“We hold ourselves bound to do good”

The Hopedale Sewing Circle started in 1848 as part of what Adin Ballou termed an “industrial army” – a group of his followers, women and men, working “to promote the cheerful prosecution of public improvements and a generous assistance of persons needing occasional aid.” Their task was with bettering the Hopedale Community by raising money and spreading the word of their Practical Christian religion. During the circle’s first two years the women earned money sewing for the community, while the men supported the “ladies” through membership dues.
The women ran the group – mostly. In its first year, William Cook served on the group’s “Industrial Committee,” along with Anna Draper and Louisa Fish. Thirty-eight people signed the first membership list, almost half of them men. Men were also the customers – the women sewed for them, making shirts, overalls, and stockings, along with doing miscellaneous mending as new clothing would have been an extravagance.
But something changed at the end of 1849. As winter approached, the women sewed for a family in need, a task that would help lead the Sewing Circle in a new direction – that of being the benevolent center of Hopedale.
“The Society met at the ‘Old House’ and worked for Mrs. Provan’s family,” an entry on December 19th reads. “Met at the house of Mrs. Bancroft and sewed for Mrs. Provan’s children,” says another, dated the day after Christmas.
The record doesn’t tell the full story. Mrs. Provan – Jeanet Provan – was dead. She had died on December 9. “Mrs. Jeanet came across the Atlantic already in consumption,” Adin Ballou wrote in his History of Milford, giving no more detail of the Scottish immigrant who had arrived in Hopedale with her husband, Thomas, and four children in May of 1849. She would be dead of tuberculosis within eight months.
The women of the Hopedale Sewing Circle were doing what they pledged to do as Practical Christians, working for people around them, people in need. Even though Jeanet Provan only lived in the Community a few months, she left a void and children who needed care. That was what the women of the Sewing Circle gathered to do. They were simply living their beliefs.
These Practical Christians had come to the area a nearly a decade earlier to “build a new civilization radically higher than the old,” in the new village of Hopedale. Their Standard of Practical Christianity called for its followers not to be “indifferent to the sufferings of a distressed humanity,” nor to “desert our brethren in their adversity.” Jeanet Provan was not a Practical Christian or a member of the Sewing Circle, but even in death she was in need.
Adin Ballou praised the women’s fifteen years of work in his History of the Hopedale Community. The Sewing Circle, he said, “found much to do in caring for and helping individuals and families that, by reason of sickness, misfortune, or otherwise, were brought into circumstances of dependence and need,” and by doing this the group diminished “demands upon the common treasury,” thus saving the residents money.
But everything changed in 1850. Many of the Sewing Circle members, along with some of their husbands, attended the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester. After that, the Sewing Circle became exclusively a women’s group. Over the next dozen years, they shared articles on female issues and discussed the progressive ideas of the day including women’s rights, abolition, dress reform, temperance, spiritualism, and even divorce.
After her passing, Jeanet’s children needed a mother, so Thomas Provan married Rebecca Davis. After Rebecca died Thomas married her sister, Jane, the widow of William Stimpson. Both Jane and William had been Sewing Circle members. Thomas later moved to Worcester with his growing family, but Ballou admired this man from Stirling, Scotland. “He is an independent, vigorous, progressive thinker, and a man of upright character,” Ballou said. “And he has had three good wives.” Thomas and most of his family are buried in Hopedale Village Cemetery.