School lore / 1804–1815, with surviving schoolwork today
Westtown Banned Sewing the School. Sewing the Planet Was Fine.
In 1804 a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania cracked down on girls embroidering pictures of the building. A decade later they were embroidering the Earth.
In May 1804 the Acting Committee of Westtown School, a Quaker boarding school in Chester County, Pennsylvania, received a report on the girls' sewing. They had, the minutes say, "latterly got into the practice of making very superfluous Needle Work," including "Views of the Boarding School" meant for framing. The committee asked the teachers to prevent "such unnecessary works with the needle in future."
The school's archivist counts six known embroidered views of that first school building. After the minutes, it seems, there were no more.
I have read a lot of school communications and I have never seen one this efficient. Nobody was sent home. Nobody's parents got a call. A committee wrote "superfluous" once and a whole art form left Chester County.
Here is what they did next. Around 1815 a fourteen-year-old from Exeter, Pennsylvania, enrolled for one year, sewed eight pie-shaped pieces of pale blue silk around an eight-inch sphere, and made a globe. She lettered the continents, countries, islands and oceans in ink. She embroidered the equator and the borders in white silk thread, the tropics in red and the lines of latitude and longitude in blue. Westtown girls made globes like this from the early 1800s to the mid-1840s, and about forty survive. Hers is at Winterthur.
The building was vanity. The planet was homework.
The school's first broadside for parents told them what a girl should bring: "a pair of Scissors, Thread-case, and Thimble, Work-bag, and some plain sewing or knitting to begin with." Nothing on the list mentions that the thimble would be asked to do the tropics.
The youngest brought home a solar system project last spring. Due Monday, announced Friday, one paragraph long. By Sunday at eleven I was painting Saturn's rings on a paper plate while she slept, and by midnight I had added a moon to Jupiter that does not, strictly, exist. My wife came downstairs, looked at it, and said it was very nice. Then she said, "Who is it for?"
Winterthur's registrar, writing about the globe, wonders whether the girl felt "accomplishment or relief, joy or frustration" when she made her last stitch. Two centuries later, the parents of America can tell her. All four, in that order, at midnight.
Westtown keeps nine of its needlework globes today, along with more than 150 samplers, a collection of Flexible Flyer sleds and, the archive notes, half of the coil that inspired the Slinky.
My solar system is in the garage, with its extra moon. In 1804 a committee would have stopped me. In 2026 nobody did, which is the problem.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Winterthur: Object of the Month — Globe or Terrestrial Sampler, July 20, 2021 winterthur.org
- Mary Uhl Brooks, Westtown archivist: Threads of Useful Learning — Westtown School Samplers samplings.com
- Mary Brooks: In Stitches — Unraveling Their Stories, 2011 exhibition account samplings.com
- Westtown School: Archives Collections westtown.edu