March 2nd Tuesday
1852 March Have been assisting Mr Scott paper[ing]
again to day Worked untill past nine
and feel very tired. The paper is all on
except a patch or two here & there Francis brought
Lavinia up to Edwins this afternoon Mr Holbrook
has finished the first coat of paint in
the sitting room chamber
To begin with, the day was normal. Winter weather continued: “there was a little mist this morning + it froze as it fell and the ground was slipery, wind north East. it was cloudy and a little stormy all day – it cleard of[f] in the evening.”* Evelina was not tempted to go out. She stayed indoors, focused on redecorating the downstairs.
With Mr. Scott in the lead, Evelina helped put wallpaper up in her parlour. She must have had to take down the framed prints and new looking-glass in order to do this. The sitting room, too, was being repainted.
Evelina stayed up late, becoming “very tired,” and evidently ready to go to bed as she wrote this entry. Yet a good night’s sleep would elude her. Indeed, few people in the village of North Easton would be able to sleep through the night of March 2, 1852.
*Oliver Ames, Journal, Stonehill College Archives, Arnold Tofias Collection
evelinaames 
Suspense?!
🙂
I could use some spring redecorating. Can I hire Evelina, Mr. Scott, and Mr. Holbrook?
The suspense is new. Your readers are holding their breath!
Since you apparently have Old Oliver’s diary/journal at your fingertips, don’t be afraid to add his other comments regarding water levels at the ponds, or whatever. Somewhere in there, although it may not be during the Evelina diary years, there is a terrific blizzard that freezes up all the wheels and factory works for a day or three.
Thanks, Dwight. At the moment, we’re out of town, so I don’t have access to Old Oliver’s diary. I previously copied many – but not all – of his entries for 1852, and they’ve been helpful. I look forward to returning to Stonehill to augment my research. You know, though, those archives are there for others to use, too, so any enterprising reader could contact Nicole Casper at the archives to see if there’s an opportunity to examine Old Oliver’s journal. I can’t speak for Nicole, of course, but she has always been very helpful and enthused about this project.
I copied a lot of them too, back in the day when Greg oversaw them, but I don’t have them particularly well-organized, and many years and other interests in Stoughton history have intervened. One of these days, I will go back and tackle that assemblage, (he says optimistically.) I have about a quarter of my Ames stuff on the computer and the rest in the hand-written notebooks.
There’s a lot there to keep organized!