Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Eliza H. Stevens was the eldest of the three children of Henry (sometimes called Harry) Stevens and his wife, Hannah Libby, all born in Gorham between 1817 and 1826. Henry was a carriage maker and did not marry until the age of thirty. He died only five years after Eliza stitched her sampler, and was buried in Portland, Maine. On December 22, 1839, Eliza married John Cloudman, a Gorham farmer who would later do very well as a merchant. After her marriage, her widowed mother moved in with Eliza and John, who, for the first several years of their marriage, lived with John’s parents. In 1862, when Eliza was forty-five years old, she and John became parents to their only child, Alice M. Interestingly, on the 1870 census, the first one taken after her mother’s death, Eliza is listed as owning $10,500 of real estate, just about twice what her husband owned. Eliza died on January 21, 1893 and John died the following June. They were both buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Westbrook, Maine. No further records could be found for their daughter. Eliza’s sampler shares two characteristics, heavily fruited trees and poor planning of spacing, with three others that were stitched in Gorham under the instruction of widow Rhoda McClellan. She had moved to Portland by June 1, 1830, when the U.S. Federal Census was conducted. She may also have been Eliza’s teacher although it is at least as likely that some other Gorham teacher was familiar with McClellan’s fruited tree motif and incorporated it into Eliza’s design.