1851
June 6 Friday Worked in the garden an hour or two this morning
mended some cotton stockings swept & dusted &c
About three or four Oclock went with Olivers wife
& Mrs Mitchell to North Bridgewater called at
Mr Summers to take Frank Mitchell home & at Mrs
Carrs & Susan Copelands to get my bonnet The bonnet
is done well When I returned home found Orinthia
here. Jane Howard brought her up.
At last, a bonnet to take home and trim. Evelina was clearly pleased. She picked it up in North Bridgewater (today’s Brockton) with her sisters-in-law Sarah Lothrop Ames and Harriett Ames Mitchell. The ladies retrieved Harriett’s eldest son, Frank Ames Mitchell, in the process. Not yet ten years old, whom had he been visiting?
Otherwise, Evelina’s day was full of quotidian activities: mending, sweeping, dusting. Nothing out of the ordinary popped up in the domestic department. Gardening, too, continued. On this day, Evelina may have planted the asters she picked up yesterday at the Howards’, compliments of a Howard daughter, Louisa.
Joseph Breck in his Breck’s Book of Flowers, 1851, admired the China Aster: “The varieties are now very numerous, and possess exceeding beauty, some of them being almost as large as a small Dahlia, and much more graceful.”
Breck warned against letting the asters “degenerate in to inferior flowers,” and recommended sowing the seeds in May, “in patches,” and transplanting them to “a bed well prepared the last of June.” It may be that Evelina was transplanting the seedlings a little early. Time would tell.
* Image from edenbrothers.com
evelinaames 