Queen of the Prairie
1852 May
Thursday 6th Worked in the garden a short time and
about nine went to the shovel shops with Hannah
and her sister They spent the afternoon here and
Augusta. Edwin came to tea Mr Brown,
Olivers room mate, came to night. We ladies rode
to Mr Clapps, bought Queen of the Prairie for 37 cts
Warm sunshine sent Evelina outdoors for much of the day. She gardened after breakfast, then broke away at nine a.m. to go over to the shovel shops with her niece, Hannah Lincoln Gilmore, and Hannah’s sister, Sarah Lincoln. What were the ladies doing at the factory? Evelina wouldn’t have gone there on her own volition.
The Lincoln sisters, originally from Hingham, spent much of the day with Evelina. They were joined by Augusta Pool Gilmore, whose husband Edwin Williams Gilmore later came to tea. “We ladies” traveled to the home of Lucius Clapp, another fine gardener with plants to sell, where Evelina purchased a Filipendula rubra, or Queen of the Prairie. Clapp was a well-respected citizen of Stoughton, described by a contemporary historian as “one of the representative farmers of this progressive age.” *
Oliver (3), meanwhile, was briefly home from Brown University. His roommate, a Mr. Brown, came to North Easton for a visit. It was a full table at tea time.
* D. Hamilton Hurd, History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, pp. 424-425
evelinaames 
Here is something on Lucius Clapp’s farm, as of two years earlier:
In the town agricultural report of 1850, the Lucius and Emily Clapp
farm of 172 acres was valued at $4300. Only ten farms had higher valuations. The two most common occupations in the 567 households (population 3494) in 1850 were farmer and bootmaker. Clapp had only one horse, four cows, two swine, and one carriage, but owned $7780 worth of stocks in banks and insurance companies. Mr Clapp paid $22.79 in real estate taxes and $42.20 in personal property taxes for that year. The document “Productions of Agriculture – Stoughton-1850” lists for Lucius Clapp:
Indian Corn – 60 bushels orchard products- $17
rye – 6 bushels market garden – $18
Irish Potatoes 150 bushels home-made manufactures – $40
butter – 200 lbs value of animals slaughtered – $62
cheese – 225 lbs
hay – 11 tons
A receipt found at the Stoughton Historical Society dated October 22,
1879 certifies that a bin of birch and maple coal (charcoal) measured by
Lucius Clapp for James Drake contains 160 baskets of coal and that Lucius Clapp received $44.80 in payment.
Thanks, Dwight. We’ll hear a little more about Lucius Clapp this year. He was also a Whig, and I believe that he and Oakes Ames liked to talk politics.