Medium Silk on linen with Algerian eye, cross, and rice stitches; thread count: 32/inch horizontal, 28/inch vertical
Description The sampler has a beige linen background, with blue and dark green silk cross stitching. The border includes leaves and birds with rows of numbers and upper and lower case alphabet.
The poem reads:
Though age must show life's fond pursuits are vain
And few the pleasures to be here enjoye'd
Yet may this work a pleasing proof remain,
Of youth's gay season usefully employe'd.
Signed:
Mary Ann Tureman's sampler, Carlisle, Ky July 15th A.D. 1836
Mary Ann Tureman was born on May 20, 1823, in Kentucky to Virginia Coburn, age twenty-two, and Joseph F Tureman, age twenty-four. Mary Ann married James L Arnold in Carlisle, Kentucky, on January 11, 1842, when she was eighteen years old. They had four children in thirteen years, all born in Nicholas County, Kentucky: Virginia M., b.1843; Ann Elizabeth, b.July 20, 1845; Mary Coburn, b.March 16, 1853 and Joseph Walter "'Walley", b.November 19, 1856. Mary Ann lived in Bedford, Kentucky in 1870.
Mary Ann Tureman died on June 22, 1892, in Nicholas, Kentucky, when she was sixty-nine years old.
