Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 5
1833-05-06
Clear but cool morning. Rode to town. Occupied in my usual little round of trifling commissions, and in conversation with Ayer the Carpenter and others. My house plagues me exceedingly. I am not here enough to see the Applicants. And many come whom I do not want to see and do not know how to treat. I was detained in town until quite late, which was not material as my father and wife had an early dinner to attend the funeral in Weymouth of Cotton Tufts who is dead at last.1
Afternoon occupied in the garden pruning and training. The weather is extraordinarily dry. No rain has fallen to speak of for many weeks. I worked a little upon the Catalogue. Evening, Conversation about Francis the first. My father read the Prefatory Memoir to this piece of Miss Fanny Kemble’s—Extravagantly laudatory.
Cotton Tufts Jr. was a cousin of AA and continued to live all his life in the family seat at Weymouth, where he became postmaster. He married Mercy Brooks (cousin of ABA’s father), who survived him. JQA wrote of him as “a man who has lived nearly to the age of fourscore; having had a liberal education, but never emerged from obscurity and retirement. He was entombed, in the same yard, and near the spot, where fifty-six years ago, I followed my mother’s mother to the grave” (Diary, 6 May 1833). See Adams Genealogy.