sewing | evelinaames

April 14, 1852

1852

April 14th Wednesday Jane washed yesterday and put

her clothes out to day […] and it is very pleasant and

most like spring of any day we have had. Made two

toilet cushions and covers for them of plaid muslin

Mrs Sarah Ames brought in her work this afternoon

awhile and I put a bosom into a shirt for

Mr Ames. Read this evening in Night & Morning

The rain and snow of the preceding two days had disrupted domestic routine, meaning that servant Jane McHanna washed the weekly laundry on Tuesday instead of Monday and hung clothes out today. Evelina didn’t seem to mind, given how “most like spring” the day turned out to be. She seemed to have recovered from having gone without much sleep the day before.

Sarah Lothrop Ames came over from next door and the two sisters-in-law sat and sewed. Evelina sewed a shirt front for her husband and made two toilet cushions. The word “toilet” in the nineteenth century referred to personal grooming, as in getting dressed or cleaning one’s teeth or sitting at a dressing table. A toilet cushion, then, was most likely a seat for a stool or small chair for a bedroom or dressing area. Evelina made both the pillow itself and its cover of “plain muslin.”

Night and Morning was, presumably, a work of fiction. Evelina must have found it in one of the periodicals she liked to read, such as Gleason’s Pictorial, or in a book she or Oakes had purchased in Boston. Any readers out there familiar with this work?

April 9, 1852

April 9th Friday Have made the skirt of my Delaine

dress and Orinthia has been sewing on her own

clothes most of the day I have done but very

little sewing this spring. Have had some one staying

here for the last few weeks and have been upon the

go a great deal of the time. Abby came about four

this afternoon and spent the evening

Evelina was trying to catch up on her sewing today, admitting that she had been distracted by “someone staying” at the house for several weeks. She had been “upon the go” with visits from her sister-in-law Amelia Gilmore, her mother, and her former boarder, Orinthia Foss. As a consequence, her sewing had suffered. It was time to get busy.

Her father-in-law, Old Oliver, was busy, too. After noting that“it was cloudy all day wind north east + snowd a little,” he went on to report the purchase of several animals. “[W]e bought 12 pigs to day that weighd 2041 lb at 7 ½ cents a lb – paid 143=00 cents for them [and] we bought a black hors[e] to day of Mr Feild of North Bridgewater which he cald 5 years old for 125$ if he proves good we are to pay 25$ more for him”

A few days ago it was oxen, today it was pigs and a horse. Old Oliver was filling the barn.

April 8, 1852

1852

April 8th Thursday Fast day Orinthia & Frank went to meeting

and at four oclock to a sing at the meeting house

hall. Mr Ames has been to work all day the same

as usual I have been very busy at work on

one thing and another have sewed on Susans

apron have it nearly done which makes the fifth

that I have made this spring

Evelina made note that today was a Fast Day, an annual event intended to be spent in fasting, prayer and supplication to the Almighty for a good growing season. The practice originated with the Puritans and evolved over time. By 1852, it was a fading custom. Frank Morton Ames and Orinthia Foss went to church and to a “sing” afterwards, but both Evelina and Oakes Ames worked “as usual.” No one appeared to fast or spend the day in church.

A different long-standing custom of the country – slavery – needed to fade and disappear, yet hadn’t. It would only disappear with bloodshed, because the untenable social and cultural practice could not be resolved in a practical, orderly and non-violent way. War would be required, and soon.

On this day in 1852, a state court in Missouri decided against Dred Scott, a one-time slave who had sued his former owner’s estate for freedom. Scott and his wife, Harriet, had once been owned by the late Dr. John Emerson. The narrative of the case was complicated, but was based mainly on the Scotts having resided for a period of time in the free state of Illinois while working for the Emersons. Scott believed that he and his wife should have been freed. But Dr. Emerson’s widow, Irene, kept the couple as her slaves, and wouldn’t even allow Scott to purchase his freedom. Scott sued and won in a lower court, but lost his case in the Supreme Court of Missouri.*

Scott and his lawyer appealed the case, which would go on to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. In one of the Court’s most infamous decisions, Chief Justice Roger B. Tanney, a Jacksonian Democrat who believed in states’ rights and a slaveholder who had manumitted his own slaves, would nonetheless declare that the Negro had no rights. An “originalist” group, Tanney’s court determined that the Constitution as originally written had made no provision for the citizenship of Negroes. For Tanney, slavery was an issue to be decided at the state level.

The Dred Scott case was one more irrevocable step in the path to civil war. The U. S. government essentially abdicated federal jurisdiction over slavery, which only accelerated the sectional divisions and conflicts. Bloody Kansas burst open, and within a decade, unprecedented conflict would convulse the nation.

*”Decision in a Slave Case,” article from the Washington National Intelligencer, April 8, 1852, courtesy of http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/25809

April 6, 1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811 – 1896)

1852

April 6th Tuesday We have had one of the driving

snow storms of the season the snow is very

much banked. We have been reading Uncle

Toms Cabin Susan has read to us most of the

time have been sewing & mending. Orinthia hemmed

a black cravat for O Angier and sewed some

on Susans pink apron. Have made a little needle

book for mother

Yesterday, Evelina and Orinthia had been in Evelina’s garden planting flowers. Today the two women sat indoors “sewing & mending” because the unstable spring weather had brought on “one of the driving snow storms of the season.” According to Old Oliver, the snow “was all in heaps and the wind blowing verry hard from northeast” *

Yet the women weren’t disconsolate. While they sewed, Evelina’s daughter Susan read aloud to them from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a popular new novel. Originally published in serial form in the National Era, an abolitionist periodical out of Washington, D. C., the full book had just been published in Boston by John P. Jewett and was on its way to becoming the best selling work of fiction of the 19th century.

Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or a Tale of Life Among the Lowly tells the story of two Kentucky slaves, Tom and Eliza, who are forced to leave their home plantation and make their way in a hostile society, one sold south, the other escaping north. It was a tale that gripped readers north and south, within the country and abroad, and provoked various imitations, interpretations and theatrical iterations. It has never been out of print.

Mrs. Stowe was not only an author, mother of seven children and wife of a Biblical scholar and educator; she and her husband were also active abolitionists. For a number of years they had lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, an active depot for escaping slaves, where they were participants in the Underground Railroad and personally helped hide slaves on the run. When the Fugitive Slave Act was enacted in 1850, Mrs. Stowe was distraught. She wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in protest.

How might Evelina have liked Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Very much, one suspects. Though hardly an active abolitionist, Evelina was sympathetic to the slaves. After the Civil War, she even tried to hire some freed black women to come work for her but, according to her grandson Winthrop Ames, the plan never worked out.

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

April 2, 1852

1852 March [sic] 2d Friday Have been mending pants for Frank

Made a long call on Mrs S Ames in the morning

Have been sweeping and dusting. Mrs S Ames dined

in the other part of the house I carried my sewing

in there a couple of hours this afternoon Oakes A

went to Mr Howards after Orinthia this evening

Frank is not well and did not go Have

written a letter to Mrs Norris Augusta here this evening

After yesterday’s April Fool’s fun, Evelina resumed her domestic routine. She swept, dusted, mended, sewed and wrote a letter to a friend. Same old, same old. Her son Frank Morton, however, was under the weather, but her oldest son, Oakes Angier, was fine and even went out for the evening after work.

Old Oliver Ames, meanwhile, also resumed some of his routine, most of which had been disrupted by the shovel shop fire a month earlier. He was occupied by planning for the new stone factory buildings, but as he listened to the rain fall, he knew it was almost planting time. The farmer in him was getting ready for a new growing season. Perhaps in recognition of that, he “bought a yoke of oxen to day of Samuel Clap for $117-50.”*

March 30, 1852

1852

March 30th Tuesday Spent the forenoon puttering about

the house doing nothing at all. Have been to

carry Orinthia to Mrs John Howards. Mrs S Ames

went with us and we called at Mrs Reed, Whitwell

J. Howard Mrs Merrill and Mrs Hills Mrs Ames

stoped here to tea and spent the evening. Louisa

Swan was at home and Ann Johnson. Augusta called

Hannah called for a moment this forenoon

Apparently, there was no sewing today; perhaps Evelina’s fingers were sore from working the heavy moreen fabric the day before. She hardly seemed to mind “doing nothing at all,” however, and gave the afternoon over entirely to calling, an occupation she enjoyed. She, her sister-in-law Sarah Lothrop Ames, and guest Orinthia Foss called on Caroline Howard, Abigail Reed, Eliza Whitwell, Mrs. Merrill and Mrs. Hills. They may have called on some younger fellow Unitarians, too: Louisa Swan (daughter of Dr. Caleb Swan) and Ann Johnson.

Calling was an essential component of social life in the 19th century, as we’ve noted before. Some women thrived on it, others only tolerated it, but just about every woman exercised the obligation to call on their friends and neighbors, as due. In Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, “Little Women,” an entire chapter is devoted to two of the March sisters, Amy and Jo, making calls. Amy enjoyed them, but had to persuade Jo to join her:

“Now put on all your best things, and I’ll tell you how to behave at each place, so that you will make a good impression. I want people to like you, and they would if you’d only try to be a little more agreeable. Do your hair the pretty way, and put the pink rose in your bonnet; its becoming, and you look too sober in your plain suit. Take your light kids and the embroidered handkerchief. […]

“Jo […] sighed as she rustled into her new organdie, frowned darkly as she tied her bonnet strings in an irreproachable bow, wrestled viciously with pins as she put on her collar, wrinkled up her features generally as she shook the handkerchief, whose embroidery was as irritating to her nose as the present mission was to her feelings; and when she had squeezed her hands into tight gloves with two buttons and a tassel, as the last touch of elegance, she turned to Amy with an imbecile expression of countenance, saying meekly, –

“‘I’m perfectly miserable; but if you consider me presentable, I die happy.'”*

*Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

March 29, 1852

Moreen Fabric*

1852

March 29 Monday. Orinthia returned with us from meeting

yesterday She helped Susan wash the dishes and

I cleaned the sitting room and afterwards sat down

to our sewing Have new bound my moreen skirt

Orinthia and self went into Edwins this evening

had a pretty lively call making fun of Orinthia’s spelling

Evelina may have “had a pretty lively call making fun of Orinthia’s spelling,” today, but her own orthography was far from perfect. Neither woman, evidently, could have won a spelling bee – and Orinthia was a school teacher! To be fair, however, spelling in the 19th century was not as standardized as it became later. Spelling has long been a fluid practice, actually, however often periodic efforts were made by different groups and individuals – Teddy Roosevelt among them – to reform and standardize it. So the two women would have had plenty of company with their wayward pens. Just consider the various ways that Old Oliver Ames spelled (or spelt) slate: sleight, slaight and slayt.

Presumably unworried about her own grammatical shortcomings, Evelina pursued her usual agenda for a Monday. She cleaned part of the downstairs while daughter, Susie, washed the breakfast dishes and servant, Jane McHanna, started the weekly laundry and prepared midday dinner. After Evelina had finished dusting, sweeping and tidying, she and guest Orinthia Foss, the poor speller, sat down to “our sewing”.

Evelina was working on a skirt of moreen, a ribbed fabric of cotton or wool that today serves more often for upholstery or curtains. In the 19th century, however, its stiffness lent itself to the voluminous skirts that defined the era. It would have been a thick, tough fabric to work on by hand. But Evelina was nothing if not an excellent needlewoman.

*Image courtesy of http://www.eatonhilltextiles.com

March 20, 1852

from The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling , 1877

1852

March 20th Saturday Have cut and basted a purple print

apron for Susan of a pattern that Lavinia

brought from Mary Abby & Edwin & wife were

here to tea Orinthia dressed in Franks clothes

and paraded around here awhile. Send for Mrs

Witherell & Mrs S Ames to see her We have had

a pretty lively time Orinthia brought over

Edwin & wife.

The ladies laughed today. After sewing for hours, breaking only for midday dinner, Evelina and her young friend Orinthia Foss laid down their needles to have tea. Orinthia got it into her head to put on nineteen-year-old Frank Morton Ames’s clothes “and paraded around.” She donned his shop pants, perhaps, and shop coat over one of his white muslin shirts. Evelina and her guests were so amused at the sight that they called in Sarah Ames and Sarah Witherell to see the fun. Cross-dressing was a novelty for these women, and Orinthia’s daring act generated hilarity.

All things considered, these women were probably due for some laughter. It was the first day of spring, and everyone had been pretty well cooped up for months, excepting the occasional trip into town. More recently, they had suffered through a major fire. Some innocent amusement was a good release.

Evelina’s favorite author, Charles Dickens, knew all about laughter: “It is a fair, even-handed adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”**

While the women amused themselves at home, the best-selling novel of the 19th century was published in book form today, in Boston. We’ll soon find Evelina reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

* Clockwise: “The Giggling Laugh, excited by Boisterous Fun and Nonsense.” “The Obstreperous Laugh, instigated by Practical Jokes or Extreme Absurdities.” “The Hearty Laugh of the Gentler Sex.” “The Stentorian Laugh of the Stronger Sex.” “The Superlative Laugh, or Highest Degree of Laughter.“ From The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling, George Vesey, 1877. Courtesy New York Historical Society, courtesy of CABINET: The Art of Laughter, Issue 17, Spring 2005

**Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol,

March 17, 1852

Modern photograph of two private homes on Oliver Street in Easton, originally built in 1852 as part of the temporary structure for the shovel factory.*

March 17

1852 Wednesday. Passed the day at Mothers with Amelia

and Susan Carried Augusta to her fathers

and afternoon she and Rachel came down

to see us Miss Foss closed her school Sat.

Came to Mothers this morning and to

night came home with us. Carried cloth

and cut out a bleached shirt Amelia worked

on the sleeves.

Evelina spent a pleasant day with her mother and several relatives. Her friend Orinthia Foss came to stay for a time. Evelina’s father-in-law, Old Oliver Ames, was completely focused on the rebuilding of the shovel shops. He seemed pleased to report:

“this was a cloudy day wind northeast. + in the afternoon it was cold + chilly. the roof is on the stone shop + the windows are in + the down stream end finisht- + the piece from that to the water shop is up + the roof shingled + the walls are boarded – one hundred + eight feet of the handeling shop is up and part of it clapboarded. the polishing shop is up and the roof shingled and the sides boarded + partly clapboarded the hammer shop is up + the sides + ends boarded and the roof and two thirds sleighted”**

This is one of the longest entries that Old Oliver ever wrote in his journal. He was clearly proud of the progress that had been made in the two weeks since the fire that destroyed almost all. The factory would soon be back on its feet, and planning for more permanent stone buildings could move forward. The wooden buildings that went up so fast would have another use after the stone buildings were erected, that of housing for some of the shovel workers. They would be moved from the original site by the pond and become residences. As you can see from the illustration, some of them are still used today.

* Image taken by Gregory Galer, Forging Ahead, MIT, 2001, Figure 50

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

March 16, 1852

Defensive breastworks dug by Army Corps of Engineers outside of Petersburg, Virginia during the Civil War – probably using Ames shovels

March 16th

1852 Tuesday Sewed on my waist very quietly

with Amelia this forenoon and this afternoon

have been into Edwins Julia Pool came

there & tomorrow is going into Boston Mrs S

Ames was there and this evening Mrs Witherell

Amelia is in fine spirits and am having

a very pleasant visit from her.

A quiet day was this, and “not verry cold.”* Evelina and her sister-in-law, Amelia Gilmore, sat and sewed for hours and visited with Augusta Pool Gilmore, Sarah Lothrop Ames and Sarah Ames Witherell. The reconstruction of the shovel shops continued.

Although Evelina was unlikely to have known it, today happened to be the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Army Corps of Engineers. Officially organized by President Thomas Jefferson on this date in 1802, the Corps was headquartered at West Point, where it established and led the military academy until after the Civil War. For many years, West Point was the major engineering school in the country.

In addition to its oversight of West Point, the Corps was tasked for much of the 19th century with exploration of America’s vast lands and waterways. As the country moved westward, the Corps surveyed road and canal routes. During the Civil War, it built bridges, railways, forts, batteries and roads – often using Ames shovels.

In 1852, in particular, the Corps was focused on waterways. In Detroit, one group of engineers conducted and published a survey of the Great Lakes. In Utah, an engineer named Lieutenant James W. Gunnison, for whom the Gunnison River is named, explored the Salt Lake area and spent time with the Mormons. He published a report entitled, “The Mormons or Latter-Day Saints, in the Valley of The Great Salt Lake. A History of their Rise and Progress, Peculiar Doctrines, Present Condition, and Prospects, Derived from Personal Observation During a Residence Among Them.”

A year later, Gunnison and several members of his team would be massacred by Indians from the Pahvant Ute tribe. Gunnison’s widow, Martha, always believed that the Mormons were the actual perpetrators. The Army Corps of Engineers kept right on going, continuing its work and eventually expanding its original mission to include flood control, dam construction, and environmental cleanup.

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

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