ABSTRACT
In 1835, an anonymous writer in the hagerstown, Maryland newspaper lamented the decline of needlework that began in the early nineteenth century:
The closing of Westtown’s sewing room eight years later could be considered the symbolic final blow to needlework in schools, and samplers in particular. By the 1820s in england and 1830s in the united States, the making of map samplers and embroidered globes had all but ceased. A few, such as Sarah Shepard’s 1844 globes and some maps produced at public schools and Sunday schools were worked, but they were among the last schoolgirl map samplers. For a period in the 1850s and 1860s, maps of Palestine (or the holy Land) were made in religious classes or Sunday school classes to teach scripture and biblical geography; these normally showed the region at the time of Jesus Christ (Plate 40). The maps were made on both sides of the Atlantic; an anonymous British sampler dated 1867 is titled “Palestine in the Time of Our Saviour”; a nearly identical American map of Palestine was made by Christina Atchison at edmondson Public School. Others showed Palestinian tribal boundaries of the time, and may have been based on an 1858 map in A Hand-Atlas for Class Teaching by Walter McLeod.2 We have also noted some state map samplers made in public schools in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s (see Chapter 4). Most of these later maps are more crudely made than earlier examples, with fewer kinds of stitches and larger cross-stitches; they look more as we would expect the work of children than the finely stitched, elegant maps of the late eighteenth century.
