Fancy samplers of New Bedford and Fairhaven, Massachusetts, 1805-1835.

In 1801 the harbor of New Bedford, Massachusetts, was lined with masts, its docks covered with enormous casks of whale oil, barrels, trunks, and bundles of assorted goods. It had taken time for the town and its industries to recover from the crippling attack of four thousand British troops on September 5, 1778, when members of the Society of Friends, which made up the majority of the population, had refused to take up arms. (1) But by the beginning of the century New Bedford had become a center for general freighting and whaling, even if it was not yet the leviathan-hunting capital of the world that it would become after the end of the War of 1812, with its British embargoes and the capturing of American whalers.

The town's four thousand-plus inhabitants were settled on both sides of the Acushnet River (see Fig. 4), joined by a bridge completed in 1801 that connected New Bedford on the western shore to the village of Fairhaven (then part of the town) on the east across Pope's Island. At the time, those living on the west side of the river were predominantly Quakers, and those on the east side were overwhelmingly Congregationalists. Both groups had been forced out of the Puritan communities of the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies in the seventeenth century and had established towns and villages along the Acushnet. (2) Members of New Bedford's Quaker meeting evidently set the tone among the wealthy of the town. The diarist Joseph Russell Anthony (1797-1840) wrote in 1823: "All the houses of New Bedford's wealthy men at this time were constructed upon the same design, which is attributed ... as an expression of the dominant influence of the social, religious and business life of the Society of Friends. In their zest to avoid ostentation, they adopted rigid uniformity of dress, speech, mode of living and style of house." (3)

Dissention, however, broke out among members of the Quaker community in 1823, prompted by the visitation preaching of a faction of Friends from Lynn and Salem, Massachusetts, whose members referred to themselves as New Lights and who disregarded the traditional practices and principles of the society--for example, visiting other churches to hear sermons, adopting fashionable dress, and drinking alcohol. (4) In New Bedford a number of wealthy Quaker families, including whaling merchants, manufacturers, and bankers, adopted this more liberal thinking, but in 1824 the more conservative Quakers succeeded in routing them out. As a result, many of New Bedford's New Lights left the Friends meeting to worship at the town's Unitarian Church, also located on the western side of the river. (5)

During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the financial vagaries of the whaling and freight industries, competing religious institutions, disbursed settlements, and dissention in the Quaker community all contributed to a pattern in New Bedford of short-lived girls' schools that produced samplers of diverse styles. The New Bedford Whaling Museum owns twenty-two examples and at least seventeen more are in local private collections. Seven are marking samplers with rows of alphabets in various lettering styles, a name, perhaps a verse or saying, but little if any ornamentation; and about twice that number are more accomplished and feature crenellated borders and floral motifs worked in counted stitches, such as cross and square eyelet. This article is concerned with a third group of samplers made in New Bedford. In addition to counted stitches, they feature floral components and borders worked in surface techniques, such as split stitch shading, satin stitch, and couching. The effect resembles the elegant, and more costly, silk-on-silk embroideries produced elsewhere in New England in this period, and perhaps reflects the uncertain economic conditions in New Bedford at the time.

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