Hempstead/Queens, New York: 1833-1840.
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Softcover. Octavo. Stiff white paper wrappers. Edgewear, foxing, and marks, with a couple of pages missing else good. Mary Elizabeth Bedell’s common place album spanning 1833-1840 while she was living in Hempstead, New York. The album is filled with pasted newspaper poems and a variety of her musings, poems, diary entries, and seven cake recipes.
Bedell has collected 37 poems from various newspapers about romance, God, and death. These clippings are pasted over pages that had been previously written on. The covered pages and several others were used to practice handwriting as the sentences are repeated multiple times. A few diary entries are written, mostly about her family and those that have passed, “I asked her if she was going to leave us she said she would stay if the Lord was willing, but it was his will to take her to himself where there is no more pain or sorrow. His will be done.” There are also pages devoted to her family's ancestry, listing her siblings and her father’s family information.
Seven different cake recipes are written, one for bread pudding calling for, “Two pounds of flour 3 quarters of a pound of sugar, half a pound of butter, nine eggs, a little mace and rose water,” followed by instructions. The name “Carman Lush,” possibly a boy she favored, is written throughout the album breaking up diary entries and her own poetry, “The Flower you gave me is faded/ The vows you breathed where untrue/ The bosom whose peace you have invaded/ Still sighs but it sighs not for you,” and, “Though fate, my dear sir, compels us to part/ Yet I never will share with another my heart.” Several times her name is written “Mary E. Lush” but by the end of the album she only writes her name as “Mary Elizabeth”. Bedell was born December 1st 1816 and died 1841 at the young age of 24.
The Town of Hempstead was first settled around 1644 after a treaty between English colonists and the Lenape Indians was established in 1643. A mural in Hempstead Village Hall depicts this transaction. Today, Hempstead has developed into the most populous village in the state of New York, with a population in excess of 50,000 people and over fifty religious institutions.
A beautiful blend of scrapbook, journal, and musings from a young lovelorn woman in the 1840s.
Item #402199
