Ashley's Sack

Ashley's Sack was purchased for $20 at a flea market in Nashville in the early 2000s. Alarmed by the embroidered story of a slave sale separating a mother and her daughter, the woman who purchased the sack did an Internet search for "slavery" and "Middleton" and then gifted the sack to Middleton Place.[5]

On display from 2009 to 2013 at Middleton Place, the emotionally-charged artifact evoked human suffering and endurance. During this period, the identities of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth were unknown. It was viewed by thousands of museum visitors, including Central Washington University sociocultural anthropologist and museum-studies professor Mark Auslander, who has since traced the history of the sack to identify Ashley, her mother Rose, and the author of the needlepoint, Ruth.[5][6] In the research article he published in 2016, Auslander uses census reports, wills, newspaper announcements of court decrees, and inventory records to reconstruct their history. The historical chains of remaining evidence suggest that Ashley and her mother Rose were enslaved by a wealthy Charleston merchant and planter, Robert Martin (c. 1790–1852), who was worth over $300,000 at his death in December 1852. After his death, evidence suggests Ashley was sold away from her mother in order to raise money for his heirs.[7]

Auslander's archival work retraces the life of Ruth. He posits Ruth Middleton was born Ruth Jones in Columbia, South Carolina, around 1903. Her parents, Austin and Rosa Jones, were servants at the University of South Carolina. Ruth made her way to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and married Arthur Middleton, who was born around 1899 and also from South Carolina. However, Ruth and her husband are never listed as having lived together. She had a daughter, Dorothy Helen, born in Philadelphia in 1919. In 1921, when Ashley's Sack was embroidered, Ruth would probably have been a single mother to a young daughter. Newspaper reports and census records suggest that throughout her life, Ruth worked in affluent households in Philadelphia. By 1928, she was well known in Philadelphia's African-American high society, gaining regular mention in the "Smart Set" and "High Society" pages of the Philadelphia Tribune, the leading African-American newspaper. Auslander writes that Ruth "host[ed] bridge and cocktail parties and [wore] elegant couture". Her daughter, Dorothy Helen, was also known for her fashion sense and authored several "Smart Set" columns.[8]

Ruth died in January 1942 of tuberculosis. Dorothy Helen died in 1988.[8]

My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother

— Ruth Middleton, 1921

The sack is a rare, important material artifact in African-American history. The sack exemplifies the coming together of traditional oral and written history. Heather Andrea Williams describes the sack in the epilogue of her book Help Me to Find My People as a testimony to inter-generational loss and survival.[9] Professor Mark Auslander emphasizes the importance of the sack, and the historical reconstruction of the lives of Ashley, Rose, and Ruth, as a conduit to understanding the endurance of family lineal memory "in the face of terrible fragmentation of family solidarity caused by the domestic slave trade".[8]

"It is an emotional object", said Mary Elliot, museum specialist with the Smithsonian, who worked on the Slavery and Freedom exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture under curator Nancy Bercaw. "This piece is very important to telling that human story", Elliot said.[2]

• Middleton Place