A Very Rare and Important Needlework Sampler, Lydia Stockton (1793-1863), Springfield Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, Dated 1804

Descended through the Stockton family;

Miss Mary Taylor Black (1823-1902), Mansfield, New Jersey;

American Art Galleries, New York, Part One of Mr. A.W. Drake's Famous Collections, March 12, 1913, lot 764;

M. Finkel & Daughter, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;

Katharine “Kitty Sue” Pease, Los Angeles, California.

Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe, American Samplers, (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1987) p. 227;

Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850, Volume 2, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 470;

Leslie and Peter Warwick, "Society of Friends: A Pictorial Needlework School in Burlington County, New Jersey," Antiques and Fine Art, Spring 2012, pp. 174-179;

Harold B. Nelson, "Sampler By Lydia Stockton (1793-1864)," Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013, p. 151;

Leslie and Peter Warwick, Love At First Sight: Discovering Stories About Folk Art & Antiques Collected by Two Generations & Three Families, (New Jersey: 2022), p. 167.

This pictorial needlework by Lydia Stockton is the newest discovery from the Burlington County, New Jersey sampler school. American folk art collectors, Peter and Leslie Warwick own a related needlework sampler created concurrently by Lydia Stockton's cousin, Ann Stockton, which they have extensively researched. Peter and Leslie note in their collecting memoir, Love at First Sight, p. 167, "We found six girls' needleworks and after our article was published, a seventh girl's needlework was found after a curator at the Huntington Hartford Library in California read our article and contacted us about a needlework from the school made by Lydia Stockton, a cousin of Ann Stockton." Coincidentally, these two rare needleworks created by cousins are reunited on the auction block today.

The seven related pictorial needleworks were all wrought by young girls who lived in Burlington County, New Jersey, in the year 1804 and attended the Upper Springfield Friends School. The seven include Ann Stockton, Sarah Gaskill, and Lydia Stockton, who all lived in Upper Springfield township, Nancy Platt and Ann Folwill, who lived in the neighboring town of Mansfield, Mary Bowker, who lived in Northhampton, now Mount Holly, and Mary Antrim, who lived in Burlington City. There were only two Quaker schools in Burlington County in 1804: Upper Springfield Friends School and Burlington City School, and it is most likely that all seven girls attended the first for several reasons. Six of the seven girls lived in Upper Springfield or in the adjacent and nearby towns of Mansfield and Mount Holly. Mary Antrim was the only girl who lived some distance of ten miles away and was not a Quaker; however, her father was aptly a weaver and Mary had relatives that lived in Upper Springfield, whom she could have stayed with in order to learn the art of needlework at the Upper Springfield Friends School. The similarities of the motifs used and the composition of these seven works indicate that they were at the same school with the same instructress in 1804, and since Ann Stockton’s and Sarah Gaskill’s relatives founded the Upper Springfields Friends School in 1788, they would have most likely attended that school. All the needleworks were dated 1804 except Mary Antrim’s, although there cannot be another time she could have made it, given that 1804 was the only year the instructresses taught “fancy” work. She surmounted her needlework with a calligraphic drawing completed in 1807. This work by Mary Antrim was formerly in the collection of Betty Ring, and sold as lot 616 in these rooms on January 22, 2012 for a record price of $1.07 million. 

The needleworks from the Upper Springfield Friends School were only made for one year and the practice was discontinued after a negative review by a examining school board. The Visiting Committee visited the Westtown School in Pennsylvania, the only Quaker school for secondary education at that time, and wrote a letter on July 11, 1804 requesting the instructresses to focus their teaching efforts on less superfluous tasks. “...the Girls have latterly got into the practice of making very superfluous Needle Work...designed for the purpose of framing and Exhibiting as pictures. [A]s this kind of Employment appears to be contrary to the Rules adopted for the Government of the School and the original design of the Institution. The visiting Committee are therefore Requested to Encourage the mistresses to use their Exertion to prevent such unnecessary works with the needle in the future.” As a result, Westtown School and the Upper Springfield Friends schools stopped making pictorial needleworks for the following nine years. Out of the surviving seven, only one is in a museum collection; the needlework by Ann Folwill (1791-1850) in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession number 54.1575, while the needlework by Mary Bowker (1795-1872) was stolen from the Burlington Historical Society in 2010 and whose location remains unknown. The needleworks by Nancy Platt (1792-?), Sarah (Erwin) Gaskill (1793-~1875), and Mary Antrim (1795-1884) are in private collections, and the remaining two works by Ann Stockton and her cousin Lydia Stockton were in private collections and are currently being offered at auction. See lot 44 for Ann Stockton's pictorial needlework.

Lydia Stockton made her pictorial needlework when she was ten-years-old, likely under the instruction of Lydia Bullock at the Upper Springfield Friends School. In 1804, the Westtown School in Pennsylvania was the only other Quaker school for secondary education where needlework was taught. The only two students from Upper Springfield who attended Westtown School before 1804 were Ann Gaskill and Lydia Bullock, as discovered through Westtown School list of attendee records by year. Ann Gaskill married Joseph Shinn in November 1803 and gave birth to her first child in August 1804, which eliminated her as the instructress, whereas Lydia Bullock graduated from Westtown in February 1804 and would have been eligible to be the needlework instructress in the spring. Additionally, there were strong family ties between the Bullock and Stockton families, both of whom invested in the school. Lydia’s father, Joseph Bullock, was on the committee to establish the Upper Springfield Friends School and her uncles had married her cousin Ann's aunts. Lydia Bullock's connections to the Upper Springfield Friends School through her father and her Stockton relatives involvement with the school's establishment, as well as her timeline of graduating from Westtown School, would have made her a likely candidate as the needlework instructress in 1804. For more information on Lydia Bullock and the Upper Springfield Friends School, see Leslie and Peter Warwick, "Society of Friends: A Pictorial Needlework School in Burlington County, New Jersey," Antiques and Fine Art, Spring 2012, pp. 174-179.

Lydia Stockton was born to parents Job Stockton (1766-1828) and Ann Ridgway (1771-1816) on October 30, 1793, the second of six children. Ann Stockton's father, Samuel (1759-1816), was Lydia's father's older brother, making the two first cousins and Ann one year older. The Stocktons were a prominent family in colonial New Jersey, who helped establish Princeton University and had ties to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Lydia's father, Job Stockton (1766-1828), was the grandson of Job Stockton, who built Bainbridge House in Princeton, and the great grandson of Richard Stockton, who owned large tracts of land which are now the city of Princeton and the campus of Princeton University. Samuel Stockton's second cousin once removed was Richard Stockton, "the Signer" of the Declaration of Independence and who built the Princeton mansion, Morven, with his wife, Annis Boudinot; one of America’s first published poets and the older sister of Elias Boudinot, the President of the Continental Congress at the signing of the Peace Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War. Elias Boudinot married Hannah Stockton, Richard Stockton's sister. Lydia Stockton passed away on August 25, 1863 in Burlington County, New Jersey and her needlework descended through her family.