The Evergreens was the setting for two family tragedies. Susan and Austin had three children: Edward (“Ned”), born in 1861 Martha, born in 1866 and Thomas Gilbert (“Gib”), born in 1875. In the early years of Austin and Susan’s marriage, Emily Dickinson would often visit The Evergreens and enjoy the company she found there. At their newly-built home, The Evergreens, next door to the Homestead, Susan enjoyed entertaining friends and the numerous literary figures attracted to the town, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe. They announced their engagement on Thanksgiving Day in 1853 and were married three years later on July 1, 1856. In 1850, Susan and Austin Dickinson, the poet’s brother, began courting. Late in life she traveled in Europe several times before her death from heart disease on May 12, 1913. Susan was a vivacious, intelligent, and cultivated woman, a great reader, a sparkling conversationalist, and a book collector of wide-ranging interests. Thereafter she attended Utica Female Academy in New York through 1848, then returned to Amherst for the rest of her life. As a girl of sixteen she visited Amherst, where her eldest sister resided, and attended Amherst Academy during the summer of 1847. After the death of her mother in 1835, she was raised with her sisters in Geneva, New York, by her aunt Sophia van Vranken. Susan Huntington Gilbert was born on December 19, 1830, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the youngest of seven children of Thomas and Harriet Arms Gilbert.
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