Edwin Williams Gilmore

March 2, 1852

Brush

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

February 27, 1852

Tea kettle

 

Feb 27

1852  Friday  this morning I invited Mrs Lothrop here

but she went to Mrs Jason Howards to spend the day

came here this evening  Mrs S Ames & Fred dined

here  Mrs & Mr Horace Pool  Mrs W Williams  Abby

Edwin & wife Oliver & wife & Fred & Mrs Witherell

were here to tea  All came unexpectedly.  Had 

a very pleasant visit from them.

Many folks came to call today.  Sarah Ames Lothrop and her son, Frederick Lothrop Ames, joined the Ameses for midday dinner. (Although Oliver (3) had returned to Brown, Fred hadn’t yet gone back to Harvard.) A real crowd arrived “unexpectedly” for tea.  Sarah and Fred returned, bringing Oliver Ames Jr. with them. Sarah Ames Witherell came in from the other part of the house, resulting in all three sisters-in-law being together. Newlyweds Edwin and Augusta Gilmore walked over from their nearby home, and old Mrs. Gilmore – Evelina’s mother – was already on the premises. The family gathered.

From farther away came Horace and Abby Avery Pool, uncle and aunt to the bride, Augusta.  A Mrs. W. Williams arrived, as did Abby Torrey, Evelina’s niece. Abby’s head must have been full of the previous evening’s entertainment, that of Willard Lothrop’s visit and trance. It’s likely that some of this evening’s conversation turned on spiritualism.  One wonders what Oakes and Oliver Jr. thought of the topic.

Perhaps Evelina served some ginger snaps or currant cake from Tuesday’s baking. The tea itself could have been one of any number of types. Lydia Maria Child published her opinion on the subject: “Young Hyson is supposed to be a more profitable tea than Hysons; but though the quantity to a pound is greater, it has not so much strength. In point of economy, therefore, there is not much difference between them. Hyson tea and Souchong mixed together, half and half, is a pleasant beverage, and is more healthy than green tea alone.  Be sure that water boils before it is poured upon tea  A tea-spoonful to each person, and one extra thrown in, is a good rule.  Steep ten or fifteen minutes.”*

*Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 1846

 

February 22, 1852

georgewashington

1852

Feb 22nd Sunday Quite a snow storm this morning but

most all went to church.  I came home at noon on

account of a violent tooth ache and did not return.  Mrs

S Lothrop & son spent this afternoon, Frank carried

Orinthia home after meeting. Read in Grahams

Magazine  Mr Ames & self passed the evening at Edwins

It has cleared off very pleasant this evening

“It was a snowing this morning + all the forenoon and fell 2 or 3 inches deep wind southerly + thawd some  was clear at night,” according to Ames patriarch, Old Oliver. Yet the family rode through the snow to get to church. Poor Evelina got “a violent tooth ache” and had to go home after the first service. She must have felt better as the day progressed, for in the evening she and her husband, Oakes, went across the way to visit newlyweds Edwin and Augusta Gilmore.

Today was George Washington’s birthday. Born in 1732, he died in 1799, when Old Oliver was twenty years old. After Washington’s death, the young Congress of the day, whose partisanship between Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democrat-Republicans rivaled the divide we see in our modern Congress, came together to pass a resolution honoring the first president’s birthday. February 22, 1800 was dedicated to him and by 1832, the centennial of Washington’s birth, some type of observance of the holiday was customary.  The holiday did not become federal law until the 1879, and at the time was qualified as a “bank holiday.”

Old Oliver would have remembered the hero of the American Revolution and probably revered him, as most Americans did. Old Oliver was a child when the Constitution was written and ratified, and lived to see 16 presidents take office. For his generation, no American leader would be more heroic than General Washington.

 

February 18, 1852

Hoof

 

1852

Wednesday 18 Feb  Augusta Emily Susan & self have

spent the day at Rachels.  Mother Henrietta & Lavinia

were there  Had a pleasant visit.  Went to

carry mother home with Charley had some trouble

with him about starting it was so cold.  Mrs Solomon

Lothrop & son Willard came to Alsons this afternoon 

Made two dickeys for Mr Ames and cut out two more

 

Just like the day before,”this was a fair day wind north west + cold”* as Old Oliver, family patriarch, noted in his daily journal. It was so cold that one of the family horses, Charley, didn’t want to leave the premises. But Evelina needed to take her elderly mother, Hannah Lothrop Gilmore, back to the family farm, so Charley was harnessed up and made to trot out. Evelina and her mother probably didn’t enjoy the frigid temperatures, either, but at least they could cover themselves with blankets or robes.

Evelina spent most of the day in the company of female relatives at the home of her niece, Rachel Gilmore Pool, who lived near the Gilmore farm.  Her daughter, Susan, and niece, Emily Witherell, were with her, as was new bride Augusta Pool Gilmore.**  Rachel’s unmarried sister, Lavinia, was there, along with their mother, Henrietta.  It was a multi-generational gathering of women from ages 9 to 79.

The women must have spent some time sewing as they all sat together, for Evelina managed to complete two dickeys, or shirt fronts, for her husband. The companionship would have made the handiwork fun to do.

*Oliver Ames, Journal, Stonehill College Archives, Arnold Tofias Collection

**Rachel Gilmore Pool was married to Augusta’s brother, John Pool, while Augusta Pool Gilmore was married to Rachel’s brother, Edwin Gilmore. One family’s sister and brother married a neighboring family’s brother and sister.

February 16, 1852

Picture frame

Monday Feb 16th

1852

Susan washed the dishes this morning and I was

at work about the house most of the forenoon

Mrs Mary Williams came about eleven Oclock and 

staid to dinner  Called into Olivers and Edwins

with her  She returned to Joshua C Wm about three

and went home in the stage  Oliver tried to get

the coloured engraving smooth in the frame but could 

not  Mended Oakes Angier a vest

 

The new week opened with the usual domestic arrangements: Jane McHanna doing laundry, Susie Ames washing dishes and Evelina choring “about the house” in the morning.  A visitor, Mary Williams, arrived and stayed for midday dinner, then departed mid-afternoon on the local stagecoach .

With her son Oliver’s help, Evelina finished hanging the prints she had bought the week before in Boston. The new pieces of art were quite au courant; etchings, lithographs, and engravings were appearing on parlor walls across the country.  New printing technology – the same that promoted the appearance of so many new periodicals and serial novels – made the production and distribution of art prints easy. The subject matters varied from historical (like the famous image by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze of Washington Crossing the Delaware, first painted in 1851) to religious to geographical to sentimental.  They were decorative and affordable, and the middle class flocked to buy them.

Subject matter, of course, was important; Evelina had purchased one print about Halloween (or All Hallows Eve as it was known). The prints had to be attractive and look handsome on the wall. But the decorative frames that went around the art work counted, too, and “were often considered more important than the prints themselves.”* It’s too bad that Oliver was having difficulty making one new print fit properly in its frame.

* Pierre-Lin Renie, The Image on the Wall: Decoration in the Nineteenth Century Interior, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide

February 15, 1852

 lilliam_wald2

Nursing uniform from the late 19th c.*

1852

Sunday Feb 15th  Have been to church and at

noon went to Mr Baileys to see sister Amelia

who is nursing there  Mother went with me

Have been reading since meeting  Edwin & wife came

in to spend the evening but Mr Ames & self were

just going to Mr Swains and they would not let 

us stop for them so they went to Augustus  Had a 

pleasant call or rather visit at Mr Swains  came away

about nine Oclock  Very pleasant

The sun came out today, so despite it being “pritty cold,”** the Ames family went to church. During the intermission between morning and afternoon services, Evelina and her elderly mother, Hannah Lothrop Gilmore, rode out to visit Amelia Gilmore.  Amelia was the widow of Evelina’s brother, Joshua Gilmore, Jr. Joshua had died three years earlier, at age 35, leaving Amelia with two sons to raise.

In order to support herself and her boys, Amelia hired out as a nurse.  In this instance, she was looking after a Mr. Bailey, who must have lived near the Unitarian church. He may have lived alone, been ill and needed paid help; otherwise the convention of the day would have meant his female relatives looked after him. When Amelia wasn’t working, she and her youngest son, Samuel, lived with the Alger family near the Gilmore farm. The older son, Charles, had hired out somewhere but would soon come to reside with his uncle Alson Gilmore.

In 1852, nursing was not a formal profession.  Women (nursing was considered the exclusive province of women at the time) undertook nursing because they needed to work and this was one of very few avenues open to them. They based their protocol on personal experience in caring for ill members of their own families. There were no training programs or certification venues available, in no small part because there were so few hospitals. People were cared for at home. It would take the Crimean War in Europe and the Civil War in the U.S. to change attitudes and formalize medical care.

*Courtesy of http://www.nursinglink.monster.com

**Oliver Ames, Journal, Stonehill College Archives, Arnold Tofias Collection

 

February 14, 1852

 history

Detail of Cover of Gleason’s Pictorial, February, 1852

Sat Feb 14th  Finished Olivers shirt before dinner and did

some mending  About three went into Edwins and trimmed

a black silk cravat for Oliver  Mrs S Ames & Frederic

returned from New Bedford to night where they have been

since Tuesday  I spent most of the evening there

Evelina’s favorite periodicals, such as Gleason’s Pictorial, Godey’s Lady’s Magazine, and Graham’s, were full of allusions to Valentine’s Day this week. Gleason’s featured a valentine on its cover, in fact.  And while commercial Valentine cards hadn’t yet developed in the United States – that would happen in the 1870s – special letters and personal poems were popular on February 14. Yet Evelina makes no mention of receiving or sending a valentine, nor does she suggest that any of her children did, either.

Perhaps when Evelina went over to see Augusta Pool Gilmore, young bride of Evelina’s nephew Edwin Williams Gilmore, she found evidence of a valentine exchange between the newlyweds. Besides being in love and – presumably – open to sentimental expression, Augusta and Edwin were young enough to adopt new approaches to holidays that older Yankees like Evelina and Oakes ignored.

Meanwhile, winter was still very much present. As Old Oliver noted: “there was about half an inch of snow last night and it is cloud[y] + cold to day wind north west”

February 6, 1852

Write

Feb 1852

Friday Feb 6  Jane has baked some mince to day of

meat that was left last week and has done

very well.  Cut out a shirt for Oliver to day

and intended to finish it tomorrow but this

afternoon Miss Foss came and Miss Burrell

from W Bridgewater  We called at Edwins

this evening  commenced raining about five

Domestic tranquility reigned today as Jane McHanna made some fine mincemeat and Evelina cut cloth for a shirt, until interrupted by the arrival of Orinthia Foss and her friend Miss Burrell. For Evelina, chores gave way to social intercourse.

Besides keeping a record of various domestic details such as her sewing, Evelina often lists in her daily diary entries the names of the friends and relatives who come to call – in this case, Orinthia Foss and Miss Burrell. She writes of the women with whom she spends time, in fact, more often than she is apt to describe interactions with her immediate family (unless, of course, her husband forgets to pick her up to go out on a social call.) She includes the names of female friends, including her sisters-in-law, as much if not more often than she mentions the names of her children. Her social life, as in “We called at Edwins this evening,” is terribly important to her. She narrates it to her diary in order to remember it and savor it. It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t care about her family; she does. But looking after her almost-grown children is not noteworthy.

Evelina’s diary is simple, even for the nineteenth century, when the “practice” of keeping a diary was “to record personal feelings and explore intellectual growth.”* Eveline doesn’t concern herself with external events the way Mary Chesnut of South Carolina did in her diary of the Civil War, nor does she describe or question the secondary status of women as other Bostonians such as Caroline Healey Dall did in her diary. The intellectual pursuits and considerations of the brilliant Margaret Fuller never interested her – it was beyond her ken.  Evelina was literate and engaged in her life, but in a diffident and unsophisticated way. She wrote in a manner that more closely resembled her father-in-law, Old Oliver; her brother-in-law, Oliver Ames, Jr.; and, eventually, her son, Oliver (3). She simply wrote down whom she saw and what she did.

 

* Steven Stone, Making Sense of Letters and Diaries, http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu

Other resources for information about diaries in the nineteenth century:

Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/diaries.html

http://www.victorianpassage.com/2007/02/19th_century_diaries_and_scrap.php

January 31, 1852

500

Jan 31st  1852

Saturday  have been choring about house & mending most

all day.  Made a robe for Mitchell Willis child with

Mrs S Ames assistance  Edwin & wife here to tea  Mrs S

Ames has been here about three hours with her work

Mrs Witherell here awhile this afternoon.  Mr Frank

Russell was buried this afternoon.  My three sons went

to the funeral.  Quite a hard snow storm  Mr Ames to Boston

Inclement weather didn’t keep the Ames men from moving around today. Oakes Ames traveled into Boston on business, as he usually did on Saturdays. His sons, Oakes Angier, Oliver (3) and Frank Morton, rode to Easton Center for the funeral of Frank Russell, a 67-year-old blacksmith and veteran of the War of 1812. Russell had died two days earlier from pleurisy, and, despite the “hard snow storm,” he was buried at the Seth Pratt Cemetery with friends and family in attendance.  What had been his connection to the Ames’s sons? Had he worked for the shovel company?

Evelina, too, was tending to a death outside the family.  She and her sister-in-law, Sarah Lothrop Ames, sewed a burial robe for Luella Willis, the two-year old daughter of Mitchell and Amanda Willis.  Like Frank Russell, little Luella would have to be buried in cold ground during snowy weather. Once the services were over, the living would carry on with their chores, their commitments and their lives.  Evelina would turn to “mending most all day.”

January 30, 1852

Chess

Jan 1852

Jan 30th  Friday  Have commenced making a flannel

skirt for self & finished Susans dark print apron.

Mother [and] self passed the afternoon at Edwins.  Mr

Ames came to tea. Mrs S Ames called there with Mrs

Holmes. Mrs Witherell and the others returned to 

night  She has not her teeth but is to send for them

Oliver & Fred went to James Mitchell and called at

several other places  had a fine time Oliver played

chess with Judge Mitchell

Oliver Ames (3), Evelina’s middle son and a future governor of Massachusetts, was still home from college, as was his first cousin, Frederick Lothrop Ames.  The two young men were having “a fine time” on their winter break.  Chess was just one of the games they might have played to while away the dark evenings, another being whist.

Chess had been around for centuries, having first developed in India and the Islamic world.  It had evolved over time; dark and light squares on a chessboard were first introduced in the 10th century, for instance, rules for a stalemate or draw in the 15th, and so on.

By the nineteenth century, chess was really coming into its own.  In 1802, one J. Humphreys published a book called Chess Made Easy.  In 1830, the first known female chess player was acknowledged (though probably not encouraged.)  The first international chess tournament was held in London in 1851, won by Adolf Anderssen, and in 1852, the year we find Oliver Ames (3) playing the game on a winter’s night in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, sandglasses were first used to time a game.

Before the decade was finished, an American prodigy name Paul Morphy came to fame, winning nearly every game he played and defeating most of the older expert players. In the United States, a chess “epidemic” was born.