Architectural samplers from Frederick County, Maryland.

American embroiderers have stitched architectural motifs on their samplers from the mid-eighteenth century on. This fascination with embroidered representations of buildings can be linked to a growing acquisition of consumer goods and the pursuit of gentility and refinement, one manifestation of which was the replacement of impermanent dwellings with more substantial multistoried houses of clapboard, brick, and stone in the fashionable and rigidly symmetrical Georgian style. (1)

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Maryland girls worked samplers with representations of buildings ranging from a simple house with a door flanked by two windows to multistoried mansions stitched with great architectural detail. (2) Best known to sampler collectors are Baltimore building samplers, published by Betty Ring and others, (3) which are identified by several stylistic motifs that endured over a period of about forty years, from about 1800 to 1840. Neat Georgian or Federal style houses sit on level ground in grassy yards enclosed by iron fences, often with ornamental gates. Graceful willows or abundant fruit trees flank the houses, and in many examples naturalistic representations of people, animals, and birds populate the yard. Elaborate borders of flowering vines tied with a blue bowknot are found on a number of examples, while others have simple strawberry vine borders.

Architectural samplers worked during the same period by girls living in central Maryland, especially Frederick County, reflect stylistic tendencies not found on building samplers worked elsewhere in Maryland. (4) They have their origins in German needlework traditions of Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania yet have assimilated features of English samplers, such as balanced compositions within wide borders. Frederick County architectural samplers are recognized by the placement of a brick building on a stepped terrace with descending rows of trees--usually spiky representations of pines. Stylized and naturalistic elements balance one another and float above and below the central building motif. Samplers from the eastern part of Frederick County also frequently show the influence of Quaker teaching. The architectural sampler design of a building set on a stepped terrace that was so popular in Frederick County carried into Virginia and Ohio, where girls, often with German surnames and family ties to Frederick County, worked almost indistinguishable samplers. (5)

Frederick County samplers can be differentiated from those worked in and near Philadelphia by their relative simplicity and sense of order. Commencing around 1789, Philadelphia samplers featured elaborate castlelike buildings on stepped terraces surrounded by a random placement of motifs. The solidly stitched foreground is enlivened by people and animals. (6)

With rolling hills and fertile valleys, Frederick County is the heart of central Maryland. It was formed in 1748 from parts of Prince George's and Baltimore Counties and named after Frederick Calvert (1731-1771), sixth Lord Baltimore and the last proprietary governor of Maryland. Over the years the area was considerably reduced in size by the formation of other counties. English-speaking people from counties in southern Maryland initially settled Frederick County in the 1730s. Prior to English settlement, German-speaking immigrants from the Palatinate had passed through the region as they migrated southward from Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania into the Valley of Virginia. Growing numbers of them remained in Frederick County and established settlements in the Monocacy Valley. During the second half of the eighteenth century, German immigration to the region increased, and Ulster Scots also migrated to the county, especially to the western uplands.

By the mid-1790s, when the French exile Francois Alexandre Frederic, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (1747-1827) passed through, the county was flourishing. He wrote in his journal, "Frederick-County contains about thirty-one thousand inhabitants .... The land is, in general, good and produces wheat, rye, barley, and Indian corn, in considerable quantities for the export trade of Baltimore, and also some hemp and flax." (7) A decade later the geographer Joseph Scott counted fifty grist, saw, or fulling mills and three paper mills and remarked on the abundance of iron ore, copper, slate, and limestone. He also noted furnaces and forges for manufacturing pig iron, holloware, and bar iron, as well as establishments "which carry on the manufacture of glass with much spirit." (8)