Join Erica Lome, Curator of Collections at Historic New England for our spring Americana Lecture as she discusses “Liberty & Loyalty: Embroidered coats of arms in an age of revolution” at 4pm on May 4. A light reception will follow the lecture.
In 1775, Mary Jones of Weston, Massachusetts, watched her life collapse around her as her family, all supporters of the British Crown, fled their homes and had their immense fortune confiscated during the Revolution. Among what she had left to remember them was a mostly finished needlework sampler displaying the Jones family coat of arms. Years later, she returned to Massachusetts and settled in Concord, where this sampler now resides in the collection of the Concord Museum.
Erica Lome uses this needlework as a starting point to survey the history of embroidered coats of arms worked in Boston in the late eighteenth century. More than an accomplishment of a genteel education, young women used heraldic needlework to document their family genealogy, a practice which endured through war, exile, and independence. (Needlework pictured: Mary Jones (1748-1830), ca. 1768-70. Boston and Weston, MA. Concord Museum Collection, Gift of Cummings E. Davis; T900)
