Danvers Massachusetts History Historical Ledger Daybook Rare Locust Lawn Farm

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Danvers Massachusetts History Historical Ledger Daybook Rare Locust Lawn Farm :
$200.00

This sale involves a Daybook/ledger from Danvers, Massachusetts between 1856 and 1859. The ledger belonged to an Edward D. Kimball. The transactions on the first page show a transaction between Kimball and P.H. Wentworth. This includes, bus is not limited to various pieces of furniture such as 12 mahogany dining chairs, 1 oak dining chair, side board, dining room carpet, Venetian blind, sofas, parlor chairs. There are much more entries for this particular one. There are several entries referring to individual workers Commencing work on Kimball\'s farm. Kimball maintains absentee of these workers. There is also an account of boarders, seed plantings, horse/cattle feeding patterns. There is also some very detailed accounts of why Kimball fired laborers. This is a very cool piece of Massachusetts history, agricultural history, labor history. Great condition. Please ask questions.This is from an article about the Kimball Farm, which was then passed to the Kimball\'s. this means that the first entry describes the furniture that was in Locust Lawn.“In 1856, Edward D. Kimball of Salem, prominent merchant and ship owner, built on the side of ‘Dale Hill’ a fine residence,” wrote Mr. Tapley. “To the south were acres and acres of beautiful lawn.” By my childhood that “lawn” was more like a field or pasture. The grass grew tall, until someone mowed it with a tractor, or Mr. Hooper’s cows grazed it low. I remember walking back and forth in that pasture with my grandfather as we played an adapted form of golf. He would push a stake into the ground, and we’d try to aim our golf balls to hit that stake (sort of a hybrid game of croquet and golf). There had been a small golf course on that estate in the past, but no one was maintaining the greens and we couldn’t find the holes. We also had to avoid stepping in cow patties. Later, my mother would bring a wheelbarrow and shovels or pitchforks for collecting that valuable fertilizer to haul home to her backyard garden.Mr. Kimball’s mansion at the top of the lawn was torn down in 1944, the year after I was born. Mr. Tapley gives the history of its ownership. After Mr. Kimball’s death in 1867, the next owner, Philip H. Wentworth of Boston, “improved the grounds by laying out more avenues through the wooded places.” The Wentworth name rings a bell for me, for I loved the children’s book “Going on Nine,” by author Amy Wentworth Stone. Amy grew up in that mansion and dedicated her book “TO ALL THE LITTLE GIRLS WHO PLAYED AT LOCUST LAWN.” The illustrations in her book helped me imagine that mansion. After the Wentworths, Mrs. Leopold Morse acquired it in 1893 and “resided there during several summers.”

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