Another "A-ha" moment: Mid-1750s Schoolgirl Needlework Pictures Done at Elizabeth Murray's Boston School

Had a fun discovery this week while visiting Historic Deerfield in Deerfield, MA. Lovely New England fall day, nostalgia in the air, leaves turning, Route Two beauty, mountains, antique homes, late summer flowers, it was a perfect day in my mind.

Probably Seventeenth-Century Connecticut River Valley Blanket Chest at the Ashley House.

We were making our way down "The Street" and we stepped into the historic Ashley House for a tour. I spied in the corner of the parlor a needlework picture on black silk and I instantly knew it had to have been done by someone at Elizabeth Murray's in the early 1750s. I love studying the incredible lost art of needlework and making connections between the young girls who did them. They were typically done by young girls before they got married, not after.

Lois Breck=Good Example

Lois Breck (1739?-1789). "The Death of Absalom," Biblical story, c1753. Created at Elizabeth Murray's Boston School for Girls, Cornhill Street. Source: Historic Deerfield.

Elizabeth Murray is probably the most well-known Boston female merchant of the eighteenth century. In her store she sold all sorts of imported goods for hat and dress making. She advertised a lot from 1751-1754 in the Boston papers.

Advertisement in The Boston Evening Post, March 25, 1751, Source: Early American Newspaper Database accessed via American Ancestors.

Born in Scotland, for brief time periods (1753-55 and the early 1760s) as a single young woman, Murray took on upper-class daughters from all over New Engand to teach them fine needlework skills, decorum, arithmetic, and how to keep merchant account books. The daughters of merchants were expected to help with the family business and a future husband.

Three of those young girls: Sarah Henshaw (Boston), Lois Breck (Springfield), and Faith Trumbull (Lebanon, CT) all attended the school probably in the summer/early fall of 1753. Faith attended the school the following year as an eleven-year old with her younger sister Mary and their cousin Betty Eliot.

Murray got married for the first time in 1755 and gave her school over to her friend and protege Jeanette Day, also of Cornhill Street.

In the early 1760s, now Mrs. James Smith, Elizabeth would come back to Boston and teach young girls again and/or help her proteges teach them. Teenager Faithy Trumbull, came back for a session and did her second masterpiece chimneypiece with Murray again or with one of Murray's proteges: Jeanette Day or the Cumings sisters. She would gift this second overmantel to her elder single brother Joseph at his home in Norwich (across the street from her future husband: Jedediah Huntington).

Gorgeous portrait of Mrs. James Smith (Elizabeth Murray) by John Singleton Copley c1769. She had quite an independent life for an eighteenth-century woman. I don't think she had children. Source: The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Thus, there are now identified three important pieces of Boston schoolgirl needlework pictures that can be grouped together and analyzed although the great needlework scholar Betty Ring already established the relationship between Henshaw and Trumbull in her masterpiece Girlhood Embroidery (1993). Thus, these three pictures were all done at Murray's finishing school on Cornhill Street in Boston in the 1753-5 period.

Faith Trumbull (Huntington)=Better Example

Faith Trumbull (1742/43-1775), "The Death of Absalom," The Lyman Allyn Museum, New London. Faithy, age 10, in 1753 filled in more of the silk canvas than Lois.

Sarah Henshaw=The Best!

Sarah Henshaw Henshaw (1738-1822), "The Death of Absalom," chimney piece or overmantel, c1753. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Creating an ambitious overmantel was achieved after doing a smaller picture. Overmantels displayed the wealth and education of a merchant or minister's daughter so she would make a good marriage. She married two years later at age seventeen.

Mrs. Joseph Henshaw (Sarah Henshaw) age 32 by Copley (1770). Five years later her brother and sister-in-law would watch over her childhood friend Faith as she tragically declined from depression and "fits." Portrait Source: The Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

Sarah Henshaw was roughly 15-16 years when she did her famous overmantel (or chimneypiece). Two years later, she married a cousin named Joseph Henshaw.

Interestingly during the Revolutionary War, Sarah's school mate, Faith Trumbull Huntington would stay with Sarah's brother and his wife, in Dedham, MA, in the fall of 1775. Faith, a very ill woman with clinical depression, was housed there to be near her husband Jedediah who tried to help her fight her deadly depression with the aid of Boston and army doctors. They all failed and Faith died by her own hand on November 24, 1775, the morning after Thanksgiving Day.

What Does This All Mean?

Some daughters of elite fathers (ministers or merchants), during the mid-eighteenth century, were sent to Boston to finish their "education." Having already learned rudimentary skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic at a local dame school or perhaps by a ministerial father, these lucky girls could go further if their father could afford it. In fact, in Faith's case, she had an excellent elementary education by Nathan Tisdale who had a tuition-based school in Lebanon, CT where she was from.

In each case, whether it be Jonathan Trumbull, Robert Breck, or Joshua Henshaw, the father was making a calculated investment in his daughter(s) to hope for as best a marriage as possible to potentially increase his own wealth, merchant connections, and/or status. All three of these young women did, in fact, marry well.