Sampler (Family record)

This sampler is an extraordinary record of Black history. It was worked by Black activist Sarah Ann Major Harris (1812-1878) sometime between 1822-1828. It records the marriage of her parents, William M Harris and Sally M Prentice, lists their children, Charles Florawell, Sarah Ann Major, Celina Dunham, Mary Anderson, William Montflora, Olive Smith, Oliver Brown, and John Benjamin W M., and depicts an unidentified house. Family records were a popular format for samplers in the nineteenth century. They provided a didactic craft where young women, who were able to attend schools, could learn to read, write, and become keepers of family history, stitching connections between family members past and present.

The Harris family moved from Norwich to Canterbury, CT in 1832. They were active members of integrated, abolitionist Congregational Churches in both towns. In that same year, when she was twenty, Sarah Ann Major Harris, as she was then known, approached Quaker teacher Prudence Crandall and asked to join her Canterbury Female Boarding School so that she could learn to teach Black children. After Crandall agreed to enroll Harris in her school, parents began to withdraw their daughters. Crandall recruited other young Black women to fill the ranks, many from neighboring states. Connecticut’s “Black Law,” prohibiting instruction for “colored persons” who were not state residents, was a direct response. Threats of violence and legal action forced Crandall to close the school in 1834, but this sampler remains a powerful document of the legacy of an educated, upwardly mobile Black family in 1830s Connecticut. Harris married Rhode Island blacksmith George Fayerweather in 1833 and remained a life-long activist, hosting Frederick Douglass in her family’s Kingston, Rhode Island, home. Harris named her first daughter Prudence Crandall after her Quaker teacher.