By STEPHEN BELCHER
Two hundred years ago, it was usual for young women to craft a piece of stitchery, embroidering a small piece of cloth with alphabets and numbers, perhaps in different styles, perhaps also with a verse and also design elements. They were usually signed and dated. It was something of a rite of passage and a demonstration of sewing skills at a time when many pieces of clothing were still hand-made at home.
There is now a national movement to document these examples of women’s art, with an active Vermont chapter (contact: Samplersvt@gmail.com or www.samplerarchive.org) They recently held an event in Essex Junction to record samplers.
The Pittsford Historical Society recently received two samplers, donated by a local household. We’ve had fun trying to determine who made them and how they ended up in Pittsford. They offered different challenges. One was a standard sampler, with alphabet, but no name: only the initials HS and the date 1804. The second was less a sampler than an embroidered thank-you note from one Christeen Baker at the Mayhew School in the Choctaw Nation in Mississippi, addressed to a Mrs. Hammond and dated 1830. There are other known examples of Christeen Baker’s work at the Colonial Williamsburg Museum and other places.
The connecting thread in Pittsford ran through the Bogue family. The donor’s grandmother was Elizabeth Stewart Bogue (1882–1926), who married a Henry Stimson in Pittsford in 1907 (they then lived in Maplewood, NJ, fairly close to the Belchers: a Pittsford colony). Elizabeth herself was born in Nebraska: her father, Willard Child Bogue, eloped with Annie Mathews and raised his family there. Elizabeth and her sister Anne came back to Pittsford in 1890 after their mother died and lived with their aunts Sarah and Jane. The aunts had moved from the Bogue farm to the Village Green, and then with a bequest from a brother who had made money in iron in NY, they built a house on Elm St.
Willard’s father was Thomas Fitch Bogue, the first of the family to spell his name that way (it was Booge before). In 1819, he married Elizabeth Stewart of Connecticut, who thus became Elizabeth Stewart Bogue. It should be noted that many of the early settlers of Pittsford came from Connecticut and maintained family ties. Elizabeth Stewart had an older sister, Henrietta, who died in 1814; here, it seems likely, we have the HS of the regular sampler. One sister dies, the other preserves a memento. But there is an alternate path, although both lead back to Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the child of Philo Stewart and Sarah Penfield Stewart (the Penfield name became connected with Pittsford). After Philo’s death, Sarah seems to have moved to Pittsford to live with her daughter (and did she bring her daughter’s sampler with her?); there, she met Thomas Hammond—a noteworthy figure in early Pittsford history—whose wife Hannah had died in 1819. They married. So here we have a Mrs. Hammond who might have been sent a token of thanks in 1830. Caverly’s account of Thomas Hammond cites in particular his piety and good works.
There is an alternate candidate, proposed by one of the sampler specialists: Louisa Chatterdon Hammond, who married German Hammond, son of Thomas, in 1820, and became active in missionary affairs. But they apparently lived in Brandon, and both of them died in Wisconsin. There is little record of their activities in Pittsford (German was a State Representative in 1828).
An incomplete exploration of newspaper records relating to Pittsford missionary activity, the family names, and the Choctaw failed to turn up a smoking gun. Caverly’s account of church activities in Pittsford mentions no missionary action (he’s also very weak on recognizing wives and their contributions). But in 1830, the Choctaw were very much in the news, including Vermont newspapers: they were settling disputes with the Chickasaw and preparing a treaty with the US government. It is sad to note that in 1831 the Choctaw were expelled from their lands in Mississippi and nearby states and sent on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma (there are still Choctaw in Mississippi).
So we have no direct evidence to link Sarah Penfield Stewart Hammond with the Mrs. Hammond named by Christeen Baker, save the simple fact that both samplers were passed down in Pittsford together and the simplest link seems to be through the Stewart women.
We have since learned of another sampler that was made in Pittsford by Olive Hendee in 1827. It was acquired by a local textile specialist. Looking into the provenance of this sampler offered a different sort of problem: there were two Olive Hendees at that time, both granddaughters of Caleb Hendee, one of Pittsford’s founding settlers. One, born in 1814, married a Josiah Leonard in 1836; a second, born in 1815, married a Roswell Woodcock in 1839. The Pittsford Historical Society has no records of the Woodcock family after the 1950s; the Leonard family, by contrast, continued strong and numerous until recent times. Shirley Leonard, widow of Elwin (who stands out in the list of Pittsford veterans), passed away in 2023. All their children lived out of state (per the records in Pittsford’s Second Century): by inference, the household was emptied and the sampler went on the market.
But the pattern is clear: houses get emptied, and the traces of history dissipate. It would be nice to see greater appreciation of the value of some of the relics. Samplers count large in possibilities: they were often framed to be preserved, and they document the past activity of women in the family. And they should be registered with the Sampler Project.
