Jennifer Core and Julia Doyle, Tennessee Samplers

Today we are excited to be talking about samplers--needlework textiles created in the 19th century by young girls (and sometimes boys!) to teach them how to mend, monogram, and embellish their household fabrics. We speak with two textile experts, Julia Doyle, the curator of fashion and textiles at the Tennessee State Museum, and Jennifer Core, whose new book, Tennessee Samplers: Female Education and Domestic Arts, 1800–1900, written with Janet Hasson, has recently been released by the University of Tennessee Press. Julia and Jennifer help us understand how to identify key characteristics of samplers and share tips on preserving them for future generations.

Transcript

Celia Walker 0:06

Welcome to another Made in Tennessee Podcast, the program that delves into the stories behind collectible art and antiques from the state of Tennessee, the makers who brought them to life, and the cultural and historical context that shaped their creation. I'm Celia Walker here along with Sarah Campbell Drury, and today we're excited to be talking with two textile experts, Julia Doyle, the curator of Fashion and Textiles at the Tennessee State Museum, and Jennifer Core, whose new book, Tennessee Samplers, Female Education and Domestic Arts 1800 to 1900, written with Janet Hassan, has recently been released by the University of Tennessee Press. Julia and Jennifer will be speaking with us about Tennessee samplers. Welcome, Jennifer and Julia.

Sarah Campbell Drury 0:51

Thank you. Thank you. So let's start off by finding more about both of you. Julia, you want to start and tell us a little bit about how you became interested in samplers? Sure, thank you.

Julia Doyle 1:02

I first encountered samplers while I was still a student studying history. That was my initial area of study. When I was first introduced to them, they were for doing biographical and genealogical research. So I went to school in Massachusetts, and I had a lot of interest in New England and New England life prior to 1800. So samplers from different collections around the state would constantly come up in my research into different families and different examples of life prior to 1800 in New England. Later, I learned a bit more about samplers in graduate school. That's where I also read a bit more of the publications specifically about samplers, some of the different surveys that had been published re garding samplers. And then when I began working at the Tennessee State Museum in 2022, I started learning about samplers that were made in the southern United States. So when I began working at the Tennessee State Museum in 2022, it was there that I started learning about samplers that were made in the southern United States, which, different to my education prior, goes a lot longer than the 1800 cutoff. And my interest really became focused on samplers in connection to the history of female education, particularly in Tennessee, and using samplers to find different teachers, different schools, even examples of different curriculums. And when I started the State Museum, I was also introduced to the Tennessee Sampler Survey, which was conducted by Janet Hassan and Jennifer Core, who is with us today.

Sarah Campbell Drury 2:48

So, Jennifer, tell us more about how you stumbled upon an interest in samplers.

Jennifer Core 2:53

Well, I'm a needle worker. My mother taught me how to stitch when I was nine years old. And so I think I did my first sampler as a gift for my parents. I did it when I was 15 for their wedding anniversary. And so I just had always done it as a hobby. I went to graduate school at Indiana University at the Folklore Institute, and I found that my real interest was material culture. And so because I already knew about needlework from a practitioner's point of view, I started looking at it more from an academic point of view. And in the year 2000, I was recruited by the Tennessee Arts Commission to come to Nashville to spend the summer here working with the Tennessee State Museum's textile collection. And so at the time, Sheila Morris Green was the curator, and we spent time looking at the sampler collection, which I think was probably around 15 samplers at the time. And so I did come back to Nashville. I'm a Tennessee native, and I grew up and lived in Knoxville at the time. So I did come back to Nashville to work at the Tennessee Arts Commission. And it was through Candace Adelson, who was the next curator at the Tennessee State Museum, that I met Janet Hassan, my co-author. And Janet said, I was, I'm interested in samplers. And I said, I'm interested in samplers too, because as a state employee, I traveled around the state a lot. And anytime I've did a site visit, I would ask people, Do you have a sampler? And most of the time the answer would be no, or sometimes it would be, well, we have one. So Janet and I in the year 2004 joined together to form a nonprofit organization called the Tennessee Sampler Survey, with the idea that we were going to see what was out there to see what samplers could be found in the state of Tennessee. Because at the time there were probably only around 30 or so known Tennessee samplers. So we made up our minds using Janet's background as a curator from she had been at Bell Meade Plantation and Historic Site, and using my expertise as a stitcher and my background as a folklorist with material culture to join together our skills to see what we could find that was out there. [Sarah] And how many samplers are you at now? [Jennifer] 273 Tennessee samplers. And we also looked at and documented probably another hundred samplers that turned out not to be from Tennessee. But a lot of those, especially the really nice ones, were from Virginia. But anytime we found one from a surrounding state, we would go ahead and document it. Since there's not a lot known about Georgia samplers, there's not a lot known about Alabama samplers, we go ahead and document it in the hopes that one day somebody would pick up that research and go forth and find the rest of them that are in those particular states.

Celia Walker 5:50

So this may be a real basic question, but what are samplers? Some may not be familiar with the form.

Jennifer Core 5:56

Well, samplers are normally in the United States a classroom exercise. And what they do is allow a girl, usually a girl, the opportunity to practice basic needlework stitches. And a misconception is that it was done to teach literacy. That's not actually the case. Most girls were literate before they started making samplers. And so there's a three-tiered approach to sampler making in the educational system. So the first sampler a girl would make would be fairly simple, and it would just be the alphabet with a border surrounding it, usually. That's called a marking sampler, and that's because those initials, those letters, are used to mark or monogram household linens. The next stage of a sampler would be a more elaborate one, also including the alphabet, but maybe a more elaborate floral border or a scene along the bottom. I think if people want to imagine a little house with little sheep or something like that, that's very typical. If a girl stayed in school, her ultimate project would be a pictoral needlework. And that was often depicting a scene from the classics or from the Bible.

Julia Doyle 7:17

Yeah. And then when we're using samplers and research, there's just so many different avenues that they can be used for historical information and historical research. As Jennifer mentioned, samplers are often being done at school as part of the educational system. So when we look at samplers, they can be a great lens into understanding the spread of education in an area, knowing, you know, if samplers appear in an area starting at a certain time, that can give you hints as to when schools are being established. Some samplers also will have the name of the school on them. So that can be a great first step into research into locating a name and a location. It also a lot of samplers, unlike many other textiles, tend to have the maker's name on them because there is the alphabet and then typically the maker's name and often the year of make, too. So for a sampler maker whose name may have changed later in time after marriage, this can also be a very helpful first step. And some samplers that we have in the collection, and other people may have seen these, they will include additional information about the sampler maker's life. So they may include family information. They may include the names of their parents or their siblings, sometimes with birthdays. And this can be extremely helpful grounds for genealogical research. It also may just show you what the girl's interests are. If they're biblical verses, it can tell you a bit about the morals of the girl, what is valuable to her, what's valuable to her education, what's being taught at her school. So it's a great kind of social insight into women's lives and their surrounding areas.

Sarah Campbell Drury 9:23

One of the things that I love about samplers is that if if a girl made a sampler and she put her name on it, that name is not lost to history. Unlike the names of probably many of her friends who we we won't know and be discussing. But now, I mean, look at us here. We're, you know, 150, 200 years later, and we are talking about these young women and we're showcasing their work, and that just is so exciting to me. Um, and of course, we have a number of museums in Tennessee that focus on art, history, or natural collections, but I've always thought of the Tennessee State Museum as an encyclopedic collection covering many forms of our cultural heritage. Julia, can you tell us a bit about the museum's textile collections and why you chose samplers for this current exhibition?

Julia Doyle 10:08

Absolutely. So the Tennessee State Museum has a very large and very varied textile collection, which is a lot of fun to work with. But our collection really covers a very large range of topics. We, of course, have a collection of clothing, of both military clothing, of also typical civilian clothing. We also have a large collection of flags, we have a collection, large collection of quilts, and we also have a large collection of needlework, including our sampler collection. And last I checked, we have about 64 samplers in our collection. I say about because there's one or two that probably aren't really samplers, they're more embroidery pieces, but they look sampler-esque. And a large majority of those are made in Tennessee. So it is a great collection to work with. And the reason we chose samplers for the exhibit that's on display right now in our galleries is that we knew Jennifer and Janet's book would be being published in 2025. And it seemed a great opportunity to be able to join in on this sort of celebration of Tennessee samplers. We knew this book was very highly anticipated that it would bring a lot of focus onto Tennessee samplers. And it would be a great way to kind of highlight our collection while also sort of being a positive feedback loop. We would be able to then have the book in our gift shop and just keep informing each other. And almost all of the samplers in the exhibit, besides one or two that are supplemental little samplers made perhaps out of state, but they're related to somebody who was in state, are featured in the book. So it's also wonderful to be able to tell somebody about the publication by Jennifer and Janet and then have them come to the museum and see several of those samplers in person.

Celia Walker 12:08

It's a beautiful show. And I love the way you've used samplers in the design and you've also incorporated into the background images of the of the schools where a lot of these girls did the samplers. I'm curious if they're favorites that you might have. And Jennifer, I'm going to ask you the same thing. It's a hard question, I'm sure, but can you narrow it down?

Julia Doyle 12:29

This is a very hard question. I feel very attached to all the samplers in the exhibit. I think especially because you do get to know so much information about the maker, unlike a lot of textiles I work with, I feel very connected with a lot of these samplers because I know where this girl went to school and her parents and her siblings. So that's something very special about this. But there are a couple that I think, especially on display, are very striking. We have a pair of samplers by two sisters, Sarah Ann Brown and Elizabeth Brown. And I think that they're very beautiful on their own, but displayed side by side, they're a very striking pair. And every time I go to the exhibit, I do gravitate towards that corner to go look at them. And Elizabeth and Sarah Brown were from a wealthy family just outside of Franklin, Tennessee. And both girls, we have documentation that they attended Minerva College in Davidson County, but they also may have spent some time at the school, Franklin College, before Minerva. And the dates on the samplers are prior to when they would have been attending Minerva College. And so these samplers can tell us some insight into their lives prior to going off to this school. They clearly were being educated in some form, perhaps by their mother or a private teacher, or another school like Franklin College. And what's great is that Sarah Ann's sampler has the names of their mother and their father on it and their birthdays. So it is wonderful for genealogical research. This family is quite well documented because they were a very wealthy family. We have letters uh regarding their father's business, but it's great for kind of confirming what I'm researching, Sarah. And Brad is not an uncommon name. And so being able to have the parents' names on there is really great. And the pair together, even though they are two individual samplers, they're not copies of each other. The color schemes of them and also the stylistic similarities. When you look at them side by side, there are similarities in the border design. In the actual structure of the sampler, there's this inverted trapezoid. We'll figure out what shape that is. That does show this regional style that I think is really striking. So that's a pair that I really enjoy. And I like to show people when they come in to see it.

Jennifer Core 15:08

[Celia] Sounds great. Jennifer? [Jennifer] Well, I'm also very fond of the Brown Sisters samplers. I think that the Sarah Ann Brown sampler was the first sampler that we actually documented. And it's quite large and very the graphic appeal of it is very intense because the colors are still so bright. And it has this big, huge pomegranate border on it. And it has quite a bit of orange in it as well, which is sort of specific to Middle Tennessee. You also see that in quilts, the use of orange. And then we were contacted by a member of the family about the Elizabeth Brown sampler, and they also had a collection of letters that went along with it. And so we went to document it and discovered that these letters had been written between Sarah and Elizabeth when they were separated and at different schools. And the owner sort of hemmed and hawed with us. We were encouraging her to donate it to the State Museum. She didn't quite know what she wanted to do with it. And it did eventually end up at the State Museum, and the two sisters were reunited, which always makes us happy. We have quite a few sets of sisters who did samplers or cousins or mother-daughter teams in the book that shows how this was so strongly linked to uh the female line in the family. A lot of times when we were trying to find out how a sampler, if a sampler were from Tennessee, we would look at the donor's name and work backwards from that and the genealogy until we got to where we thought it would fit in that own family history. As far as my favorite samplers, my favorite East Tennessee sampler is the Jane Campbell sampler, which is circa 1830. And that sampler actually, I could say, kind of started us on this journey because when I was working that summer of 2000 at the State Museum, there was an auction, and those people who are in the decorative arts might remember the Spruill auction in Knoxville. And this sampler was part of that auction, and there was this great buzz about it because a Tennessee sampler was coming onto the market, and people were very excited about it. And so I said to the textile curator, Sheila, go get me that sampler. And she went to the auction and they were outbid, and they were outbid by the East Tennessee Historical Society. So the sampler actually stayed in the same county where it was made. So when they came back and said we couldn't get it, it's at the East Tennessee Historical Society. I said, Oh, well, that's okay. They're allowed to have a Knoxville sampler in their collection. And that one, the colors on that are still so pristine. It had never been framed. It had been kept probably in a trunk. It didn't have any crease marks on it. Um, the the front and the back were the same intensity of color. And the stitcher was very talented. She used 13 different stitches in the sampler. And that sampler also gave us a really interesting connection to samplers from Virginia because it shared a lot with samplers that were from the Lynchburg, Virginia area. My favorite Middle Tennessee sampler is the sampler that's on the cover of the book, the Alice Louise Boggus sampler, which is from Maury County. And another reason I'm so attracted to that is the intense color of it. And so, with the book cover design, the front of the book is the front of the sampler and the back of the book is the reverse of the sampler. And the front of it has these uh chartreuse and magenta and bright yellow and turquoise colors. And it's very well executed. And Alice was only 10 years old when she did it. And this particular sampler falls into a category that we decided to call the little dog samplers because they all had this motif of a little dog on them. And Alice, I think, has 10 little dogs. If you look in all the corners, she's tucked them in all around the edges. And Alice had a very interesting life. She was very well educated. She went to three different schools, and she grew up to become a teacher. And this sampler is still in the family and belongs to one of her descendants who's named after her, which I always love to uncover those family connections. And that's one reason people thought that there weren't samplers in the South, is because when we started doing this, I would say 95% of the samplers we documented were still in the family. And they wanted to keep the samplers. You know, a lot of times we had to re-reassure people that we weren't trying to poach the samplers from them and that we would keep their identities private if necessary. And since then, we now know that there are lots of samplers in Tennessee, and many more of them have come on the market and have gone into public collections like the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Tennessee State Museum, who are equipped to handle such fragile textiles.

Sarah Campbell Drury 20:18

I have one question about the little dog scene. Do we know the significance of these little black dogs, why they're there?

Jennifer Core 20:24

I think they were just cute and they represented domestication. You know, they represented something that the be part of the girls' everyday life. And I wouldn't say that each dog represents an individual specific dog because they are so stylized. But you can imagine if you're 10 years old and the way that samplers, what we're learning from looking at samplers from the same school is that there was room for choice for the students. So if I'm a teacher and I have a student and I say, okay, this semester, this term, you're going to be doing a sampler, and here's the colors you can pick from. You can pick pink and green or red and green, you know. And then here's here's the houses. There's two different houses you can put on your sampler. And also here's here's a motif, a little charted motif of a dog. Feel free, go out, put it wherever you want, make it any color you want. And so that's what they did. .

Sarah Campbell Drury 21:23

Well, they're very charming. They're very charming. And so, of course, you know, since I'm in the auction business, I I always think about things from a market standpoint. And we really have seen an increased interest in the market in Tennessee samplers. There was a record set case several years ago for a Mary Elizabeth Collins sampler that had the house, it had the verse, I mean, it had the Franklin, Tennessee noted on it, it had all the bells and whistles that sold for $30,000. So that right now is the current high, high price um at auction for a sampler. But, you know, we've also had the uh Isabella Baker sampler that was made in Knoxville in 1848 that brought about $17,000. That was a family register sampler, so very different in appearance because it listed her family members. And then, you know, I think probably the most recent sampler that we sold was in 2025, just earlier this year in January, made uh the Spring Hill Academy 1842, kind of a little bit more average looking in terms of, you know, samplers that brought $7,800. So, you know, these are we're not talking about insignificant sums for people who choose to invest in these samplers. Um a lot of the rest of us, like like me, we have to go to the State Museum and and see the samplers if we want to enjoy them visually. But I I'm curious to know, Julia, Jennifer, what do you think has generated this interest and these examples of early instruction? Julia, let's start with you.

Julia Doyle 22:57

I I think certainly, at least from my perspective, I think there's a better understanding of how samplers can be used in the historical narrative and historical research. I think that there is a lot of interest in women's history. And there's a lot of interest in domestic life, studying history, not through major events like war or major events like that, but also in the everyday. And I think samplers are an excellent lens into that because, like we said before, so many textiles, so many art that are made by women, both art intended to be art and art that is craft that becomes art later, don't tend to have great provenance. And samplers very often have a name attached to them. Even if they don't, sometimes you can do the research and find them, especially if, like Jennifer says, they've been in the family for a long time. And I think that really drives a lot of interest. I think, especially in the lives of young girls who are so underrepresented in museums a lot, samplers can be a great way to open that chapter. I also think that the genealogical research, that aspect has really grown. A lot of times when people tell me they're interested in samplers, it is usually from that angle. They're either interested in doing their own genealogical research or they've done it before. And certainly if you get into prominent families, if you get into well-known figures on the state, a sampler that has names listed for sure would drive a lot of interest. But also just in everyday people, there's that possibility to even if you have somebody's name, because a lot of the samplers on our collection are made, you know, in the mid-1800s. So their name might be on the census, so we may have their marriage record. But there is something a lot more personal about having a sampler versus just we know this woman's name, we know she was born this year, we know she died this year. So I think that certainly drives a lot of interest. And they're also just beautiful, beautiful pieces. They're they display well, they're fairly easy to store in a museum collection for certain. Even if you're a private collector, I'm sure they're just beautiful to look at.

Jennifer Core 25:30

[Julia] And Jennifer, if you... [Jennifer] I think that there's actually probably always been an interest specifically in Tennessee samplers, because there was this um perception of scarcity, and so therefore they were valuable to collectors because they did so rarely come on the market. I think that there is also a a needle worker industry, people who are actively practitioners of needlework. And so it starts off where you might do a small sampler kit, and then you want to challenge yourself and you do a larger one, and then you get into hand-dyed linens and silks, and then you think, well, maybe I want an old one too, you know. And some people buy samplers with the uh intention of reproducing them. Designers sometimes do that. And there's uh a huge cadre of people who are stitching every day, who are specifically interested in samplers. And so they are looking at this and saying, wow, that girl did that when she was 10 years old, and she did a whole row of queen stitches, or she did a whole row of rice stitches, and I'm middle-aged and I don't know how to do that stitch. I want to challenge myself and learn how to do that. So there's also an appetite for learning about the techniques. And I think when you have the benefit of an exhibit like is currently at the Tennessee State Museum, and you can see how they connect to one another. So you're not, it's not just this one individual girl who made it, but she's representative of her whole class. So for every sampler that we find, there might be five more like it that are out there. So sometimes I think the hunt, you know, you you know what I'm talking about, Sarah, the hunt and trying to find something. And um, I'm not a collector myself, but we we dealt with many collectors, all of whom were incredibly generous to us and allowed us access to their collections and and threw their homes open to us. And so I think that people wanting to do samplers themselves, people wanting to surround themselves with beautiful things, and then the stories that accompany the samplers are what are making them so appealing in today's market.

Celia Walker 27:52

You know, it's really interesting to be with you all and look at samplers together because you'll go, oh, "that's West Tennessee," or "that looks like East Tennessee to me". And I'm thinking, I don't have this connoisseurship.

Jennifer Core 28:04

Well, as Julia has said, many times it has the name of the place on the sampler. So I like to say that samplers are the perfect object to study because it has the name of the maker, it has the year, it has the place, it might have her parents' names, it might have her teachers' names, her school name on it. So in addition to all of those bits of information, there are also particular styles or motifs that show up in different parts across the state. And here in Tennessee, you know, we're the three states in one: East, Middle, and West, everything is dictated by that. If you're part of a statewide organization, you have to have multiples of three on your board, or if you have a meeting in East Tennessee, you have to go to West Tennessee so that you can be fair. And those same material cultural differences that show up in the architecture and in the fences and in the pottery and in the quilts and in the coverlets also are showing up in samplers. And so a lot of what we got into in the book was the pattern of settlement, you know, as people are coming from the east and moving westward across the state. I wouldn't say that West Tennessee has fewer samplers, but if you look at comparable studies for silver or pottery or quilts or something like that, you do see a drop-off. And it may be that we're just not looking in the right places. It may be because West Tennessee was open to settlement in 1838, and so that's coming after quite a few samplers and schools have already been established in East and Middle Tennessee. It may be the infrastructure, it may be because West Tennessee was more dependent upon the rivers and less so upon railroads or roads, and it may be also a question of population as well. So there, I'm sure there's more West Tennessee samplers. Sarah just found one a few weeks ago that we didn't know about. So um, but yes, once you start getting into it, you do see that there are briefly East Tennessee samplers tend to be long and narrow, worked in silk on a high count linen. Middle Tennessee samplers tend to be square, quite large, you know, between 17 and 25 inches square, and oftentimes are worked with wool on a large count linen and uh show a heavy influence from printed materials from Germany, actually, from um patterns that would have been coming out of Germany from in the mid-19th century. [Celia] That's fascinating.

Celia Walker 30:48

So those who are so lucky to have a sampler, can you advise us about how they should care for that?

Julia Doyle 30:55

So if you have a sampler, if perhaps you have one descended from your family or you've recently purchased one, you want to know how to take care of it at the home, the I think most important step probably is to avoid light exposure. Textiles are very light sensitive, and light exposure damage is cumulative, so it builds up over time, and it's also irreversible. So the fading, especially with samplers, that beautiful color that really makes them so vibrant, uh, that will fade if exposed to too much light. And that's especially with UV light. So sunlight is a big enemy, but also if you have UV lights in your house. Uh so I typically just recommend keeping them in an interior room away from windows. Uh I don't recommend storing samplers in an attic or a basement. Uh I don't hear much about them being stored in basements, but I do hear attics, which is usually people trying to avoid the windows, keeping them in a trunk or a family storage in an attic. You want to keep it basically away from where you might be exposed to water leaks or pests. So uh obviously water can be damaging to textiles. Pests, if you have a sampler with wool on it, moths are gonna want to eat that. So really kind of keep it where you would be most comfortable. That's in general with textiles, wherever you would be most comfortable in the house is probably gonna be where they're most comfortable. Somewhere temperate, somewhere that's not super bright, somewhere where there's no water, somewhere where there's no pests. And if you just keep them in a box of some sort, that will keep the light off of them. I usually suggest just storing samplers uh flat. If you can put a board under them, like a blue board or a some sort of you know, cardstock board, that may also help you when you're moving it. Uh, you want to handle it fairly infrequently just to avoid tugging or getting the oils from your fingers on it. But if you have a board, you can pick the whole board up and move the sampler flat. That's what we do at the museum, and that helps a lot with just limiting the actual touching of the sampler. And and an acid-free board, right? Yes, not like a plank. Blue board is best. That may not be available to all consumers, but yeah, generally acid-free. If you can get acid-free, that is what we would recommend.

Sarah Campbell Drury 33:23

Yeah, and you can get acid-free tissue paper, you know, online. That's pretty easy to acquire.

Julia Doyle 33:27

Yes, you can, which is the power of the internet. Um, but yes, if you pack it with some acid-free tissue and just store it in a box away from open windows. I do know the samplers, they are very personal. There is a family importance. So sometimes people do want to display them. But if you follow these steps for the storage portion, it will be some preventative care and it will help extend the life of the sampler.

Jennifer Core 33:52

So I just want to echo what uh Julia said that light is your great enemy. And one thing that I would advise people to do is if you have a Tennessee sampler that we haven't documented to reach out so that I can uh keep track of it because we're still we're still documenting them as they come in, um, adding to our big database. The other thing I would say is to keep the history with the piece. So when we documented a sampler, we would generate an 8x10 photograph, a genealogy, and a technical report. And we would tell people, put this in an envelope and put it on the back of the frame. Because there were many times that there was a sampler that we were sort of stumped on, and somebody would say, Oh, they would know through family history. Well, those initials stand for this. And then we would be able to find the maker that way, or we would be able to find out which Annis Franklin Kyle it was, because there's two of them. And so to me, what makes samplers so special is the stories that they tell. And when you separate that from them, then they become merely decorative. They don't signify more than what they are in that actual piece. And so if you if you know where this sampler came from, please don't just write down on it, my great-great-granny made this. You know, write down my great-grandmother and tell me her name and when she was born and where she lived, made this and gave it to me in this particular year, because we do sometimes come across those little notes like that. And one sampler that's in the Tennessee State Museum's collection, but it's not on display now, but it didn't have a name on the front. It had the date to 1862, and it had the alphabet and some scattered motifs. And whoever had accessioned this particular piece into the collection had very wisely retained how it had been framed. And so they kept the piece of cardboard that was on the back. They took the cardboard away because cardboard is evil and will hurt your sampler. But on the back of the cardboard on the framing, it said, Artemis Steagel made this sampler while sitting with his sick mother. And that is the only sampler made by a boy that we found in the state of Tennessee. And if that had not been written on the back of the framing, we would never have known where that sampler came from. We would never have known that was a Rome County sampler. And we did research on it and we found that Richard Artemis Steagel III, that's his full name, would have been better if they put down the full name, but Artemis was a rare enough name that we were able to find him. He his mother survived her illness and later lived with him after he was married and had his own family. So that was just a really neat clue and made unlocking the whole story behind that sampler possible. So, Jennifer, how do folks reach you if they do have a sampler? We have a website, it's Tennesseesamplers.com, and my email address is Jen@ TennesseeSamplers.com, and Tennessee is spelled all the way out on both of those. [Sarah] And how can people acquire your book? [Jennifer] Ah, good question. It's available through UT Press, and their website is uh University of Tennessee Press, UT Press.org. [Sarah] And then Julia, tell us about the exhibit.

Julia Doyle 37:15

How long will it be up? Yes, so the exhibit is in the main galleries of the Tennessee State Museum. So when you enter the galleries, it will just be right in the main galleries off of First Peoples. Our guest services desk can also provide directions. It will be up through next spring, the spring of 2026. We don't have a set closed date yet as we just figure out when it will be closed in conjunction with our other exhibits. But you do have a little bit of time to come and see it. And yeah.

Celia Walker 37:46

And folks can reach you, Julia, through the State Museum's website, right?

Julia Doyle 37:49

Yes. Uh folks can contact me through the Tennessee State Museum. My email address is julia.doyle@ tn.gov, and that is just TN, the initials. And they can also call the Tennessee State Museum, and they can either forward the call directly to my phone or send me an email with your inquiry, and I will respond to it.

Celia Walker 38:14

Our show is edited by Ben Hill. The music is by Kylie Daly. This program is sponsored by the Tennessee Commission for the United States Semiquincentennial, arranged under an agreement with the state of Tennessee. Thanks to JT Spangler and the folks at Vanderbilt University Studio 608 for recording this episode. Be sure to connect with us on Facebook. And thanks to all of you for listening.