Museum accessions.

The District of Columbia, created in 1790 as the capital of the United States, encompassed Georgetown, Maryland, at the north and Alexandria, Virginia, at the south surrounding the new city of Washington. Progress in building the area was slow, and for some time each of the three parts functioned as a separate enclave (Alexandria defected in 1847). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a good many people were coming to the district to participate in the government, the popularity of young women making samplers was at its height. Each of the three areas seems to have produced its own characteristic styles of needlework.

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Although there are strong indications that many new schools were started and that teachers came to give instruction in the needlework arts, there is a paucity of works remaining from these areas. Nevertheless, the surviving pictorial needlework has captured considerable interest among scholars and collectors, perhaps because of its rarity.

Two nineteenth-century samplers from what was then known as Washington City have recently been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The group to which they have the closest affinity are all architectural samplers dating from 1810 to 1826. Referred to as the Navy Yard samplers (there are perhaps a dozen), most of them were sewn by women who lived near or at the Washington Navy Yard, which in 1814 was still under construction. While they do not all show the same building, the buildings depicted are always of red brick with one or more white string courses. Moreover, the samplers all include triangular pine trees and share the soft colors of green, pink, blue, and yellow, wide floral borders with undulating vines, and abstract flowers.

Over time, various scholars have offered information and speculations about the group: Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett brought together a few examples in this magazine in April 1975, noting the buildings planned by Benjamin Latrobe for the Navy Yard in 1804 and 1805; Betty Ring expanded on the issue in Girlhood Embroidery in 1993, noting the probable influence of a Philadelphia teacher; and Kimberly Smith Ivey furthered the discussion in her book In the Neatest Manner in 1997.

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Although it might be surmised that the building shown in these two samplers was a real building at the Navy Yard, it most likely was not. The three-towered brick building ...