Feb 04, 2016 - Sale 2404

Sale 2404 - Lot 238

Price Realized: $ 3,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(RHODE ISLAND.) Peck, Maria Hacker. A lively and extensive diary of a teenaged Providence girl. 250 manuscript diary pages plus [7] commonplace book pages. Folio, 1/4 calf, worn, front board detached; minor dampstaining and wear to contents, lacking endpapers, lacking pages 143-6 with loss of thirteen days of entries. Providence, RI, 2 December 1803 to 27 October 1807
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Maria Hacker Peck (1788-1868) was the daughter of Joseph and Sarah Hacker Peck; her father was a storekeeper on South Main Street in Providence, apparently of modest fortune. Her diary, extending from age fifteen to nineteen, records a constant swirl of social activity, music, lectures, dancing school, and theater, sometimes touching on moments of significance to the history of her city. An account of a yellow fever epidemic in 1805 is particularly gripping: "Last Friday two or three persons were taken sick about the same time and in the same manner at the lower part of the town, and we have great reason to suppose it the malignant fever which proved so fatal to the inhabitants four years since" (22 July 1805). The next day she wrote: "Eleven cases. My mother went in search of a house to remove to. We were all employed in packing up for our intended move. Dr. Brown called, says he cannot determine whether it is the yellow fever (but I fancy he has in his own mind)" (23 July 1805). The family stayed away in rented quarters on the hill for two months. A visit to her old neighborhood was chilling: "The town council has ordered all the inhabitants below Brown's Lane to remove as soon as possible, and . . . the streets now look desolate and lonely, no person stirring, and every store closed" (26 July 1805). The medical historian may also enjoy her account of her sister's cancer surgery (21-25 March 1807) and other passages.
Weather events are also recorded in dramatic fashion, most notably a freshet which devastated Pawtucket: "Bridges and mill dams all round the town have been carried away by its violence. The village of Pawtucket exhibits a scene of horror and distress, before unequalled. . . . Goods are swimming down the river of all descriptions. Here the floor of a house, there, trunks, baskets, blacksmith's bellows, barrels, &c." (15 February 1807) She visited Pawtucket two days later and reported: "The water has taken out not only the houses, but the ground on which they stood, and for a space of 200 feet has left nothing but a ledge of bare rocks."
On a visit to a North Providence China-trade merchant, she met what must have been among the first Chinese immigrants to Rhode Island: "Walked over to Mr. Megee's farm with Mrs. Brown and Sarah, saw there two Chinese who were very polite to us, and shewed us round the farm" (7 December 1803). She offered her only commentary on politics on 4 July 1807: "Independence of America was this day celebrated. . . . Perhaps it is the last time they will ever do it, for she now stands in a very perilous situation. Insult upon insult has been borne without resistance, and now nothing but war, war is the cry." Of the hundreds of names which appear here in Maria's social circle, perhaps none are mentioned more frequently than J.P. Jones. On 21 February 1806, she went to the "Washington Ball" with Mr. Jones and stayed out nearly all night: "Did not get home till four o'clock!" They went to Newport together in June 1807. Maria married John Pierce Jones in 1810.