Schoolgirl samplers of Dover, New Hampshire

Magazine Antiques, August, 1997 by Rita F. Conant

The eight samplers illustrated in this article belong to a group of ten, all executed in the first decade of the nineteenth century, judging be the dates stitched into them by their makers.(1) Three of the young needleworkers (see Pls. IV, V) identify Dover, New Hampshire, as the place where they stitched their samplers, and the only documented teacher of needlework in Dover at the time was Sophia Cushing Hayes Wyatt (1781-1857). It appears that the samplers were all made under her tutelage at the part-time and full-time girl's schools she operated on and off in Dover at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Sophia Cushing, born in Dover, was the daughter of Elizabeth Cushing (1747-1817), a Quaker who never married. Sophia's grandfather was the Reverend Jonathan Cushing, a prominent Dover minister.(2) According to her autobiography, Sophia attended two of the best public schools in the country: one kept by the Reverend William Stone, and the other by the Reverend Jesse Appleton, both in Dover,(3) and both open to all pupils regardless of age, sex, means, or religion.

Sophia Cushing showed great promise, writing that

before I was thirteen, I had an invitation to teach a school in Meaderborough, in the upper part of Rochester, New Hampshire. I commenced the school with eighteen or twenty scholars, young men and women, and three babies. A school mistress in those days was a wonder, and especially one so young as thirteen.(4)

The next year, 1795, she went to a school in Dover run by William Brewster of nearby Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and she continued both attending school and teaching for the next three years.(5) In 1798 she married Jonathan Hayes (1778-1798), a Dover storekeeper. In the year of their marriage her husband took a quantity of English goods to the West Indies for sale, a voyage that resulted in his untimely death.(6) Sophia, who had no financial means of her own, arranged that their son, Charles, born in 1799, be brought up by his grandfather Aaron Hayes, also of Dover.(7)

Sophia opened a private morning school for girls in Dover, presumably in 1800, to judge by the dates stitched into the samplers in Plates I and II. In her autobiography, published in 1854, she called it

the first private school in Dover...commencing at five o'clock, and ending at eight....The young ladies who attended...were selected from fine families, and were ambitious each one to obtain useful knowledge....Many of those then young ladies are now wives of eminent gentlemen, placed in affluent circumstances, kind, affectionate mothers, and a great acquisition to society.(8)

When the morning school session was over, Hayes went to teach at the public District School in Dover, which had as many as seventy or eighty students.

In 1805 Sophia enrolled as a student in Gilmanton Academy in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, and in 1807 she attended Bradford Academy in Bradford, Massachusetts, where, besides higher instruction in English, she wrote that "considerable attention was bestowed in the department on painting and embroidery; a nice work sketch on satin, by means of a needle-work, then much in vogue."(9) She noted in her autobiography that she kept the satin embroideries she made at Bradford,(10) but they have not been located.

On her return to Dover Sophia opened a full-time private school for girls, which she advertised in the Sun. Dover Gazette and County Advertiser, of April 16, 1808:

Sophia Hayes respectfully informs the inhabitants of Dover, N.H. and its vicinity, that she intends to open a school for the purpose of teaching Reading Writing, English Grammar, Rhetoric, Geography, Drawing, Painting, Embroidery, and various kinds of Needlework. Four hours attendance in the forenoon, and four in the afternoon of every day of the week, Wednesday and Saturday afternoons excepted.

In 1811 Sophia left Dover for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she advertised in the New-Hampshire Gazette on April 2 that she intended to open a school "with the same subjects offered as in her previous schools in Dover." In October she married Samuel Wyatt, a cabinetmaker, and on March 31, 1812, she announced in the New-Hampshire Gazette that she would "open a private boarding school on Daniel Street for the instruction of young women." A painted mourning picture by Lydia Cogswell (see Pl. IV) survives from that school, bearing the Portsmouth label of the framer B. Cermenati dated 1812.(11)

The Wyatts moved back to Dover in the fall of 1812 because, Sophia wrote in her autobiography, the War of 1812 made Portsmouth "liable to great depredations, and many of the families left their homes to seek refuge...in different parts."(12) In May 1816 the couple became innkeepers, buying the Dover Hotel (later called Wyatt's Inn), which they ran until 1819. At that point they moved to Medford, Massachusetts, where they kept a hotel until they returned to Dover in 1826 and built the New Hampshire Hotel opposite Wyatt's Inn.(13)

In 1833 the Wyatts moved to Boston to operate the Marlborough Hotel, returning again to Dover in 1835 to reopen the New Hampshire Hotel as a temperance house. The venture failed in 1843 and sometime afterward they left Dover for good. Sophia died in Georgetown, Massachusetts, in 1857.(14)