Jane Winter Price's Sampler

This sampler features a footed bowl on a square base, holding a large bouquet of flowers. One flower has been shaded with dark red and orange-red paint over the stitches. Jane included the inscription:

“These violets scent the distant gale;
They grew in lowly bed,
So real worth new merit gains,
By diffidence o’erspread:
Jane Winter Price
But as the fragrant myrtle wreath,
Will all the rest survive:
So shall the mental graces still,
Through endless ages live.”

To accompany her large bouquet of flowers, Jane Price used stanzas 2 and 9 from a verse accompanying a nosegay found in an English reader published in 1816. A small bouquet of flowers often given as a gift was known as a nosegay. The sampler is stitched with silk embroidery thread on a linen ground with a thread count of warp 25, weft 28/ in. The stitches used are chain, stem, surface satin, cross, outline, herringbone, crosslet, and French knot.

Jane Winter was born on March 17, 1818, to Richard and Catherine Winter Dunnington Price in Charles County, Maryland. She married Josiah Woods McHenry (b. May 14, 1815 in Christianburg, Virginia) on February 27, 1849, in Shelby, Alabama. They moved to Union Springs, Arkansas and had four children - Catherine Price (1850-), Barnabas Middleton (1852-), George Richard (1854-), and Jane Cornelia (1856-). By the 1870 census they were living in Homer, Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, and she died there on January 11, 1899.