Medium Silk on cotton canvas with Algerian eye, cross, and Irish stitches; thread count: 22/inch vertical, 20/inch horizontal
Provenance Made by Leah Bates in 1856. By attached history, it was made at the "Loretto Monastery School in Breckinridge County", under the direction of A. P. McCullough Teacher. Later it was donated to the Loretto Archives by Mr & Mrs Joseph Rhodes, McDaniel, Kentucky, through Rev. Joseph Hoepf. The sampler as sold at auction to Private Collector #4.
Description The sampler has five rows of alphabets separated by decorative bands and is surrounded by a border. At the bottom of the sampler are her parents' names "Theadore Bates" and "Mary Bates" on the left, while to the right Leah embroidered "A. P. McCullough Teacher, 1856". These names flank colorful vining which surrounds on three sides the inscription:
Worked by
Leah Bates
Worthvill Ky.
Leah Scott Bates was born on March 8, 1843, in Ghent, Kentucky, to Mary Ann Gullion, age seventeen, and Theodore Wythe Bates, age twenty-seven. She lived in Mill Creek, Kentucky in 1860. Leah married Warren E. Nash in Carroll County, Kentucky, on May 28, 1868, when she was twenty-five years old and had a son, Clarence T., b.March 25, 1870, in Port Royal, Kentucky. Leah had removed to Carrollton, Kentucky, by 1870 and children Wendell B. was born on December 3, 1873 and Oliver W. was born in 1874. Leah lived in Worthville, Kentucky, by 1880. Leah Scott Bates died in 1905 in Carroll County, Kentucky, when she was sixty-two years old.
