Artist/Maker

Lynn, Eliza Antoinette

Place Made

Date Made

1836

Medium

silk on linen

Dimensions

25 1/4″ x 16 3/4″

Accession Number

6057

Description

MAKER: On May 12th, 1836, student Eliza Antinette [Antoinette] Lynn presumably put the finishing stitches on her needlework sampler. Eliza was the daughter of William (1795-1841) and Mary Lynn of Chester District (later Chester County), South Carolina. Ancestors of the Lynn (Linn) family were among the early Scotch Irish Presbyterians in this region, emigrating from Ireland in 1773 with the Presbyterian minister Rev. William Martin. William Lynn was identified as a member of Purity Presbyterian Church and is buried in the church cemetery.

A strong needlework tradition driven by Presbyterian educators stretched from Mecklenberg County, North Carolina to the communities to the south, including Chesterville, South Carolina. Large and impressive in size, (measuring more than 29 inches tall by 21 inches wide), this sampler is worked in silk on linen. Eliza ambitiously imcorporated a two-story house, a flower and vine border, trees, a verse, bands featuring a variety of stitches and five alphabet sequences. Characteristic of samplers in the region, there is a capital alphabet band worked exclusively with eyelet stitches.

Eliza Lynn married Turner W. Holley and had seven children – five still living at the time of her death in 1901. Turner Holley died in Charleston in 1864 from yellow fever leaving Eliza a widow for many years. Her obituary claims that she was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church for sixty years – but it was at Old Purity Presbyterian cemetery that she was laid to rest.