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1 T he Connecticut River Valley was one of most important centers in America for the teaching and production of embroidered pictures by young girls in private academies from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This book is the first to examine the needlework of the region in depth. It explores the key centers and teachers of the craft, the styles they developed, and the themes their students addressed in the media of samplers, canvaswork, and silk embroidery. The needlework produced in the watershed of the 410-mile-long “Great River” over the course of one hundred years challenges our understanding of the region, which was defined by its diversity more than its homogeneity. Acting as a conduit for goods, people, and ideas, the river was key in knitting the area together through transportation and trade. This introduction explores the forces that shaped the region’s culture, with an eye toward the factors that encouraged schoolgirl needlework to flourish in its cities and towns.1 The range of approaches to needlework in the Connecticut River Valley, as Carol and Stephen Huber have noted in their essay in this volume, may be attributed in part to the region’s settlement patterns. Although Saybrook, at the river’s mouth, was founded quite early, European colonization of the area did not progress up the river from south to north but rather developed in widely spaced clusters around useful natural features such as waterfalls or large, flat, tillable fields. Moving overland from the coast, those attracted to the area’s fertile alluvial soil established communities at places such as Wethersfield and Hartford in the midseventeenth century and avoided the marshy terrain south of Middletown until the next generation. Towns founded later, such as Haddam, remained smaller in scale—not large enough to support their own private schools, which encouraged students to travel to a larger center such as Hartford. Further north, in Massachusetts, the 1650s and 1660s saw the establishment of Northampton, Hadley, and Deerfield at the frontier between European and Native American land. Because it was settled over a long period of time, the valley’s culture incorporated frontier communities and more sophisticated towns simultaneously, resulting in material culture that ranges from rustic to urbane. The Connecticut River Valley developed as a region focused on agriculture and strung together through trade as farmers large and small moved their produce and livestock to market. The main source of wealth during much of this early period was agriculture. Because of its economic power as a landowning group, the rural gentry shaped a regional culture in which its values predominated. Rather than emulate urban sophistication, the gentry sought to differentiate themselves from their neighbors, the valley’s yeomen farmers. To do so, they commissioned household goods that embodied their staid, prosperous, but unostentatious mindset, as well as their pride of place. Rather than rely largely on imports , people of means in the valley solicited local craftsmen to design and construct the furniture, architecture, and household goods that made up their material world. This led to considerable diversity of styles and techniques as each maker or workshop developed its own approach rather than hewing strictly to the most fashionable styles disseminated from Europe or larger New England cities. More exalted, imported goods eventually made their way into valley households, particularly by the early nineteenth century, but in general a rustic and homespun aesthetic prevailed and persisted even in the region’s most accomplished examples of material culture. At the same time, commerce fostered an awareness of outside trends, and Connecticut River Valley towns that developed as centers of trade—places such as South Hadley, Hartford, and Middletown—also became sites for the dissemination of ideas about gentility. Periodicals and books outlining the principles of amy kurtz lansing Introduction The Connecticut River Valley as a Cultural Center, 1740–1840 2 a m y k u r t z l a n s i n g deportment and polite society were published in Hartford and towns further north along the river beginning in 1792.2 Perhaps not surprisingly, as the Hubers describe, some of the most distinctive needlework emerged from these commercial towns as teachers established schools there to meet valley inhabitants’ demand for cultural accomplishment. As trade and shipping from river ports grew in importance over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of those locales became vital points of connection to the shoreline, Boston, New York, London, and the West Indies...

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