This ambrotype portrait captures Abigail Cobb Hadlock Spurling Preble (1808-1874) as a middle-aged woman: mother of nine and mistress of the Preble House on Great Cranberry Island during one its most active periods.

She was the daughter of Samuel and Sarah (Polly) Manchester Hadlock of Islesford, on Little Cranberry Island. She married William Pitt Preble (1811-1905) in 1839 after her first husband, Samuel Spurling, died at sea in 1837. As the first president of the Cranberry Isles Benevolent Sewing Circle, she secured funds for construction of the island's first church in 1866.