William Leonard Ames

March 20, 1851

photo

Shirt bosoms

/51

March 20 This morning at 1/2 past seven commenced 

a fine bleach shirt for one of my sons

and finished it about ten Oclock this evening

Made the whole but stiching the bosom

Mrs Witherell brought the 8th bosom that

she has stiched for me this forenoon and 

sat with me two hours  William left this 

morning.  Clothes dried and ironed.  Cloudy & snowy

A[u]gustus here to dine

Today Old Oliver wrote in his daily journal:

“it is a snowing moderately this morning  William left here this morni[n]g for New Jersey.  It did not snow long but it was cloudy all day wind north west but it thawed some.”

William went back to the family-financed foundry in New Jersey for a final time before making the momentous change of striking west.  He wanted to put distance between himself and the shovel operations in Easton.  With his older brothers Oakes and Oliver Jr. managing the family business, his only chance at success was to find his own niche somewhere beyond their reach. At age 38, he was about to begin a very different life.

As William rode off, Evelina, naturally, was wielding needle and thread.  After so many days of sewing shirts, she was adept enough to sew one entirely in a single day, beginning just after breakfast and finishing up right before bed.  Having her kind sister-in-law Sarah Witherell to sew with for part of the day was a pleasant diversion.  That Sarah contributed so many “bosoms” (detachable shirt fronts also known as dickies, false-fronts, and, in the 20th century, tux fronts) suggests that some of the shirts might have been destined for the men in her care, her father Old Oliver and her son, George Oliver Witherell.

March 18, 1851

imgres

1851

March 18th Tuesday  A very bad north East snow

and Orinthia did not keep school and we both

sit down to sewing quite early.  She to work

on a coarse shirt for Oakes Angier and I have

made a collar and finished the shirt that

I commenced yesterday  Wm Called for the 

first time since he came here.  A[u]gustus dined 

& spent the night

More snow, enough to call off school and prevent nephew Augustus Gilmore from departing to his lodgings at Mr. Wrightman’s.  Did it fall on any little crocuses in Evelina’s flower beds? Wasn’t it getting to be springtime?

Augustus, a man with a robust figure and evident appetite, continued to spend time with the Ames family, often joining them at dinner. Did he pay for his board, or did Evelina and Oakes give him free meals?  Evelina began to track his meals by underlining those occasions in her diary.  Why? Did she begrudge her nephew’s presence in the dining room, or did her tracking of his meals have some other purpose?

William Leonard Ames, youngest living son of Old Oliver, had been visiting in North Easton for ten days, yet today was the first time he called on Evelina and Oakes.  His avoidance of their parlor spoke loudly of the animosity between William and Oakes.  His pronounced delay in paying a call on his oldest brother might well have been his only way to retaliate for the financial distress that Oakes had caused him in the closing of the family ironworks in New Jersey, an operation that had been in William’s care.  For a deeply researched account of the particulars of the rift between the two brothers, in which the blame seems to lie more with Oakes, see Greg Galer’s thesis, Forging Ahead.  

March 9, 1851

Down_in_the_Cave_Church_Pews_Company_Town_Exhibition_Coal_Mine_Beckly_WV_8576_(7536218802)_(2)

/51

March 9  Sunday  Have attended meeting all day.  Mr

Whitwell gave us two excellent sermons particularly the

afternoon  William is here & went to meeting.  came

Friday morning  I spent the intermition with Mrs Elijah

Howard at the meeting house very pleasantly indeed.

After meeting looked over some of the old Saturday

Couriers  Edwin made a call is about sick with a cold

It is quite pleasant, but snow on the ground & bad

traveling

Evelina and Oakes saw Oakes’s younger brother William at church, probably for the first time since William had returned to town. The relationship between the two brothers was not cordial, but the families sat together in the same pew (or set of pews, given the size of the extended family) and could hardly have avoided one another.

As usual, Evelina enjoyed listening to Mr. Whitwell’s sermons.  She enjoyed the “intermition” between the morning and afternoon service at the church, too.  She spent it sitting with Nancy Howard, mother of Ellen Howard on whom Evelina had called earlier in the week.  The formality of the times shows in Evelina’s referring to Nancy not by her first, or Christian, name, but by her husband’s name. Even in her own journal, writing of friends, Evelina maintained the nomenclature of “Mr.” and “Mrs.”  Formality of address was second nature to her, as it was to most well-bred people of the day.  Even husbands and wives typically referred to one another as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” when speaking in the third person.

Oakes Ames must not have gone into Boston the day before or, if he did, he failed to return with the latest magazines.  For her reading that night, Evelina opted to look over old issues of  The Saturday Courier .  Where was this paper published?  Not in Easton, not in Boston.  Bridgewater? Canton? Stoughton? Taunton? Does any reader know about this newspaper?

It also may be that Oakes was away from Easton this week.  He often traveled to other nearby states for the shovel company, taking orders and collecting accounts, a task that his middle son, Oliver (3), would eventually take on.

*Photo from Down in the Caves Church Pew Company.

March 7, 1851

photo

1851

March 7th  Have been giving my rooms a thorough sweeping

& dusting which took me all the forenoon

This afternoon worked on an old shirt of Franks

Am putting new wristbands & bosom into it.

This evening Oliver, Frank & Orinthia have gone to

Alsons to a party.  Orinthia would not go to the dancing

school last night on account of something Frank said & had to be urged

to go to Alsons to night  Augustus not here   Pleasant

Some entertainment today for the young people: a party at Alson and Henrietta Gilmore’s house out in the country.  What was the occasion?  Was it a casual get-together, a spur-of-the-moment gathering, perhaps extending from the assembly of the night before?  Had Lavinia Gilmore or her brother Francis asked for the party, or had it been planned by their parents?  Were they hoping to promote their daughter’s eligibility for marriage?  Was there method to the gathering, or was it just for fun?

Orinthia Foss, the young schoolteacher boarding with the Ameses, was included in the festivities, although she apparently went with some reluctance.  It seems that Frank Morton Ames had teased her in some fashion, hurting her feelings or insulting her the day before. Frank could be a handful, according to William Chaffin, who wrote that Frank “needed more discipline than Oakes [Angier] or Oliver [3].”   Frank was a seventeen year old youth, after all, with more energy than wisdom, probably competing with his older brothers for respect and attention, and letting his mouth do his thinking.

Another younger sibling came to North Easton today.  William Leonard Ames, fourth son of Old Oliver, “came this morning from New Jersey,” according to Old Oliver’s daily record.  In New Jersey, William Leonard ran an ironworks operation, a related family business that had recently failed. According to extensive research by industrial scholar Greg Galer, William Leonard and his eldest brother, Oakes Ames, were at odds over the handling of the demise of the business.  Oakes had “engineered the bankruptcies of these operations for his financial gain,”* while William had barely managed to walk away.  As a result, the two brothers were not on good terms.  Evelina doesn’t mention William’s arrival.  She sticks to her sewing, new wristbands for Frank.

* Greg Galer, Forging Ahead, p. 6.

February 10, 1851

Storm

Feb 10th Monday  Warm this morning but not pleasant  Jane 

put her clothes out but the wind commenced blowing quite

hard with some rain, so that the clothes had to be taken

in & were dried over the registers  Cut Susan a Chemise

out of the width of  1  1/4 yd wide cloth and partly made it

Worked about house as usual on washing days in 

the forenoon  Wind blows quite hard this eve.

What a jungle of white linens the Ames house featured this Monday, with Jane McHanna having to drape dripping laundry around the heat registers.  So much for Evelina’s cleaning the floors the other day.  Miserable winter weather – snow, rain, ice, wind and rain again – was wreaking havoc with the domestic schedule.

One person in the Ames household celebrated her 12th birthday today: Sarah “Emily” Witherell.  Emily was born in New Jersey where her parents had lived while her father, Nathaniel Witherell, Jr., worked with William Leonard Ames, her mother’s brother, at various Ames enterprises.  Tragedy had struck in recent years, though, with the death of her father and the subsequent “drounding” of her two year old brother, Channing.  Emily was stricken with loss at an early age.

With her mother, Sarah; older brother, George Oliver Witherell; and grandfather Old Oliver Ames,  Emily now lived in North Easton, Massachusetts in “the other part of the house”.  She probably still attended school, but she and Susie Ames were too far apart in age at this point to be close friends, although they would soon find themselves sharing  piano lessons.  Her cousin Oliver (3) found Emily to be outspoken and opinionated; she was, evidently, unafraid of speaking her mind at a time when candor in women was not prized.

Emily never married.  After Old Oliver died in 1863, when she was about twenty-four, Emily and her mother moved into Boston, eventually taking up residence in Back Bay at the Hotel Hamilton and living off of distributions from investments managed by her male cousins.  A spinster cousin, Amelia Hall Ames, the only daughter of William Leonard Ames, eventually moved in with Emily.  These two cousins, in turn, may have undertaken to raise yet another cousin, Eleanor Ames, a granddaughter of William Leonard Ames. All that is in the future; on this day in 1851, we can hope that Emily had a special birthday despite the weather. She deserved a happy moment.