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Ida E. Williams Hoff

Album, A Friendship Album Belonging to Ida Williams

Ida was born on July 1853 in Newark, NJ to Enoch Slosson Williams Jr. (1832-1912) and Martha L. Legg (1835-1890). She one brother, Frank J. Williams (1855=1856) and one half sister Ellie K. Williams, (1898-?). She married Lewis R. Hoff Jr. (1855-?) on August 7, 1878. She died on September 17, 1880.

Candor, NY: 1876-1880. A friendship album belonging to Ida E. Williams of Candor, NY. The album entries comprise of her friends and family members from Candor, NY, and surrounding towns between 1876-1880. The entries are, generally speaking, short quotes, either from poetry or plays. Of note in the album is a wonderful, multifaceted black and white ink drawing done by Rudolph C. Oakley, attorney at law, in Candor, NY in the Spring of 1880. There is a large silhouette of a young child smoking a pipe and four smaller drawings surrounding it in circles: the first is of two couples walking in the woods, the second is of two cats meeting on a wall at night, the third is a couple bent over in a garden coughing, and lastly, a little bird singing on a tree branch. The album itself has seven (7) pages with colored decorative borders, often in a floral or nature theme. Additionally, the album has four (4) double sided pages of blank sheet music. The covers are brown leather with gilt stamped decorative borders as well as a gilt "Album" at the center. Interior pages are gilt edge. Approximately one third filled. Measures 8 1/2" x 7". Below are some of the album's entries.

"With wealth thou art blest and beauty is thine
And with your mind to you Providence has been kind
Wealth may take wings, beauty must fade, and soon disappear,
But in Eternity the wealth and beauty of your mind a crown shall wear."
- (Maternal) Uncle Epenetus Howe, Candor, NY, July 24, 1876

"Back on the golden hinges
The gates of memory swings
And my heart goes into this garden
And walks with the older things
The old times joys and pleasure,
the loves that it used to know
it meets there in the garden,
and they wander to and fro."
- Waca June 19, 1876, Ella H.. J., Excerpt from poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox entitled "Memory's Garden"

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtue would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by out virtue."
- Gertrude S. Ward, Candor, NY, May 4th, 1877, Excerpt from Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well"

To view the album, please click on the following link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/GYJndAFunVeoDWYh6. Some interior pages are loose.

Price: $275.00

Item #29001193