Making a Living Making Quilts: A Historical Perspective

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Rebecca Murray Martin: Mantua Maker


1806 illustration of an English dress maker

Rebecca Murray Duvall Solzar Martin married three times in Charleston, South Carolina in the late 18th century. Through the marriages she maintained a dressmaking shop on Meeting Street.


This mantua maker can represent Rebecca Murray(ca 1860?-1840)

 Dress makers were called mantua makers at the time. Her first husband John Duvall was a "staymaker" manufacturing items for ladies' apparel. Together they opened a dressmaking establishment before his death during the American Revolution in 1782. She married next Jacob Solzar who died in 1784.

Learning from her experiences as a widowed businesswoman (Solzar's will compromised her finances) she arranged for a prenuptial agreement when she married a third time after five years of recouping her losses. Her son in law wrote that Rebecca "brought a decent competency," to husband John Jacob Martin (1763-1853), son of a Lutheran minister, who "himself had nothing" when they married in 1789.

Geertruydt Roghman's etching of a  Dutch seamstress, 1648-1650
Not much had changed in 200 years

Rebecca and Martin had four daughters and prospered. Records indicate she had four enslaved people and other women employees living with them. Her foresight in keeping her property separate from her husband's was wise because in 1813 she found out that Jacob had a second family in Charleston. He was essentially a bigamist in a society that did not allow divorce.

Jacob's solution to the dilemma was absconding for Philadelphia with his "Delilah" Elizabeth Pennington and their children. Property was divided; Rebecca kept her four girls and their father seems to have been forgotten. We know about the scandal because eldest daughter Eliza's husband Martin Strobel wrote a pamphlet defending his wife's family.

And we only know so much about Rebecca because her second daughter Harriet Martin married once and well, choosing a Lutheran minister who'd succeeded her grandfather at St. John's Lutheran Church. New Yorker John Bachman had recently come to serve in Charleston when he and Harriet Martin married in 1816 when she was 25.

John Bachman (1790-1874)
Bachman was minister at St. John's Lutheran Church
for 56 years.

St. John's Lutheran on Clifford Street.

Listings from 1816 Charleston Directory

Harriet lived with Rebecca and her sisters above the business at 197 Meeting Street
until she married.

John and Harriet Bachman lived in this house 

Bachman also married Harriet's family. Mother Rebecca and youngest sister Maria lived with him for the rest of their lives. Harriet gave birth to fourteen children; nine lived beyond childhood. The family was afflicted with tuberculosis---Harriet's many pregnancies complicated the lung disease and sister Maria served as mother to all those children while Harriet led the life of an invalid.

Harriet's son-in-law was an extraordinary man, an amateur scientist, 
an accomplished biologist when not
attending to church duties.

John James Audubon (1785-1851)
Photograph by the Brady Studios about 1850

About 1830 he met another extraordinary man, John James Audubon, who had published several volumes of his Birds of America. Bachman invited Audubon to live with them too.

Maria Martin Bachman (1796 - 1863)
Collection of the Charleston Museum

Houseguest Audubon encouraged Maria, then in her mid thirties, to develop her painting skills. She began painting the botanical backgrounds for Audubon's plates, graduated to insects and then to painting the birds.

Long Billed Curlew with the City of Charleston in the background

"The Long-billed Curlew spends the day in the sea-marshes, from which it returns at the approach of night, to the sandy beaches of the sea-shores, where it rests until dawn.... it was my good fortune to witness their departures and arrivals in the company of my friend Bachman....Accompanied by several friends, I left Charleston one beautiful morning, the 10th of November, 1831, with a view to visit Cole's Island, about twenty miles distant.... After shooting various birds..." Audubon
The Audubon paintings were workshop productions with different artists doing backgrounds and birds. This one was published in 1840 after Audubon spent time every year from 1831 to 1837 with the Bachmans.

One of Maria's butterfly paintings

Audubon wrote son Victor in 1833: 
 "Miss Martin with her superior talents, assists us greatly in the way of drawing, the insects she has drawn are, perhaps, the best I've seen"
A Fox
The painters used dead animals for models. It took more than a few
days to paint the corpse. One wonders where they were stored.

Despite the animal carcasses the Bachman household must have been a  wonderful place. Matriarch Rebecah oversaw a group of pious Lutherans, many grandchildren, painters studying the skins of dead birds, enslaved servants trained to skin the birds and maintain the usual Audubon zoo in the yard, which included small mammals such as shrews and rabbits and larger ones like a bear.

Bachman's Warbler

The Reverend was infatuated with Audubon who brought assistants on his annual visits plus two Audubon boys who married two Bachman girls. Maria was painting in the parlor with the other assistants, while upstairs Harriet periodically delivered another baby.

Audubon's first language was French, so we can add an imaginary French accent to the portrait of the resident genius. A friend who traveled to Florida with Audubon described him as "the most enthusiastic and indefatigable man I ever knew ... Mr. Audubon was neither dispirited by heat, fatigue, or bad luck ... he rose every morning at 3 o'clock." Maria's biographer Debra J. Lindsay describes Audubon as an inebriate --- a man fond of his liquor in a house full of sober Lutherans.

What Rebecca Martin thought of the visiting artist is not recorded. Her health declined and by 1840 she was confined to her sickroom where she died that year, leaving Maria, her only unmarried daughter "well off in money matters." While she painted, Maria supervised a house full of invalids, many afflicted with tuberculosis, which killed both those Bachman/Audubon wives and their mother Harriet, who died in 1846 at 56.


By then Audubon was living in his own home in New York City, suffering from dementia, his mind "all in ruins" wrote Bachman in 1848. Audubon came to rely on Bachman to do his science. Bachman wrote the text for Audubon's three volumes The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America published between 1846 and 1854. He had become the leading expert on American mammals.

In January, 1848 Bachman married his housemate and sister in law, Maria Martin. The couple who shared religion, science and a home full of children seem to have been happily married until Maria's death in 1863. She fell and seriously injured her arm in 1856, which put an end to her painting career but in the 25 years she spent at scientific illustration she produced an impressive body of work.



Read Debra J. Lindsay's biography, Maria Martin's World. Here's a preview:
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