The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, founded the Westtown School in Chester County, Pennsylvania. It looked to British schools for inspiration in shaping the education of Quaker girls and boys. Students were first admitted in 1799. Today, it is believed to be the oldest continuously operating coeducational boarding school in the United States. Ann Hibberd, who worked this sampler, was born in Chester County in 1803. She entered Westtown in March 1817 and continued there until April 1818.

While Westtown students created ornamental needlework, including embroidered globes, much of what has survived taught practical needlework skills: marking textiles with names or initials or making darning repairs. This sampler is a typical design of Westtown darning samplers, having blocks of seven different darning stitches along with the names of the student, school, and date. Most darning samplers were worked with white thread on a white ground, making them difficult to see and understand from a distance. Examples worked on colored ground fabrics, such as this one, are rarer and show the stitches more clearly. The style of Westtown needlework influenced other regional Quaker and non-Quaker schools.