Sarah Elizabeth Angeline Andrews (1839-1897)
Sampler
The Sarah Andrews sampler is one of the finest examples of Middle Tennessee needlework, identifying not only the stitcher, but the school and the teacher as well. In correspondence with Janet Hasson of the Tennessee Sampler Survey, she described the Andrews work as a “very important Tennessee sampler”. Setting this sampler apart is the inclusion of the school, Union Academy, and its teacher, Miss Isabella Sharpe Wallis. Four other samplers are related to this teacher and school and are documented in the Tennessee Sampler Survey. Ms. Hasson referred to Miss Wallis and a related sampler in her recent article in the MESDA Journal, “Female Education and the Ornamental Arts in Antebellum Tennessee.”
TEACHER: Isabella Sharpe Wallis was born between 1818 and 1823 in Williamson Country, Tennessee and was the eldest child of Alfred Wallis and Mary (Polly) Hargy, who were married in Lexington, Kentucky in 1804. The Hargy family were educators, where Polly’s father, John Hargy operated Lexington Academy for several years. In 1799 he opened another school for “Young Ladies and Gentlemen” which he operated with his daughter, most likely Polly. Two years after her father’s death, Polly married Alfred Wallis, a native of North Carolina. They moved to Tennessee, eventually settling in Eagleville, on the border of Williamson and Rutherford Counties where Alfred was a farmer.
Isabella Wallis and her sister Catherine both became needlework teachers. Isabella was a teacher at Union Academy located in Williamson County north of Arrington in District 14. Four samplers are known that include her name: the 1850 Sarah Andrews, the 1850 Mary Halfacre, the 1859 Mary Jane Stevens, and a sampler on perforated paper stitched in 1851 by Isabella as a gift for one of her students. She
married Hiram Slate in 1852 and continued to teach at Union Academy, at least until 1859.
MAKER: Sarah Andrews was a student at the Union Academy where she stitched her sampler in 1850 at 11-years-old. Her sampler was an ambitious work and measures a generous 23 1/2” x 25 1/2”. Sarah was the daughter of George Matthews (1796-1886), a farmer and surveyor in District 10 of Williamson County, Tennessee. The 1850 census records the Andrews family as having four enslaved people in their household – three females ages 60, 36, and 8 and one male 34 years old. Sarah married Samuel McDowell in 1860 and the couple had six children.
