William Whitwell

January 10, 1851

tcrr_ames

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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.

January 8, 1851

Collar

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Jan 8th Wednesday

Made some cambric cuffs & collars and

starched & ironed some.  Worked on them most of the

day.  Jane ironed the coloured & coarse clothes

Head aches this evening trying to sew on fine work   gave

it up & went to reading a Thanksgiving story that

Mr Whitwell brought me to read.  Bought 25 cts worth Crackers

Settled with Sarah Ames she paid me for Cheese &c

Have been looking over my expense account  Pleasant

Evelina was an excellent needlewoman.  Like most women in the days before “ready-bought” apparel, she made her own clothes.  She made clothes for everyone in her family, in fact.  By. Hand.  No sewing machine was yet on the market; Isaac Singer and Elias Howe had each invented one but a drawn-out patent dispute was holding up its production.  By the advent of the Civil War, however, and the consequent need for mass production of uniforms, the sewing machine would come into its own, and the production of clothing would become an industry.  The three Ames sisters-in-law would eventually acquire a machine to share.

In the meanwhile, in the last decade before this change, Evelina sewed almost every day.  She occasionally relied on the help of a dressmaker – all the sisters-in-law did.  But Evelina easily made dresses, aprons, and underclothes for herself and her daughter, as well as work shirts and underclothes for her husband and sons.  Collars, handkerchiefs, sheets, linens and more were cut out, run together, fitted, taken up, untucked, hemmed, mended, refitted and re-mended.  The projects were endless, especially as the children were growing, but fortunately, sewing was an occupation that Evelina appeared to enjoy.  She spent more time at it than any other chore – certainly more than doing laundry, which she relegated to Jane McHanna, and probably more than cooking, which she typically undertook only when short-handed.  Sewing was her primary responsibility.

The “Pleasant” at the end of today’s entry describes Evelina’s take on the day’s weather, by the way, and not the prospect of looking over her expense account.  Other Ames diarists of this period followed the practice of describing the day’s weather, Old Oliver especially, but Oliver Jr, too.  Practiced agrarians, they all watched the sky.

January 7, 1851

 Sleighing

/51 Tuesday Jan 7th Jane better and finished her washing and I did the

housework this morning.  Mr Ames went to Boston to get

some grindstones  This afternoon wrote a letter to O

Foss & cut Susan a gingham apron  Mr Whitwell called.

Robinson primed the mantelpieces ready for painting

Ann commenced making fire in the Furnace  Daniel

Wheaton & wife passed the evening at Olivers and we

played cards.  Pleasant & beautiful sleighing

After the cold weather of the previous few days, this Tuesday was mild enough for people to be out and about, enjoying the relative ease of gliding along in their sleighs.  Not so for Oakes Ames; he went into the city in search of grindstones for the shovel shop, most likely taking an ox-drawn wagon to bear the heavy load home.

The Reverend Mr. William Whitwell paid a call at the house.  He and his wife Eliza were relatively new to the community and were becoming good friends with Oakes and Evelina.  Mr. Whitwell would serve as acting  pastor for Easton’s Unitarian congregation for the next seven years.  His eventual successor, the Reverend William Chaffin, described Whitwell as “a good man and a cultivated scholar” whose term was “quiet and uneventful.”*  In fact, Whitwell’s writing on St. Paul can be found in a famous Unitarian publication of the day, The Christian Examiner.

Other little moments in this ordinary day included a new sewing project and the repainting of mantels by Mr.  Robinson, a local painter and paperer.  Meanwhile, Ann Orel, a teenage Irish maid who worked for Sarah Witherell, started up the new coal furnace.  Perhaps the arrival of coal dust necessitated the painting of the mantels?

This evening, Evelina and Oakes walked next door to play cards with Sarah and Oliver Ames Jr. and their mutual acquaintances, Daniel and Hannah Wheaton.  Unitarians had no problem with card playing.

* Chaffin, History of Easton, Massachusetts, 1886, p. 362