Domestic Furnishings - Overview
Washboards, armchairs, lamps, and pots and pans may not seem to be museum pieces. But they are invaluable evidence of how most people lived day to day, last week or three centuries ago. The Museum's collections of domestic furnishings comprise more than 40,000 artifacts from American households. Large and small, they include four houses, roughly 800 pieces of furniture, fireplace equipment, spinning wheels, ceramics and glass, family portraits, and much more.
The Arthur and Edna Greenwood Collection contains more than 2,000 objects from New England households from colonial times to mid-1800s. From kitchens of the past, the collections hold some 3,300 artifacts, ranging from refrigerators to spatulas. The lighting devices alone number roughly 3,000 lamps, candleholders, and lanterns.
"Domestic Furnishings - Overview" showing 1 items.
Esther Copp's Sampler
- Description
- Three block alphabets; two alphabets colored in pairs, one all black; no "J"; numbers 1 through 0. Simple geometric crossbands framed by flowering vine and rose bushes. At base of sampler, centered tree flanked by two framed inscriptions, with tulips and strawberries. Single row of cross stitch forms border on all four sides. Silk embroidery thread on linen ground. STITCHES: cross, petit point, Algerian eye, rice, queen. THREAD COUNT: warp 34, weft 38/in.
- Inscriptions:
- "Better it is to be
of an humble Spi
rit with the low
ly than to divide
the Spoil with
the proud"
- "Esther Copp her
Sampler made in
the eleventh
year of her age
august AD 1765"
- Background:
- Jonathan Copp was born on June 12, 1694, and married Mrs. Sarah (Dennis) Hobart as his second wife on June 30, 1742, in Stonington, Connecticut. Their daughter Esther was born on October 23, 1754, in New London, Connecticut, and she never married. She died September 21, 1829. (See sampler by Phebe Esther Copp, her grandniece. A tree, rose bush, and one text are the same on both samplers.) Esther's sampler is part of an extensive collection of 18th- and 19th- century household textiles, costume items, furniture, and other pieces belonging to the Copps, a prosperous but frugal Connecticut family. The collection was donated to the United State National Museum in the 1890s by John Brenton Copp, offering the nation the opportunity to preserve and study the everyday possessions of a New England family.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1765
- maker
- Copp, Esther
- ID Number
- TE*H06590
- catalog number
- H06590
- accession number
- 28810
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center