Sarah Erving Waldo

Some thoughts about one of the Erving women during Women's Month

Sarah Erving worked this sampler in 1750, when she was 13 and learning the womanly arts befitting her social status. It represents the Spies of Canaan, Joshua and Caleb from the Old Testament, according to the description by the Peabody Essex Museum, which holds the item in their collection.1

Sarah was born to Abigail and John Erving in 1737, into a family of three brothers and three sisters. She had one more younger sister and a brother in the next 3 years. By 1750 her oldest sister, Elizabeth, had already married at 17 and had her own daughter. 

There was a shortage of suitors during the war in Canada during the 1750s. Sarah married at the Brattle Street Church in Boston in 1762 to a much older man who had been to war. Colonel Samuel Waldo, Jr. and his father the Brigadier General had large land holdings in what is now Cumberland County Maine. She was 24, but he was 39, and widowed a year before. The marriage intention was published in Falmouth as well as Boston, and they returned to the Waldo land after they married.

Sarah seems to have inherited her mother's fertility, and had a daughter 9 months after her marriage. Their first two children were named Sarah and Samuel, with Samuel following 15 months after his sister. Her next son was named for her father, followed by Lucy, Samuel's mother's name, and Francis. 

The portrait of Sarah by John Singleton Copley speaks of the Waldo wealth and privilege. It is dated 1764-5.2  Although the tea table signifies domesticity, I can't help wondering if it hides a pregnancy. The artist could portray her in any way he wished, unlike a photograph where she might need to be camouflaged.

Samuel Waldo died in 1770, four months before their last son, Ralph, was born. Sarah brought her children back to her family home in Boston, where the child was born. I imagine her as the hostess of her father's mansion on Marlboro Street, since her mother had been gone for more than 10 years, but I haven't found evidence of this. Her brother George had lost his wife that same year and young George was only a year old. He had cousins nearby. 

Most of the Waldos remained Loyalists, but luckily Sarah didn't have to contemplate evacuating to England once she was under her father's care, as some of her in-laws did, and as did two of her brothers. 

 

Did she care for her father in his decline until his death in 1786? Sadly, her son John died at sea at Bermuda earlier that same year.

The 1790 census lists "Mrs. Waldo"  in Boston with a male over 16 and two other women. One was likely her daughter, Lucy, who did not marry until 1807. When her brother William died in 1791, the funeral was held from Sarah's home on Bromfield's Lane. The current Bromfield Street intersects Tremont opposite the Granary Burial Ground where her father was buried.

In 1810 she had 2 women living with her in her Tremont Street home-her first name was recorded on the census that year. One of the women was under 16 and the other over 45, likely servants. . 

Sara was 80 when she died in 1817 in Middletown, Connecticut, where Lucy lived. She had a significant estate, with a value of $2M in current dollars. Lucy was her only living child, but she mentioned the grandchildren through Samuel and Sarah in her very detailed will. Samuel's daughter, Sarah, seems to be a favorite, receiving her gold watch and seal. Lucy received her brick mansion house on Tremont Street which was valued at $20,000, as well as her household items, jewelry and wearing apparel "notwithstanding her coverture," meaning it would not go to her husband.3

It isn't easy to piece together the lives of Colonial women, but the Ervings left more records than most.

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Notes:

1 Sampler available to purchase as a kit at Peabody Essex Museum. 

2 See a description here.

3Middletown CT probate on Ancestry