Maria Butler

An instructress of considerable skill was teaching girls in Leominster, a town north of Worcester, Massachusetts, for at least ten years beginning in 1806. There are several fully-developed samplers known that belong to this group and they all share the same unusual and praiseworthy composition and excellent needlework. They generally  feature an octagonal center outlined in satin stitched diamonds, surrounded with extraordinarily lovely vines of leaves and flowers. Each of the makers inscribed their work in a solidly stitched panel that forms the bottom of the octagon. Their pictorial elements vary slightly, but they all stitched the same verse. Martha Lincoln’s 1806 sampler was in the Theodore Kapnek Collection and is illustrated as figure 52 in A Gallery of American Samplers: The Theodore H. Kapnek Collection by Glee Krueger (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1978). Another, made by Laura Murdock in 1816, was published by Mary Jaene Edmonds, in Samplers and Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art 1700-1850 (Rizzoli, New York, 1991).

The sampler we offer now was made by Maria Butler in 1809; it was published in American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection, Vol. V (Highland Hose Publishers, 1974). It was the only sampler in this book and the Israel Sack provenance adds to its significance. Maria included a little house in the background of her pictorial scene, a charming addition not found on the other Leominster samplers. Notably, this sampler remains in its fine original gold leaf frame.

The eldest child of Abijah and Beulah (Fairbanks) Butler, Maria was born on September 14, 1796. Abijah Butler (1750-1822) was a church deacon in Leominster and a sergeant in Capt. David Wilder’s Company of Minute Men in the Revolutionary War. Maria married James Wood of Hancock, New Hampshire in 1820 and had five children. Maria died in 1854 and is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Leominster. Much family information is published in town histories and family genealogies.

Worked in silk on linen, it is in excellent condition and has been conservation mounted into its original gold leaf frame.