Homes of American Statesmen; With Anecdotical, Personal, and Descriptive SketchesVarious
History
Homes of American Statesmen; With Anecdotical, Personal, and Descriptive Sketches
Various
Historic buildings -- United States; Statesmen -- United States; United States -- Biography
Previous to his marriage Mr. Ames had lived with his mother. After that
event he moved to Boston and took a house on Beacon Street, next to
Governor Bowdoin's. He appears to have lived here about two years, when
he returned to Dedham, and began the building of a new house. This house
was finished and occupied by the winter of 1795; during the interval Mr.
Ames lived in a house opposite the old mansion now occupied by the
Dedham Gazette. This new house of Ames's is still standing in Dedham,
externally much the same as of old; a large square-built, two-story
house, flat-roofed, simple and substantial. Internally, however,
together with the ground about it, it has undergone many alterations.
Formerly it had not the piazza now in front of it, and the various
chimneys were then represented by one fat, old-fashioned, solid
structure in the middle. It passed out of the hands of the family about
1835, and is at present owned by Mr. John Gardiner.
Mr. Ames seems to have inherited most of the old homestead, to the
extent of twenty-five acres, on which he built his house, facing the
south, a little to the east, and back of his mother's. He employed
himself a good deal henceforth in the cultivation of his farm. The
"Front Lot" was surrounded with a rail fence and a row of Lombardy
poplars, and was used at different times as a mowing lot, a cornfield,
and a pasture for the cows. On the east side of the house, extending in
length from the street to the river, and in width from directly under
the windows, far enough to include a street and a row of small houses,
since constructed, was a pasture and orchard including seven or eight
acres, and stocked with the best fruit. Directly back of the house was
the garden, a long and rather barren strip of land, of peculiar surface.
Two straight walks went from the house the whole length of it. At the
farther end of it was a low oval space, with a walk running around it,
and a pond in the middle. All this part of the garden was low, and
surrounded at the sides and end with a bank, in the form of an
amphitheatre. Three or four terraces lay between it and the higher
ground. These and the oval space with its walk, still remain, but the
fence between the garden and the orchard has been removed, and the two
straight walks somewhat changed, to suit the modern appetite for grace.
The place is still full of the fruit-trees that Fisher Ames planted,
some crossgrained pear-trees, and venerable cherries being the chief.
The boys used to look over in this orchard and garden, at the big pears,
weighing down the trees and covering the ground, as if it were the very
garden of the Hesperides, and the dragon were asleep. Once in a while
the gates would be thrown open to these hungry longers, and they helped
themselves; when winter came too the pond afforded them a capital
skating place. A large shed ran out from the back of the house, on the
west end, used, among other purposes, as a granary. To the west and back
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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