Silk Fabric Sample

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Description:

Gold silk damask textile fragment, rectangular in shape, with one short edge hemmed and three sides unfinished. This sample comes from a textile woven from Carolina silk that was used to produce a dress for Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) in London, England in 1755.

As the new mistress of Belmont Plantation in 1744, Pinckney took on the task of introducing sericulture to South Carolina. She benefited from the work of enslaved people, who maintained the notoriously tricky silkworms. The Carolina silk they produced was then brought to London for processing in 1753. In 1755 it was announced in the South Carolina Gazette that the Pinckneys? had gifted a dress of Carolina silk dyed with indigo to Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales (1719-1772). A portion of the Carolina silk material was then gifted to Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), a botany enthusiast, with the rest made into a gold dress for Eliza Lucas Pinckney herself. That dress is now in the collection of the Smithsonian, while this fragment of the material was gifted to The Charleston Museum by Sally Pinckney Burton in 1958.