Sampler

This large pictorial sampler features a grand five-bay, three story Federal house with an elegant balustrade or “widow’s walk” atop the roof line. Birds perch on leafy tree branches on either side of the house. The front yard is enclosed by a white fence with decoratively spaced spindles and a gate at each end with round post caps. The rendering that thirteen-year-old Mary Parker made of her house is typical of what a British traveler, John M. Duncan, observed on his 1818 tour through New England: “…the Houses are generally of wood, painted white, and decorated with Venetian Blinds of a brilliant green.” At the time, green was considered soothing to the eyes. As seen in Mary’s sampler, green was also the favored color for the slatted house shutters that New Englanders closed during summer days to protect themselves from the hot sun, flying bugs and dust from the dirt roads.

The rectangular center of Mary’s sampler has three bands of upper- and lower-case alphabets. The four-line verse above the scene of the cheerful house and garden is particularly grim, asking why Mary, although a young girl, wasn’t yet contemplating her own death on the very day she is stitching the sampler. The inscription at the bottom contains her name, age, where she lived, and the year she completed the sampler. The center is framed with three borders: a sawtooth inner border, a wide stylized carnation border, and a more delicate scrolling outer border.

Mary Parker’s ambitious needlework is one of three known samplers made by members of the Parker family of Pepperell, Massachusetts. Her sister, Sally Parker, made a sampler dated 1799, and their cousin Harriot Parker’s sampler is dated 1808 (these are both in private collections). While neither the teacher nor the school where these samplers were stitched has been identified, all three Parker family samplers are just the sort of “large and elaborate specimen of handiwork” that would have been “framed and glazed…[and] the chief ornament of the sitting room or best chamber,” as remembered by the diarist Sarah Anna Emery, in her 1879 book, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian.


Mary Parker was the daughter of Lemuel Parker Jr. (1762-1828) and Hannah Gilson Parker (1763-1813). Born in Pepperell, Massachusetts, on May 18, 1792, she was the fourth daughter of their eight children, all of whom lived to adulthood. On February 7, 1822, she married Dr. Nehemiah Cutter (1787-1859) in a ceremony in Pepperell officiated by the Rev. David Palmer. Mary was his second wife and they had no children. Dr. Cutter, a native of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, was a graduate of Middlebury College (Class of 1814) and received his M. D. from Yale College in 1817. A distinguished physician with a private practice in Pepperell, he established the Cutter Retreat, one of the first private psychiatric hospitals in America, which was active from 1834 to 1853. Mary died in Pepperell on August 16, 1835, at age 43.