Sophia Smith’s sampler is part of a distinctive group of Wethersfield, Connecticut, samplers made at two different schools during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Earlier examples were probably worked at the Abigail Goodrich School, which operated from around 1804 to 1815. Sophia’s is one of a later group of samplers, most likely made...

This sampler, worked by Abigail Mears in 1772, is related to a group of embroideries known as the “fishing lady pictures.” The name originally referred to Boston needlework featuring the same fishing lady, but now encompasses a variety of related pastoral compositions, with or without the fishing lady. From the 1760s, the same types of...

French-speaking Catholics, fleeing the bloody revolutions in France and the Caribbean, settled in large numbers in the Baltimore area. In 1791, priests from the Parisian Society of Saint Suplice established a seminary in west Baltimore conducting religious services in French, and it soon became the center of a rapidly-growing French community. Among the émigrés, both...