Blanche Butler Ames

She attended school in Lowell until she was sent to the Academy of the Visitation in Washington, D.C. at age 13, where she described the sectional tension between northern and southern students on the eve of the Civil War.

When her husband was elected Governor of Mississippi in 1873, Blanche accompanied him, and wrote a series of letters detailing her experiences as a Northern woman living in the South during Reconstruction.

After Adelbert resigned under pressure in 1876, the Ames family returned to Lowell to pursue business interests, where they remained for much the rest of their lives.

After her husband's death in 1933, Mrs. Ames compiled a collection of their letters, released by the family as Chronicles from the Nineteenth Century: Family Letters of Blanche Butler and Adelbert Ames in 1957.

[1] She died at the Ames winter home in Ormond Beach, Florida, on December 26, 1939, at the age of 92, and is buried beside her husband and their children at the Hildreth family cemetery in Lowell, across from her parents and siblings.