Using a needle and thread was considered a necessary household skill for girls and women in the 1800s. Samplers were what they made to practice stitches and show off what they could do. Margaret Miekel’s sampler helps us stitch together the living and learning in the area before Wisconsin was officially a state!
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A Stitch in Time
[creepy organ music] [lightning crashing] – Kacie Lucchini Butcher: I thought you said this wasn’t scary.
– Taylor Bailey: It’s not scary.
– Cat Phan: Uh, I cannot look.
[sinister music] [lightning crashing] – Oh no, the power!
– Ugh, we were just getting to the best part.
– Oh, I’m okay with skipping it.
– What are we supposed to do now?
No power, no internet.
– Well, I’ve got an idea.
Did you ever wonder what women and girls did before the invention of internet and TV?
– Sit around trying to invent TV?
– No, cross-stitching!
– Cross-stitching?
I haven’t cross-stitched in years.
– I’d only known, I would’ve brought my hoop.
– Lucky for you, [ding] I came prepared.
– Okay.
[rain pattering] So, did people really do this for fun before there was TV?
– Absolutely; it was a way to learn, to show off your skills, to earn a little money, and more.
Do you guys wanna go see a piece of cross-stitch history that happened right here in Wisconsin?
– I mean, the alternative is sitting here in the dark.
– Mm, you guys go ahead.
I think I’m gonna stay and work on my cross-stitching.
[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [television static] – Cat: Whoa, that is one old house!
– I told you we were gonna be doing cool history stuff today.
– Did someone cross-stitch that house?
– No, definitely not.
– So, where are we right now?
– Lynda Thayer: You are at the Dousman Stagecoach Inn Museum in the city of Brookfield in Wisconsin.
It was built in 1843.
– Are you wondering what a stagecoach inn is?
Don’t worry; me too.
I looked it up, and basically, this was a place for people to stay when they were traveling by stagecoach, which is a type of horse-drawn vehicle.
Traveling by stagecoach was pretty slow, so you needed places to stay along the way.
Wait, but you don’t live here, right?
– [laughs] No, I do go home at night.
– So, we came today because we had been talking about cross-stitching, and I wanted to show Cat a little bit of the history of it.
So can you tell us about this cross-stitch sampler?
– The sampler was made in 1845.
It was made by a young girl sewing cross-stitch embroidery.
– Cross-stitch is a type of embroidery, which just means decorating materials, like fabric, with needle and thread.
Embroidery was practiced by lots of women and girls from all different social classes for hundreds if not thousands of years.
– There’s two alphabets, a set of numbers, and a lot of initials.
We think these two, “RM” and “HM” are her parents, and we’re still researching this.
And you always signed your sampler, and her age is on here, and the year she made it, 1845.
– What’s going on around this time?
For one thing, Wisconsin wasn’t even a state yet.
The area was still the Wisconsin Territory.
So you could say this cross-stitch sampler is older than the state of Wisconsin.
There’s a lot of hidden things in this.
– There are.
Usually, there’d be more decorative items.
There’d be a Bible verse, like this other example here.
There’ll be Bible verses or morals on how to live life, and family information.
Samplers have been around for hundreds of years, and it was a way to practice the alphabet, their numbers, but it was also the way they learned to sew.
And cross-stitch was one of the most important ways to learn to sew.
Because even if you didn’t sew your own clothes, you had to fix the clothes.
– So you would not only be learning the alphabet and numbers, but you’d be learning these, kind of, important household skills.
– Yes.
– So, how do you actually make a cross-stitch?
Fabric is stretched across a wooden frame to make it taut.
Imagine trying to stitch on loose fabric in your hand.
It would be quite floppy.
Thread is then strung through the eye of a needle, tied off to ensure that it won’t go through the fabric, and then woven into a linen fabric.
Cross-stitch is just one type of stitch that utilizes cross-stitches that resemble the letter X.
Depending on the type of embroidery, other stitch patterns can be used too.
There are thousands of stitch types between cross-stitch, embroidery, knitting, crocheting, and other types of needle work.
– So, what do we know about Margaret?
– Well, Margaret Miekel, as it says on the sampler, was 12 when she made this.
And her family immigrated to the United States from Scotland.
We believe they settled in a town not far from here called Hartford, Wisconsin, and her father worked as the local horse doctor, or vet.
– Is there anything else we can say about Margaret Miekel, the girl who made this?
We tried looking into this to see what we could learn.
I checked historical books and old census records from the time period.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything.
So what does this mean?
Well, finding old documents, especially about girls and women can be really tricky, in part because so many of them used their husbands’ names when they married.
But we can keep looking.
Doing history means keeping at it even when it looks like there are dead ends.
Can you tell us a little bit more about what life would’ve been like for young women and girls during this period?
– Women, for the most part, cared for their homes and families.
They did everything to keep the home up, and they, the young girls learned from their mothers and grandmothers how to cook, how to sew, how to do laundry, how to make candles, how to make soap, how to churn butter, how to take care of the chickens.
They would plant and care for a garden, a kitchen garden.
And, much, much more.
– We know that lots of young girls learned these skills, but what about enslaved women?
Remember, slavery was still legal in the southern states at this time.
Enslaved Black women and girls would have definitely known how to embroider.
It was a necessary skill for mending clothing.
After emancipation, embroidery continued to be important.
This cloth sack was once given to a young enslaved girl by her mother.
It was passed down over the years, and in 1921, the granddaughter of that girl embroidered their story on the sack.
Today, we know a little bit of their family history, thanks to this.
So, I heard a rumor once that there were games that you could play with the hoops.
Is that true?
– Yes.
You actually could play a game if you had at least two people.
You’d stand about eight feet apart, and each of you would have two sticks, and you would put the embroidery hoop on your set and cross them, and then fling it.
And, the other person tries to catch it on their sticks.
– Fun.
– Fun.
– So, if Mom couldn’t find her embroidery hoop, that might be where it was.
– Kacie: Yep.
[laughing] – So, how’d it go at the museum?
– It was so cool.
We met this woman named Lynda, and she told us all about what it was like to live during that time period.
And we got to see the cross-stitch sampler up close.
– What?
That’s so cool.
– Yeah, and she told us about a game that the girls used to play with these hoops.
– We could have been playing a game this whole time!
– This whole time.
You don’t even need power.
[Taylor laughs] – Cross-stitching and other types of embroidery were a key part of domestic life throughout history.
Unfortunately, a lot of objects from this point in time don’t survive, which is why it’s cool to see the ones that we do have.
What are some objects or habits from your daily life that you think are important?
What would you want a future historian to know about them?
Make a list, and then compare it with your friends and classmates.
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