Rebekah Hacker 1786

Description

Rebekah Hacker (b.1777-d.1799) was the daughter of Salem, Massachusetts, schoolmaster Isaac Hacker (1750-1818) and Anna Estes Hacker (1754-1802). Rebekah was one of ten children, and died unmarried at age 22. After her death, her sampler passed into the family of her brother, Jeremiah Hacker and his wife, Beulah Morris Hacker, who lived in Philadelphia. Alphabets, verses, pattern bands and a lush landscape with a fashionably dressed family group adorn the sampler, which is worked in cross, satin, stem, eyelet and back stitches. In the book American Samplers (published in 1921 by the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America) the authors Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe refer to this sampler as an example from “the very modest era when Adam and Eve went clothed to their doom, and fig leaves were insufficient. In Salem, Massachusetts, there was a Quaker maid who pictured Adam and Eve in plain Quaker dress, with Cain and Abel standing beside them in knee breeches. The tree of knowledge is there and many animals, but Rebekah Hacker’s childish heart was too tender toward the sinful pair to put in the serpent as a reminder of their fall.” (page 23) Perhaps the authors did not have a very clear picture of the sampler, because more likely it depicts a happy family outing with mother, father, young son and daughter, with perhaps some distant overtones of Eden in the lush landscape with a sort of “Tree of Life” at the center. The verses read:

Behold Alas Our Days We Spend
How Vain they Are How Soon They End
May Useful Arts Employ My Youth
And Love of Virtue And Of Truth
That When the Fleeting Moments End
A Crown Immortal I May Find
Rebekah Hacker Is My Name And With My
Nedle I Work the Same In 10 year of My Age

No tracing, no freehand is required to finish this sampler. I have done all the work for you by outlining the scene in counted back stitch, and once filled in with satin and stem stitches the sampler will very much resemble the original. The graph is printed in full color to make it even easier to navigate.

The reproduction, like the original, is worked on 25 count unbleached linen in rich shades of green, rust red, blue, gold, brown and ivory. The finished size will be approximately 14″ x 19″, and is recommended for an intermediate skill level.