March 11, 1851

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/51

March 11  Tuesday.  Orinthia & myself each finished a coarse shirt

this morning before school  I then went to mending

shirts and worked on them all the forenoon & untill

about two Oclock & went to cutting out shirts.  Cut three

coarse ones for Oakes Angier & one fine one from the pattern

I had of Sister Sally.  Cut out some stories for my scrap

book.  This evening commenced the sleeves of a shirt.

Augustus dined at Mr Peckhams  Pleasant but windy

The ladies continued sewing on shirts.  Evelina sewed for so long that her eyes must have hurt by the end of the day, yet she was still working with her needle when the lamps were lit. She mended many shirts, finished sewing one and cut out four more. Orinthia Foss, the young schoolteacher who was boarding with the Ameses, helped her.

Of the four shirt patterns Evelina cut, one was a new design from “Sister Sally,” most likely the wife of Horatio Ames. Horatio was the second son of Old Oliver and brother to Oakes, Oliver Jr., William, and Sarah Witherell. The black sheep of the family, he lived in Connecticut where, like his brother William, he ran an ironworks operation.  He and his wife Sally had begun their married life in North Easton; his father had built them a home there and their first child, another girl named Susan, was born only a few months after Oakes Angier.  As the two earliest grandchildren of Old Oliver and Susanna, the two cousins had certainly played together.

Evelina did take one break from sewing.  She cut out some items for her scrapbook, which up to now had been filled mostly with “receipts” or recipes.  That, or Evelina was creating two scrapbooks, one for keepsakes and favorite readings, the other filled with recipes for the kitchen.

*Illustration “Ladies Sewing Birds,” advertising broadside of C. E. Stearns, Middletown, Connecticut, 1851. Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford