All devices to restore the young mother's failing strength were in vain: soon after giving birth to the fourth daughter, Ann Eliza, she died.
Her life had been pure, happy, and unselfish; yet her last hours were full of anguish. Reared in the strictest tenets of Evangelical piety, she was oppressed with terror concerning the fate of her soul; the sorrows of death compassed her about, the pains of hell gat hold upon her. It is piteous to read of the sufferings of this innocent creature, as described by her mourning family; piteous, too, to realize, by the light of to-day, that she was almost literally prayed to death. She was twenty-seven years old when she died and had borne seven children.
Mr. Ward's grief at the death of this beloved wife was so extreme as to bring on a severe illness. For some time he could not bear to see the child who, he thought, had cost her mother's life; and though he gathered his other children tenderly around him, the little Annie was kept out of his sight.
By and by his father came to make him a visit and heard of this state of things. Going to the nursery, the old gentleman took the baby from its nurse, and carrying it into the room where his son sat desolate, laid it gently in his arms. From that moment the little youngest became almost his dearest care.
He could not live with his sorrow in the same dwelling that had contained his joy. The beautiful house at Bowling Green was sold, with the new furniture which had lately been ordered to please his Julia, and which the children never saw uncovered; and the family removed to Bond Street, then at the upper end of New York City.
"Mr. Ward," said his friends, "you are going out of town!"
Bond Street in the twentieth century is an unlovely thoroughfare, grimy, frowzy, given over largely to the sale of feathers and artificial flowers; Bond Street in the early part of the nineteenth century was a different affair.
The first settler in the street was Jonas Minturn, who about 1825 built No. 22. Mr. Ward came next. The city was then so remote, one could hardly see the houses to the south across the woods and fields.
The Ward children saw the street grow up around them; saw the dignified houses, brick or freestone, built and occupied by Kings, Halls, Morgans, Grinnells, most of all by Wards. Mr. Ward was then at No. 16; his father, the old Revolutionary soldier, soon came to live at No. 7, with his daughter Anne; his brother Henry was first at No. 14, then at No. 23; while his brother John was to make No. 8 a dwelling beloved by three generations.
Julia did not remember in what year her father bought the tract of land at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway. At first a large part of it was fenced in, and used as a riding-ring by the Ward boys. There was also, either here or at No. 16, something in the way of a garden, which she thus recalls in an address on horticulture, given in her later years:—