Reading Between the Lines of Pauline Fortier’s 1815 Sampler

Although the structural integrity of the fabric is compromised and the colors are diminished, the message embedded into the sampler is clearly legible. A French inscription marks this piece, now in the Historic New Orleans Collection, as the earliest known Louisiana sampler, made in 1815 by ten-year-old Pauline Fortier at the Ursuline convent school in New Orleans. The sampler is evidence of the Ursuline’s primary mission—to educate women, and by shaping them into ideal Christian mothers, to create the foundation for a resilient society steeped in Catholic virtues. Another early Louisiana sampler, now at the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site, states that it was crafted by an Acadian woman named Louise Celeste Babin in Attakapas territory in 1819. Together, the Fortier and Babin samplers highlight the ways in which material objects, and literacy, connected women not only across the Atlantic Ocean, but within the landscape of early nineteenth-century Louisiana. Emerging from a pool of shared language, and iconography, the two samplers speak to the divergent paths of two early Louisiana families.

This paper will delve into the words, imagery, and compositions of the two samplers, while also linking them to historical records that reveal both women’s reliance on enslaved labor. As a historic textile, the Fortier sampler, made by the daughter of a prominent sugar planter, gestures toward the crops—sugar and cotton—which foregrounded Louisiana’s economic dependence on slavery. Indeed, tracing Pauline’s lineage reveals that the Fortier plantation featured prominently in the 1811 German Coast Uprising. This paper will argue that the Fortier sampler, part of a highly dynamic needlework tradition, responds to the specific pressures faced within the Ursuline convent in the years following the 1811 Uprising.