daughter of William Wilson (1726-1792), who was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania and Rebecca Young (1745-1791) from New Castle County, Delaware. The couple settled in New Castle County after marrying in 1770. Unfortunately, Jane’s mother died in 1791, the year she completed her sampler, and her father died the following year, leaving Jane an orphan at age fourteen. In 1798, when she was about twenty, Jane married Scottish immigrant William Thomson (1770-1831) in Philadelphia, where they continued to live for the rest of their lives. The couple had at least six children, four of whom reached adulthood. Jane lived to be ninety-one and is buried in the Old Pine Street Presbyterian Churchyard in Philadelphia.