Poyen Family Record Sampler

The Poyen Family Record sampler is a beautiful and finely made sampler from ca. 1819. Family record samplers, which recorded the births, and sometimes the deaths, of members of a single family became popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when infant mortality was dropping, and the family unit had become more stable. The Poyen sampler clearly relates to others made in Essex County, Massachusetts, north of Boston. However, the story behind the Poyen family is anything but commonplace. The patriarch listed on the sampler, "Joseph Poyen" was actually Joseph Rochemont de Poyen de St. Sauveur (1767-1850) who was from an aristocratic French family who had settled on the island of Guadeloupe in the West Indies in about 1658 and raised sugarcane on their plantation there, using enslaved labor. Guadeloupe was considered a part of France proper, and when the French Revolution began in France in 1789, it also spread to Guadeloupe. Not only did the Republicans rise up against the Royalists, but there were a series of slave revolutions on the island as well. In 1792, after two of his brothers had been killed in the conflict, Joseph, his father Pierre, two other brothers and two sisters managed to gain passage on a brig moored off of Guadeloupe that was bound for Newburyport in Massachusetts. Since the de Poyen family’s sugarcane was part of the infamous triangle trade between West Africa for slaves, the West Indies for sugar, and New England for rum, the de Poyens probably had a relationship with someone on the ship. Newburyport was one of the biggest producers of rum (made from molasses derived from sugar cane) in New England, its waterfront once home to seventy distilleries.



De Poyen settled in the nearby "Rocks Village" area of Haverhill, dropped the aristocratic "de" from his name, and married Sally Elliott, the daughter of the well-to-do local tavernkeeper. They were eventually parents to nine children, only seven of whom were born and recorded at the time this sampler was made. While Poyen reportedly lived a happy life in his newly adopted country, the names of his children, such as "Mary Antoinette", "Francis Louis" and "John Saintsauveur" attest to his continuing loyalty to the deposed French monarchy, and to his aristocratic origins. While the overall design of the sampler has much in common with other high-style family record samplers from Essex County, there is one part of the design that seems unusual—the hexagonal lozenges in which the names are stitched, which alternate with diamond shapes, each of which hold a symmetrical three-budded sprig of flowers. These alternating hexagons and diamonds are highly reminiscent of the neoclassical printed cotton toiles produced by French factories such as Oberkampf in the first two decades of the nineteenth century; see for example Met textiles 26.238.6a. b, 26.238.9 a-f, and 26.238.17. While this design affinity may just be a coincidence, there is also some likelihood that a family still so closely bonded to its French origins had access to fashionable imported French fabrics.