By Rachel Hogue  

This past March, to round out Women’s History Month, the W&M Bray School Lab partnered to host a workshop on eighteenth-century sewing—and the incredible skills it required. The goal of the workshop was to go beyond the research about the marking and plain stitching likely done by female Williamsburg Bray School scholars. We put sewing tools in our own hands to better understand that facet of life and labor at the school. In his letter regarding school rules, Robert Carter Nicholas made sure to note the female scholars would learn “sewing, knitting, and other such things.” While we cannot say with certainty what the product of that labor was, the sewing itself becomes a valuable artifact.  

Recently, historian Serena Dyer has written on the value of recreating the processes of historical sewing work in studying eighteenth-century labor. By putting needles to fabric and recreating the processes through which the Bray school female students would have learned, we can “echo the movements of multiple hands which labored.” These echoes, sounded in the movement of needles and collaborative learning, do not retrace one specific pair of Bray student hands but instead point us to all the female students. Pulling from a single line in the primary textual sources the movements of the past become the artifacts we recreate as ‘surrogates’ for what the archive does not tell us about the Bray school students. We can and should still lament the context of enslavement surrounding such labor and yet simultaneously uphold the dignity and resilience of black women and girls who did this sewing, mending, washing, and “other such things.” As an act of both research and restorative justice we engaged with the materials, movements, and learning they had to experience.  

This workshop was an example of how creativity is necessary to bring research into accessible forms for our public, especially our Descendant Community. I presented my research on the sewing done by female scholars of the Williamsburg Bray School at the Slate Seminar in October 2023 and at Lemon Project Symposium in March 2023. In the wake of my presentation, I was quickly asked how this sewing history could become a hands-on teaching tool. It was necessary to realize that those presentations were only step one. First the research is presented to the public, and then with a workshop, it can literally be placed in the hands of our community. During our workshop on marking and plain stitches, the learning became a communal process. Conscientiously engaging the Lab’s invested community does not start and end with traditional presentation of research, it is a collaborative effort. Sewing history lends itself to a specific kind of hands-on work that benefits the need to close the gap between individual research and accessible, public forms of that research.  

Once the workshop got going, there was no need for one person to lecture, but rather all of us sat around the table and helped one another through the stitches. There was also a good deal of laughter over our collective difficulty with marking stitches and our more informed respect for the skill and dexterity of the Bray school scholars as children who had no choice but to do such labor. The learning was mutual; as I assisted with sewing, descendants engaged me with their history and entrusted me with their memories of the Bruton Heights School, in which we met for the workshop. 

We started with a short presentation about what we do know of black girls’ school sewing contemporary to the Williamsburg Bray School. This meant before anyone picked up a needle the entire workshop was on equal footing with background knowledge and context for the sewing projects tucked into the workbags given to each participant. We wove the needles in and out of fabric to get some semblance of the reversible cross-stitch methods, also known as a marking stitch. In the counting of each stitch’s pattern and arrangement we all quickly concluded how important arithmetic would have been to Bray School scholars engaging in such work. The Bray School scholars’ material literacy would have been just as complex as their reading and writing. Bringing the importance of literacy and access into the present, a crucial part of the workshop was introducing a digital component of this research.  Together with the Lab’s graduate assistant, Nicole Brown, I made a digitized map of primary sources, stitch instructions, and material culture. I invite readers to explore this map, think through the dexterity and skill required for a Bray School girl to maintain her safety as an enslaved child. And, more importantly, as you ponder the “echoes” of their moving hands, think of how these skills could have been masterfully subverted for resistance, liberation, and freedom despite the school’s goals to make girls—and boys—more “useful” to enslavers.  

Rachel Hogue graduated in May 2024 with a major in History. She is pursuing her master’s degree in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York in England.