Museum accessions.(Litchfield Female Academy and Charlotte Hopper Newcomb)(Brief Article)

Much has been written about the Litchfield Female Academy, a school in Litchfield, Connecticut, started by Sarah Pierce in 1792, and a plethora of documents from the school survive in private and public collections around the country, most notably the Litchfield Historical Society. There, among many other items, are letters, reminiscences, and diaries of students and teachers, textbooks used at the school, scrapbooks, and some of the works of art executed at the school--particularly watercolors and needlework pictures. To this treasure trove has been added yet another jewel in the form of the needlework picture illustrated above, which is accompanied by the journal kept by Charlotte Hopper Newcomb while she was a student at the school in 1809 and 1810 and in which she records her progress on the picture. Fortuitously, portraits of Charlotte and her husband also survive, and these, also illustrated here, have recently been acquired by the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio.

The seminal source of information about the Litchfield Female Academy was the myriad records gathered and organized in the 1890s by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. Her work and subsequent research (published in Chronicles of a Pioneer School from 1792 to 1833... [1903] and More Chronicles of a Pioneer School from 1792 to 1833 [1927]) reveal the names of more than two thousand girls who attended the school, and, while several Newcomb girls were among them, Charlotte was not, adding to the documentary significance of her journal. Born on July 20, 1795, Charlotte lived in Pleasant Valley, New York, a small Dutchess County village on the Hudson River, in a house built about 1760 that ...