There are nine rows of alphabets with only three narrow crossbands. In the second and third alphabet rows is the signature:
DIANA * BANTA* WAS BORN
JANUARY THE 19 1

(The remainder of her birth year 1”795” was either never embroidered or picked out at a later date.)

The linen is hand hemmed on all four sides with navy, tan, and light blue thread. In Dutch tradition, she tucked the threads on the verso/back of the sampler (please see the inverse verso and verso in the ancillary images). This simple sampler is stitched mostly over one thread using one strand of floss in some places, two strands in others. (AKS thanks Margaret G. Kohl for the information found in her article “Diana Banta’s Sampler”, Early American Life magazine, October, 2006.)

Diana (Dinah, Jr.) Banta was born on January 19, 1795, in Mercer County, Kentucky when her father, Samuel Banta (1753-1833) originally from Montgomery Township, Somerset County, New Jersey (but among a large group of Dutch immigrants to Kentucky), was forty-one years old, and her mother, Dinah Dorland (1753-1812), was also forty-one. (The Banta family in central Kentucky is well documented in a wonderful book by Joan England Murray, “The Bantas of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, their Ancestors and Descendants”, 1985. Please see the ancillary images.)

Samuel Banta was a soldier in the Revolutionary War in December 1776 at York, Pennsylvania serving under Capt. Van Arsdale. After the war, the Dutch in Pennsylvania began moving to Kentucky in 1780. Samuel took the southern route through Cumberland Gap and with his wife Dynah, pregnant with their fourth child, reaching Mercer County, Kentucky in the spring of 1781.

In 1805 he was residing in Mercer County on the Kentucky River where he "Embraced" the Shaker Faith. Samuel, Elisha Thomas, and Henry Banta were the first Kentuckians to become Shaker converts in 1805. Samuel sold their farm, gave the money to the Society, and moved to the utopian community of Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in 1807, (founded two years earlier by Shaker missionaries from New York and one of twenty-one Shaker villages scattered between Maine and Kentucky). By December 1806, some forty-four individuals signed the first family covenant and within two years they were living on a farm they named Pleasant Hill. Numerous members of the extended Banta family moved to Pleasant Hill during the 1800’s.
The communal colony flourished in the Bluegrass region on the road between Lexington and Harrodsburg, and within ten years, the colony’s products – seeds, brooms, preserves, and cooper ware such as pails, tubs, churns, laundry tubs and barrels – were being shipped to New Orleans for sale. By 1823, the colony had grown to 491 Shakers living on about 4,500 acres.
For a time, Samuel served as a Deacon at Pleasant Hill in the Center Family Dwelling in 1807. His wife Dinah died there in 1812 and in 1816 Samuel left the society but may have gone to the South Union Shaker Colony in Auburn, Kentucky near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Samuel left the Shakers, April 24, 1827, at age seventy-four and brought suit to regain his property from them but died in 1833 at age seventy-nine before the suit could be resolved. There is a “In Memory of” marker for him in the Mud Meeting House Cemetery, (also known as the Dutch Reformed Church Cemetery), Harrodsburg, Mercer County, Kentucky where several of his relatives are buried. (See the ancillary images.)

Diana (Dinah, Jr.) Banta’s siblings included Ruth “Antie “(1772-1812), Styntie Lyney (1776-1852), Henry (1779-1843), Mary (1781-1865), Lambert (1783-1861), Rachel (1787-1824) and Peggy R. (1793-1834).

Diana was twelve years old when the family moved to Pleasant Hill, she became a Believer in 1814 and signed the Covenant when the Church was first organized, in 1814. There is no available history of Diana marrying or having children.

Diana (Dinah, Jr.) Banta died on November 11, 1828, at the age of thirty-three, and was buried in the Shaker Cemetery, Mercer County, Kentucky where her mother and several sisters are also buried.