Threads of Useful Learning: Westtown School Samplers

A new book, Threads of Useful Learning: Westtown School Samplers, authored by Westtown School archivist Mary Uhl Brooks, examines the needlework produced by Westtown students from 1799 until 1843, when sewing was removed from the curriculum.  This needlework – including several types of samplers such as darning, extract, marking, and medallion, along with embroidered celestial and terrestrial silk globes believed to have been made only at Westtown – is discussed in the context of the useful education and spiritual formation envisioned by the Quakers for their children.  Fully illustrated with pieces from Westtown School’s own extensive textile collection as well as others in museums and private collections, the book discusses this important schoolgirl needlework and the education, religious beliefs, and lives of the teachers and girls who created it. 

Westtown School (located in Chester County, Pennsylvania) was opened in 1799 by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to provide Quaker children with a useful education in an environment wholly dedicated to their spiritual formation. Establishment of this yearly meeting school resulted in part from a concern about the future of the sect as the discipline of members who lived contrary to Friends’ stated testimonies increased; material prosperity for many Quaker families in the city brought challenges to the testimony of plainness, viewed as an outward sign of disregard for other testimonies; and the Quaker testimony of pacifism set the faithful apart from their fellow colonists during a time of great political, social, and economic upheaval for Quakers in 18^th century Philadelphia.[1]

How to ensure the survival of the sect?  Look to the next generation.  As J. William Frost stated in The Quaker Family in America, the only way to preserve Quakerism at this time “was for the children to adopt, preserve, and pass the faith on to their descendants. The children had to hold to the truth with the same degree of fervor as their parents.”[2] Westtown School was to play a major role in immersing Quaker children – during their formative years – in the daily habits of silence and spiritual circumspection in a physical setting void of superfluous comforts, so that these children might develop an adherence to their faith which would last throughout their lifetimes. It was in this school setting that scores of Westtown girls made samplers, silk embroidered globes, and other works with the needle, all under the watchful eyes of the sewing teachers. 

Much of Westtown School was modeled on Ackworth School in England which had been founded by London Yearly Meeting in 1779.  Nearby Ackworth was York School for Girls, founded by Esther Tuke and others in 1785, which also influenced Westtown needlework.  (This school, also referred to as the School in Trinity Lane, preceded the York Quarterly Meeting Girls’ School, now the Mount School.)  Philadelphia Quakers maintained close ties with their ancestral homeland and some traveled throughout Great Britain as ministers, including George Dillwyn (with wife Sarah) and Rebecca Jones. After her journey throughout the area from 1784 to 1788, Jones returned to Philadelphia with firsthand knowledge of the operation of these Quaker schools—and a sampler made for her by a student at Ackworth in 1788.[3] The maker, Candia Power, included a passage from “Considerations on Pure Wisdom and Human Policy,” in Serious Considerations on Various Subjects of Importance (1773) by John Woolman, a close friend of Rebecca Jones.  The Westtown collection also includes two pieces from York School, one made for Sarah Dillwyn.[4] These samplers are evidence of the strong ties among Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic—and their vision for the education of Quaker children. The needlework that Westtown girls began stitching in 1799 — darning, extract, marking, and medallion samplers — all derived from the styles taught to their counterparts in England. Important, too, was the selection of Elizabeth Bellerby as Westtown’s first sewing teacher.  She had been a student at York School in England, so likely she was quite familiar with the needlework styles to be taught at Westtown.

Some two hundred years after the opening of Westtown, there still is a plentiful body of needlework samplers made by Westtown girls that examined as a whole offers a window into the sewing school at Westtown. A look at over 260 samplers positively identified as made by students while at Westtown (about a third of which are in the school’s collection) suggests what may have transpired in that classroom so long ago.  Was there a particular order in which the different types of samplers were made by a student?  Was there a type of sampler made most often? Did styles change over the decades that sewing was part of the curriculum?  And that ever vexing question: Does the use of variant spellings of the school name on the samplers (e.g., West Town, West-Town, Weston) follow a pattern?  The answer to the last question is no. It seems neither time period nor type of sampler dictated the spelling of the school name on a piece.

Activities in the sewing school were clearly intertwined with the school’s overall curriculum. (The course of studies was much the same for boys and girls at Westtown, though boys studied surveying while girls had lessons in sewing.) Darning and marking (alphabet) samplers are evidence of the Quaker vision of a useful education, offering girls practice in needlework skills employed for invisible mending as well as marking linens at home. Extract samplers with their pious and moral verses were part of the spiritual formation of the students.  Students were not allowed to bring any books to school, so all literature available to them (from which these verses likely were selected) was approved by the committee overseeing the school.  In the classroom and through needlework, girls were introduced to authors whose works would improve their literacy while providing spiritual inspiration and reflection. Nineteenth-century book lists and catalogues – and the rare books themselves – currently in the Westtown School archives confirm this link between the sewing activities of the girls and literary works used for lessons in reading and grammar. 

The embroidered globes were perhaps more about lessons in geography and astronomy than needlework. Quaker education has long included an emphasis on the natural sciences for both practical and spiritual reasons because the better one understands the physical world and its workings, the better one knows the Creator.  Despite the volume of student letters, committee minutes, and other documents in the school archives, no information has been discovered pointing to the conception of the fabric globes at Westtown.  But what is known about the school’s curriculum during its early years makes it plausible that a teacher (or teachers) – or perhaps an ambitious student – determined that girls could and should make silk embroidered globes, both terrestrial and celestial. Through this exercise, girls not only studied the locations of continents and countries, stars and planets, and the relationship of earth and sky, but they made their own tools to do so. Globe-making is one area of Westtown’s sewing school not influenced by Ackworth or York School. Map samplers were worked at those English schools, but there is no evidence that embroidered globes were made.

Architectural samplers from Westtown School are very few in number, but their brief appearance made clear the purpose of the sewing school--or, more pointedly – what was not the purpose of the sewing school or the school as a whole. Dates connected with three of the six known embroidered views of Westtown’s first school building suggest they were made in 1804, so it seems a reaction from the Acting Committee to this needlework was swift.  In the minutes from a meeting in May, 1804, following comments on “exceptionable” pieces copied by scholars into their piece books is this: “The [visiting] Committee also stated that the Girls have latterly got into the practice of making very superfluous Needle Work, called in the School fine pattern Samplers & Views of the Boarding School which are designed for the purpose of framing and Exhibiting as pictures, as this kind of Employment appears to be contrary to the Rules adopted for the government of the School and the original design of the Institution, the Visiting Committee are therefore Requested to Encourage the mistresses to use Exertion to prevent such unnecessary works with the needle in future.”[5] It seems that was the end of architectural samplers at Westtown.  Embroidering a piece of needlework for display was not an exercise that would cultivate a pious and humble spirit.

While the Acting Committee did not find architectural samplers appropriate for the sewing school at Westtown, other area Quaker schools and instructors apparently felt no such restriction. A number of samplers from Burlington County, New Jersey, featured Westtown School as the centerpiece of highly decorative pastoral scenes. Some samplers of this type were made under the instruction of former Westtown students.  These pieces demonstrate that highly decorative needlework was not unfamiliar to Quaker women and girls, but clearly was discouraged at Westtown. 

Or was it? Medallion and spot motif samplers cannot be described as lessons in useful needlework as darning and marking samplers were. The designs were not utilitarian, nor were any moral or spiritual lessons imparted as with extract samplers. Nor were the medallion and spot motif samplers plain in a manner similar to other Westtown sampler types. They were colorful and decorative, with an abundance of geometric medallions and floral and animal motifs arranged in stylistic fashion. How can these samplers be reconciled as part of the useful education at Westtown?

As with most Westtown samplers, medallion ones were derived from the needlework traditions of English Quaker schools. Sarah (Tuke) Grubb penned the following about instructing girls in needlework at York School, “And whilst careful attention is paid to their improvement in necessary needlework & knitting, all that’s thought merely ornamental is uniformly discouraged.”[6] But samplers such as these were made at both York and Ackworth and became highly associated with Quaker needlework in general.   The two known Westtown samplers dated 1799 (the school’s opening year) are both medallion samplers, including one by Mary Hill, so this sampler type was part of the sewing school curriculum from the start.[7]   But there was continual oversight of needlework produced at the school, both by the teachers who routinely examined pieces made by the girls and insisted pin cushions with ribbons and other items deemed too fancy be destroyed, and the Visiting Committee which continued to report to the Acting Committee about ornamental needlework in the school.[8]  But the medallion samplers were never questioned, perhaps because many of the motifs came from nature or because the samplers were part of the tradition of English needlework – or a combination of both.  A look at the large, extant body of Westtown School needlework has illuminated our understanding of the medallion samplers as well as the other sampler types produced over a period of decades at this Philadelphia-area Quaker boarding school known for its schoolgirl needlework.  

This article is based on Threads of Useful Learning: Westtown School Samplers which will be available in January 2016.  The book includes 105 catalog entries with full color illustrations of samplers and globes, plus lists of all known Westtown-made samplers and globes. Copies of the book can be ordered from the Westtown School store by going to https://www.westtown.edu/page.cfm?p=1000384.