Who was Betsy Andrews?
Our house, when we were growing up, was filled an assortment of furniture handed down through the family. These things often possessed intriguing names —The Pioneer Table, the Sewing table, Nana’s Desk, the Chocolate Set, and so forth. As a kid it seemed as if every room held a box or a chair or a dish that had story—or mystery— associated with it.
On the wall of the living room for many years there was a small, framed, sampler. A sampler was a relic artwork from earlier days when American girls practiced and demonstrated their needlework skills as well as their knowledge of letters and literature, by sewing an alphabet and often a passage onto a cloth backing. They are a beloved American folk art form.
The sampler in question was one of four, originally, according to mom. Three had come to us from Nana’s house. One, which is I believe at Tom’s house currently, was a square format, had the requisite alphabet and a passage about temperance. A second at Cassie’s was a list of the birthdates of long forgotten family members. Mom and Auntie Mim said at some point there had been another, that had part of the sampler hacked out of it—perhaps with birth dates, that somewhere along the way had been lost or thrown away. I never saw this one.
The sampler of which I write is small—about a foot and a half long, maybe ten inches wide off the top of my head.. It is the brown of dried fields. There are the faintest of traces of color if you really look at it. Oddly there were random letters and the numbers that stood out in a green color, and at the bottom are the green remnants of a geometric decoration of some sort.
When you look at the sampler, there is an alphabet sewn on it, and then the word Betsy, followed by what seem to be a random string of letters, ending with the date 1786.
This is how it looks on the sampler:
BetsyAndre wshersampl erwork’dinth e13ofherag e1786
As such, it hung on the wall as witness to many family Thanksgiving dinners and who knows how many college football games on TV.
Growing up among all these peculiar things has a way of flavoring your interest. While the furniture wasn’t a daily topic of conversation, their stories and origins did come up from time to time, most often as a short narrative, a brief anecdote about who it was believed they’d come from. Most of the things were believed to have come from one of two places (the Pioneer Table and Parlor Chairs excluded—they were McMurdo furniture). Some were associated with the Wile family of Philadelphia, and some from Norridgewock, Maine, where it was believe Mim and Mom’s grandfather Francis (possibly Frank in his time ) Wilder had been from.
One afternoon during a family gathering of some sort, I looked at the sampler as we probably all had at some point or many, and realized that the random letters held a name—“Andrews” after the word Betsy, and then a short sentence, not random letters at all.
“Betsy Andrews her sampler work’d in the 13 of her age 1786”
Betsy was a good needleworker, but her sentence structure left something to be desired, as she had not hyphenated the words in the sentence properly. As mom once remarked about an incorrect birth date on one of the Hadassah Thompson samplers, Betsy may have said to herself “To hell with it” and just got it done, sentence structure be damned.
On my short list of accomplishments in life, parsing out the Betsy Andrews sampler appears at some place.
As to who Betsy Andrews was and how her sampler ended up in a venerated location above the TV console in the dining room, no one could really say.
And so it lay for decades.
Part II: