Textile, woven

Description

This is a woven cotton picture of a young girl, “Dollie Stevens,” made sometime during the 19th century. The picture is woven in white against a blue ground and depicts a young girl wearing a dress and a hat. There are bowknots in each of the four corners, and the image is framed by a scalloped border with a dot in each wave. Dollie Stevens (1788-1803) was the daughter of Jonathan and Susanna Bragg Stevens and the sister of Nathaniel Stevens (1786-1865). Nathaniel, commonly known as “Captain Nat,” founded the Stevens Textile Mills in North Andover, Massachusetts in 1812. This business would eventually grow to become the firm J. P. Stevens & Co. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.