Sampler Collector Sees Personal Stories in Stitches of Bygone Era : Collectibles: Exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art showcases samplers by generations of schoolgirls. To a Long Beach woman, their needle crafts reveal much about their education, lives.

To Mary Jaene Edmonds, the woman who guided the work of Elizabeth Drew was as much an artist as Picasso.

Nobody knows her name, but she was a schoolmistress in Plymouth, Mass., at the beginning of the 19th Century. Unlike Picasso’s, the schoolmistress’ genius was exercised at a distance. Her masterpieces were created not by her own hand, but by those of her young female charges.

Thus, Elizabeth Drew, 13 years old, carefully stitched the exquisite sampler her unknown teacher designed for her: a border of China roses, a meticulously executed alphabet, a pious dedication of “the first efforts of an infant’s hand” to the Lord, and a landscape with four silken poplar trees in the middle ground and ships in the bay beyond. As Edmonds points out, samplers were considered an essential part of a genteel girl’s education and were almost always made in schools, not at home.

Young Elizabeth’s sampler is one of 80 featured in “Samplers & Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art 1700-1850,” an exhibit that opened recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is also the title of a new book on the subject by Edmonds, a Long Beach resident who has been collecting and studying samplers for more than 20 years.

To Edmonds, who has lived with her husband in Long Beach for 50 years, samplers are more than art, although they are unquestionably that. They are also evidence. Each of the pieces is filled with clues about the women who made them and the times in which they lived. As Betty Ring, a leading authority on samplers, points out, these schoolgirl embroideries are sometimes the only surviving sources of information about education for girls since “for the most part, men historians in the 19th Century simply did not record what women did.”

Unlike so many other forms of folk art, samplers are often signed and dated, and Edmonds has been able to track the hints contained in dozens of samplers through family records and other archives to discover the histories of their creators.

“We call it sleuthing in the stitches,” says Edward Maeder, curator of the costumes and textiles at the museum who helped organize the show. Even when samplers are not signed, they can sometimes be identified by a close study of their style and content. Samplers made in Quaker schools feature instantly identifiable alphabets with large, squared-off letters. As Edmonds notes, the Quakers pioneered equal education for boys and girls in America, teaching them the same curriculum in the same schools--except that the girls were also taught needlework.

The art of the needle was so important in early America that schools frequently boasted of the excellence of their instruction. Different schools often had distinctive hallmarks that appear again and again in their samplers. The students of Mary Zeller, who ran a school for girls in Philadelphia between 1789 and 1808, stitched lambs of God into their work. In 1793, Miss Zeller had Elizabeth Stine, who was probably 9 years old at the time, include an unforgettable shaggy goat in her stitchery menagerie as well.

Edmonds collected tobacco tins (“I loved the lithography on them”) before she discovered samplers. Her first sampler purchase, discovered in a New England inn, was by 10-year-old Jane Likens. Likens wielded her needle in Virginia in 1822, and Edmonds is convinced that the child was dyslexic. She points to such evidence as Jane’s chronic stitching of b for d.

Samplers are filled with such moving glimpses of their creators, making them the most personal of art objects. “These are my girls,” Edmonds says of the samplermakers, “and I love every one of them.”

Her girls had their weaknesses. It was not unusual for a grown-up samplermaker to remove her age, once so carefully stitched in place, when she was old enough to prefer to keep that information to herself.

“They are like the snapshot albums we have today,” says Maeder, who describes samplers as “mortal remains.” Although they are rarely maudlin in tone, the samplers often refer to death, so palpable a presence before modern medicine.

In genealogical samplers, the names of living relatives are often stitched inside pieces of fruit attached to the family tree. Those of family members who have died are left poignantly unattached.

The age of sampler making was one in which parents could not reasonably hope to outlive all their children.

Edmonds says her sentimental favorite among the samplers is that of Ann Eliza Goddard. It was made in Massachusetts when she was 8 years old. After she died on April 14, 1834, her mother framed her sampler with the child’s threaded needle, her needle case, a lock of her red hair and a little note: “Dear Ann Eliza let this be/A token of my love to thee.”

Another haunting sampler is that of Nancy Graves. The best student in her class at the Cherokee Mission school in Dwight, Ark., Nancy, or Ku-to-yi, was 11 years old when she made her sampler in 1828. Edmonds found detailed information about Nancy and her classmates in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

But the record suddenly ends a few years later when the United States government exiled the Cherokee nation to Oklahoma. The sampler apparently survived because it was given as a gift to a New England missionary, the “Mr. Kingsbury” whose name appears on the piece. Edmonds has not been able to find out what happened to the young samplermaker on the Trail of Tears.

Like any good historian, Edmonds is hungry to know the rest. She is intrigued, for instance, by the unusual creativity evident in two samplers probably produced in the same school in Norwich, Conn., at the end of the 18th Century. “Something was going on in Norwich, Conn., that wasn’t happening in the other towns nearby, and we don’t know what it was yet,” she says. The most likely hypothesis: a schoolmistress greatly gifted with the needle and bold enough to extend the boundaries of her art.

Ring, the authority on samplers, said they have surged in value over the last several decades. “You could buy a great, great sampler in the 1960s for $500,” she recalls. No longer. In 1987 a sampler sold for the record price of $198,000. But prices have sagged. The exhibit continues through Feb. 2. The museum is located at 5905 Wilshire Blvd.