1852
Tuesday July 13 Julia Mahoney came to work this
morning and cut the waist to my borage
dress and went home at noon. Mr Ames
went to Canton and I begged the chance
to go with him & we called at Mr Kinsleys
Saw the ladies of the family & two Mr Peabodys
of Boston Called on Mrs Atherton
The first few days of this particular week were proving be “verry warm days. + pritty good hay days.”* Old Oliver had to be pleased.
After a morning of sewing a new barege dress with her dressmaker, Evelina “begged the chance” to ride east and north with her husband to Canton, where they visited Lyman and Louisa Kinsley. The Kinsleys, of course, were business associates but also friends, and they and their twenty-one year-old daughter, Lucy, happened to be entertaining visitors from Boston, “two Mr Peabodys.”
The Peabody brothers had called on the Kinsleys to be sociable, certainly, but one of them had a romantic motive. Francis Howard Peabody, also aged twenty-one, was courting Miss Lucy; the two would wed in 1854. They would have three children, a boy followed by two girls. Their little boy, Frank Everett Peabody, would become a founding member of a famous Boston brokerage firm, Kidder and Peabody.
*Oliver Ames, Journal, Stonehill College Archives, Arnold Tofias Collection
evelinaames 