Betsy Andrews' Sampler
The Betsy Andrews sampler is one of the oldest heirlooms that we possess as a family. Faded brown for the most part and small in size, the sampler in my memory came to hang on the walls in our homes about 1967, shortly after the death of our grandmother, Flora Wilder. I'm not sure if she had it hanging in her own homes, but according to Cassie Hill, Flora (Nana) knew that it was a Wilder family relic.
Due to the age, the sampler is a little hard to read. Like most early American samplers, it has an alphabet sewn onto it, and then what seem to be a collection of random letters--all faded brown-- strung together, followed by the numbers 1787 in a more bold green. One of my memories as a kid of about thirteen or fourteen is looking at the sampler one day on the wall of our dining room in Berkeley, and suddenly realizing that the letters weren't random, but were words sewn on without spacing in between. the letters read:
"Betsy Andrews her sampler work'd in the 13 of her age, 1787"
I think I was the first person in our generation to have realized what it said. I know my mom was really interested in that little discovery.
But as to who Betsy Andrews was? None of us had a clue as to who she was, or where she, or the little sampler, had come from other than it made sense that something so old had belonged to someone from our family who had been forgotten in time.
The first link goes to the Betsy Andrews Sampler images.
A few years ago, I contacted a professor at the Univesity of Oregon named Dr. Lynn Anderson, who is collaborating with other scholars and American folk art experts on the creation of a database of colonial and early American samplers. In addition to documenting a given sampler's existence, it documents known information about the girls and women who created them, as well as their teachers, and the techniques, styles and materials employed in the creation of samplers.
Scans were created of the Betsy Andrews sampler and sent to Dr. Andrews and her colleagues for study. The link below are Dr. Anderson's comments on the sampler.