Mary Belden,
Burlington, Connecticut,
1835

Sampler size:
23¼" x 17¼"

Price: $4800

Enlarged and Printer Version

The small town of Burlington, Connecticut, located 17 miles west of Hartford, was home to the family of Isaac and Sophia (Moses) Belden and their ten children. The ancestry of this Moses family is well documented through publications and can be traced back to John Moses who came to Plymouth, Massachusetts in the 1630s. His son removed to Connecticut where this very handsome and large sampler was made almost two centuries later.

Samplermaker, Mary Porter Belden, was born in 1820 and she worked this sampler in 1835 when she was 14 years old. Alphabets appear along the top of the sampler with an aphorism, "Learning is of more intrinsic value than gold or silver" at the bottom. The birth dates of all family members, from 1794 until 1834, were then carefully stitched. Inside an enclosure Mary presents a monument entitled "In memory of" and included the death dates of two of the siblings as well as that of her mother, who died earlier in the same year the sampler was made. The lengthy inscriptions account for much of the needlework but Mary decorated her sampler with a basket of flowers, two pairs of linked hearts and flower branches as corner elements.

In 1848, Mary married Aseph Fuller, a clockmaker, of nearby Bristol, Connecticut and they remained in Bristol. They had two children and their daughter, Mae, followed her father into the clock trade. Mary died in 1887 and her sampler descended in the family for many years. The sampler was worked in silk on linen and is in excellent condition. It has been conservation mounted and remains in its fine original beveled mahogany frame.

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