Harriett Ames Mitchell

April 27, 1851

Asleep

1851

Sunday April 27th  Have had a bad head ache all day and

was not able to attend church Laid down and

slept until about two Oclock which relieved

me very much After church Miss Foss & self

called into Olivers and met Harriet there.

Sarah Lothrop spent the day there. This

evening commenced a letter to Pauline C Dean

It has been a very pleasant day

 

Perhaps all that riding around Easton yesterday was responsible for Evelina’s headache today. She had pushed herself on Saturday, and the jostling along the washboard roads in bright sunlight may have been a factor in her feeling ill today. That, or she was catching what Sarah Lothrop Ames had. She felt so poorly that she didn’t even try reading, which was often her refuge on a Sunday. Her remedy, just to lie down and sleep, made her feel much better. Sleep was probably a better cure than the Wistar’s Balsam she took a few weeks ago.

Evelina felt well enough in the afternoon to call next door to check on Sarah Ames. There, she and Orinthia bumped into Harriet Mitchell. Harriett was hopefully feeling more settled after her first week back in North Easton. Who was watching her children? Sarah Witherell?

Who is the Sarah Lothrop that Evelina mentioned as spending the day next door?  She must have been a relative – a niece or cousin – of Sarah Lothrop Ames, who was still ailing.

 

 

 

April 19, 1851

 

rail_travel_leslies

*

1851

April 19  Harriet and her children came from Pittsburgh this

morning, came by the way of Stonington to Mansfield

and got someone to bring them.  It s too bad we did

not send for them, but Father thought the storm

might prevent their coming  Called in to see them this

afternoon.  Harriet does not look near as well

as she did before she went.  Augustus went to Boston

& Mr Ames  Tolerably pleasant

 

The youngest offspring of Old Oliver and Susannah Ames came back to town today.  Harriett (Ames) Mitchell, all of 31 years old, traveled by rail from Pittsburgh to Easton, finding her own way from the station in nearby Mansfield. (The railroad had not yet been built to North Easton.) In tow were her three children, Frank Ames Mitchell, John Ames Mitchell, and Anna Mitchell, aged 9, 6, and not quite 4, respectively. Given the rigors of traveling a long distance on a train with small children, it’s little wonder that Harriett did “not look near as well as she did before she went.”

Weather and travel conditions aside, the question is why Harriett returned home and left her husband, Asa Mitchell, behind. We know only a little about Asa Mitchell. He was a member of the well-regarded Mitchell family of Bridgewater. A coal dealer, he had recently moved west from Cambridge to Pittsburgh, Erie or someplace in Pennsylvania.  His employment seemed unsettled, and perhaps was driven by the vagaries of the coal industry.

Asa and Harriett had been married for eleven years and, like any of the Ames marriages, we can only conjecture what their relationship was like. We do know that Harriett and their children spent many months away from Asa, eventually staying in a house in Bridgewater that Old Oliver obtained for her. Asa spent some time there, too, but by 1867 he was an inmate at the Taunton Insane Asylum, where his expenses were met by Oliver Jr. We don’t know what his mental illness was; it may have been as debilitating as senility, as sudden as brain trauma or as complicated – and untreatable then – as schizophrenia or bipolar disease.  His condition would erase him from Harriett’s life and, by extension, the lives of his children. He died in June, 1877 in Taunton.

So on this cloudy day, with the “wind north east and cold,” and an uncertain future in front of her, Harriett brought her children home and was made welcome. She and her older sister Sarah Witherell were close and, no doubt, were glad to see each other.

* Leslie’s, 1878

January 10, 1851

tcrr_ames

/51

Jan 10th Friday.  Have been baking most all day  Heat

the oven three times.  It rained very hard last night

and carried off most all the snow and it is very wet

and sloppy.  Margaret Keighan here to see Jane.

This is Mr Ames & Mr Whitwells birth day  both

of the same age 47 years.  Have been expecting Mr & Mrs

Whitwell here this afternoon and as they did not come

would have rode there this evening but Mr Ames is engaged

If Evelina and Oakes had been able to visit the Whitwells tonight, they would have had to take the carriage rather than the sleigh because of recent heavy rain.  According to Old Oliver, the sudden wet and warm weather has “took the snow of[f] so much that it spoilt the slaying.”  Evelina, meanwhile, was so tied to the brick oven all day, baking mince meat pies and such , that she had a right to be a little disappointed not to go out this evening.

The Ames family, Puritan stock that they are, don’t overly celebrate anyone’s birthday.  Yet Evelina notes the shared birthday of her husband and the minister.  Oakes Ames was born in North Easton on this day in 1804.  He was the first child of an eventual eight to be born to Oliver Ames and Susannah Angier Ames.  The others to follow would be Horatio, Oliver Jr., Angier (d. in infancy) William Leonard, Sarah, John and Harriett.

Besides Oakes, Oliver Jr. and Sarah are the only siblings who still live in North Easton in 1851.  Except for a stint away at school, Oliver Jr. never moved away.  He and his wife live next door.  Sarah, on the other hand, left for New York in 1836 when she married Nathaniel Witherell, Jr.  Now a widow, she returned to North Easton in the late 1840s and moved back into the old homestead to care for her father after the death of her mother in 1847.

The absentee siblings are away but never forgotten; among the brothers, especially, business deals are ongoing.  Horatio, the black sheep of the clan, lives in Connecticut and runs a forge.  William Leonard had been in New York City and Albany, working as a merchant who sold, among other items, Ames shovels.  When those enterprises failed, he switched to managing a blast furnace, in keeping with the family talent for manufacturing.  But this proved unprofitable, too. By 1851, William Leonard was making his way as a cattleman on the Minnesota frontier.  John, who had also moved to New York City, died in 1844 of a chronic lung ailment.  Harriett is married to a man from Bridgewater named Asa Mitchell, and at this time lives in western Pennsylvania.

As a boy, Oakes moved with his parents to Plymouth while his father worked at various manufacturing efforts, although shovel making predominated.  The family moved back to North Easton in 1813, after the conclusion of the War of 1812, whereupon Old Oliver threw himself into the manufacture of shovels. After that, the family stayed put.