Early American Textile Repair: Darning Samplers at Westtown School

by Emily Whitted   

Thanks to support from a Decorative Arts Trust Research Grant, I traveled to Westtown School in West Chester, PA, for two days of research in their institutional archive. This visit greatly benefitted my dissertation in theHistory department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Westtown School, established as a Quaker boarding school in 1799, is the oldest continuously operating boarding school in the country. Westtown’s archive is particularly rich in educational needlework completed by its female students in the early 19th century. Their collection of over 30 darning samplers were invaluable for my dissertation project on early American textile repair work. Early American darning samplers are already quite rare objects in museum collections, so the sheer volume of Westtown’s samplers made this research trip unlike any other.

Many of Westtown’s samplers are photographed, but I needed to study these samplers in person to better determine whether students were in fact repairing damaged ground fabric with their needles or simply overlapping their darning stitches over intact woven fabric structures. The difference between these two techniques is critical. Darning samplers that overlap their stitches on existing woven fabric structures are exhibiting a decorative darning stitch, not one that was used to repair damaged fabric. These techniques, however, have historically been interpreted as the opposite. My onsite research confirmed that Westtown’s most distinctive darning sampler tradition, which also inspired Quaker darning sampler traditions at the Wilmington Boarding School in Delaware and the Providence School in Rhode Island, was firmly decorative. However, Westtown’s archives also contained several darning samplers made by Westtown students that actually repaired damage, in the tradition of England’s Ackworth School. Surviving examples made by the school’s earliest students reveal that students completed both types as a progression of their needlework education (figure 3).

Westtown’s archive also contains a rich collection of early 19th-century institutional records and correspondence between its students and their family members. Studying these letters helped illuminate the gendered differences between students’ clothing care. Female students were often expected to mend their own clothing, which they note when writing to their parents, while male students were totally reliant upon female labor to repair their clothing. The school employed women who were specifically hired to mend the boys clothing (figure 4), while correspondence between boys and their families often discuss sending clothing back and forth for their mothers to mend or modify.

As a welcome surprise, I discovered during my visit that Westtown also holds a relatively underutilized collection of clothing donated by former students or their descendants, spanning from the early 19th century to the present. I examined several early Quaker dresses, and multiple examples of needlework completed by early students, including infant caps and shifts, which were also mended. Comparing real-life examples of making and mending with needles with their sampler-based demonstrations of making and mending helps me to understand what portions of their instruction were practiced in real-life scenarios rather than in controlled, performative environments.

Together, my findings from studying Westtown’s darning samplers and their archival holdings will form the foundation for my dissertation chapter focused on mending and plain sewing education for early American women, and the broader landscape of textile labor. I am grateful to the Decorative Arts Trust for funding this critical research trip and for supporting my dissertation work.

Emily Whitted is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was a William L. Thompson Collections Fellow at the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation and participated in the 9th Annual Emerging Scholars Colloquium in January 2025. A recording of her lecture about Duncan Phyfe window seats is available on our YouTube channel.