Log-book of Timothy Boardman

PREFACE

Under the auspices of the Rutland County Historical Society, is published the Log-Book of Timothy Boardman, one of the pioneer settlers of the town of Rutland, Vermont. This journal was kept on board the privateer, Oliver Cromwell, during two cruises; the second one from New London, Conn., to Charleston, S. C.; the third from Charleston to New London, in the year 1778. It seems that the Log-Book of the first cruise was either lost, never kept, or Mr. Boardman was not one of the crew to keep it. It was kept as a private diary without any view to its ever being published.

When this manuscript, on coarse, unruled paper, was brought to light, it came to the knowledge of the officers of the county historical society, who, at once, decided that it was a document of considerable value and should be published. Correspondence was accordingly opened with the Rev. Samuel W. Boardman, D.D., of Stanhope, New Jersey, a grandson of Timothy, to whom this document properly belonged, asking his permission to allow the society to publish it. The Reverend Doctor immediately gave his consent; and in his own words: “Supposed it was largely dry details. Still these may throw side lights of value, on the history of the times.” At the same time he also consented to furnish a biographical sketch of his grandfather to be published with the Log-Book. Accordingly the sketch was prepared, but it proves to be not only a sketch, but a valuable genealogy of that branch of the Boardman family. This sketch was collected from many sources, mostly from manuscripts.

The Boardmans in Rutland county are all known as a strictly industrious, upright, religious, scholarly race; and they are so interwoven with the early history, business and educational interests of the county, that this document must meet with general favor and interest.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

There is still preserved a letter from England, written in a fine hand, with red ink, dated Obeydon? Feb. 5, 1641, and directed,

The letter is as follows:

“Good sonne, I have receaved your letter: whereby I understand that you are in good health, for which I give God thanks, as we are all – Praised be God for the same. Whereas you desire to see your brother Christopher with you, he is not ready for so great a journey, nor do I think he dare take upon him so dangerous a voyage. Your five sisters are all alive and in good health and remember their love to you. Your father hath been dead almost this two years, and thus troubleing you no further at this time, I rest, praying to God to bless you and your wife, unto whome we all kindly remember our loves.

This letter exhibits many of the characteristics of the Puritans to whom the Bormans belonged. They were intensely religious; this short letter contains the name of God three times and speaks of both prayer and praise. The Puritans were an intelligent people, reading and writing; this letter is a specimen of the correspondence carried on between the earliest settlers and their kindred whom they had left in England. They were an affectionate people, “remembering their loves” to one another; and praying, for one another, as this mother did for her son and his wife. This short letter has the word “love” four times.

They were a persistent people, those who came hither did not shrink from the hardships around them. They came to stay, and sent back for their friends. Samuel desired Christopher to follow him. Many of their families were large, there were at least nine members of this Puritan household. Samuel was born probably about 1610; he had emigrated from England in 1635 or 1636. His name is found at Ipswich, Mass., about 1637 where land was assigned to him. Ipswich had been organized in 1635 with some of the most intelligent and wealthy colonists. His father died after Samuel’s emigration to America, in 1639. His wife’s name was Mary; their oldest child, so far as we have record, was Isaac, born at Wethersfield, Ct., Feb. 3, 1642. He probably journeyed through the wilderness from Ipswich, Mass., which is twenty-six miles north of Boston, to Wethersfield, Ct., about one hundred and fifty miles, in 1639 or 1640.

Between 1630 and 1640 many of the best families in England sent representatives to America. It is said that Oliver Cromwell was at one time on the point of coming. Between February and August, 1630, seventeen ships loaded with families, bringing their cattle, furniture and other worldly goods, arrived. One ship of four hundred tons brought one hundred and forty passengers, others perhaps a larger number. Among them were Matthew and Priscilla Grant, from whom Gen. Grant was of the eighth generation in descent. Bancroft says, “Many of them had been accustomed to ease and affluence; an unusual proportion were graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. The same rising tide of strong English sense and piety, which soon overthrew tyranny forever in the British Isles, under Cromwell, was forcing the best blood in England to these shores.” The shores of New England says George P. Marsh, were then sown with the finest of wheat; Plymouth Rock had but just received the pilgrims; the oldest cottages and log-cabins on the coast were yet new, when Samuel Boreman first saw them. The Puritans were a people full of religion, ministers came with their people; they improved the time on the voyage, Roger Clap’s diary, kept on shipboard 1630, says, “So we came by the good hand of our God through the deep comfortably, having preaching and expounding of the word of God every day for ten weeks together by our ministers.” Mr. Blaine says that the same spirit which kept Cromwell’s soldiers at home to fight for liberty after 1640, impelled men to America before that time, so that there was probably never an emigration, in the history of the world, so influential as that to New England from 1620 to 1643.

It is possible that Christopher Boreman fought and perhaps fell in the army of the commonwealth. But why did so many of the early settlers, quickly leave the Atlantic coast for the Connecticut valley? Their first historians say there was even then “a hankering for new land.” They wished also to secure it from occupation by the Dutch who were entering it. Reports of its marvelous fertility, says Bancroft, had the same effect on their imagination, as those concerning the Genesee and Miami have since exerted, inducing the “western fever,” “Young man go West.” The richness of the soil of the Wethersfield meadows has been celebrated as widely as the aroma of its onions. It is only three miles from Hartford and was for two centuries one of the most prominent communities in Connecticut. There was scarcely a more cultured society anywhere. “It were a sin,” said the early colonists “to leave so fertile a land unimproved.” The Pequod war had annihilated a powerful and hostile tribe on the Thames in 1637. Six hundred Indians perished, only two whites were killed. Connecticut was long after that comparatively safe from Indians. In 1639, the people formed themselves into a body politic by a voluntary association. The elective franchise belonged to all the members of the towns who had taken the oath of allegiance to the commonwealth. It was the most perfect democracy which had ever been organized. It rested on free labor. “No jurisdiction of the English monarch was recognized; the laws of honest justice were the basis of their commonwealth. They were near to nature. These humble emigrants invented an admirable system. After two centuries and a half, the people of Connecticut desire no essential change from the government established by their Puritan fathers.” (Bancroft).

The first emigration of Puritans to the Connecticut river is supposed to have been to “Pyquag,” now Wethersfield, in 1634. The next year 1635, witnessed the first to Windsor and Hartford; while in the following year 1636, Rev. Thomas Hooker and his famous colony made the forest resound with psalms of praise, as in June, they made their pilgrimage from the seaside “to the delightful banks” of the Connecticut. Hooker was esteemed, “The light of the western churches,” and a lay associate, John Haynes, had been governor of Massachusetts. The church at Wethersfield was organized while Mrs. Boreman’s letter given above, was on its way, Feb. 28, 1641; Samuel and Mary Boreman were undoubtedly among its earliest members. His first pastor there was Rev. Richard Denton, whom Cotton Mather describes, as “a little man with a great soul, an accomplished mind in a lesser body, an Iliad in a nutshell; blind of an eye, but a great seer; seeing much of what eye hath not seen.” In the deep forests, amid the cabins of settlers, and the wigwams of savages, he composed a system of Divinity entitled “Soliloquia Sacra.” Rev. John Sherman, born in Dedham, England, Dec. 26, 1613, educated at Cambridge, who came to America in 1634, also preached here for a short time. He was afterwards settled at Watertown Mass., had twenty-two children and died in 1685. The colony at New Haven, which was soon united with them, was founded in 1638, under Rev. John Davenport and Gov. Theophilus Eaton. They first met under an oak and afterward in a barn. After a day of fasting and prayer they established their first civil government on a simple plantation covenant “to obey the Scriptures.” Only church members had the franchise; the minister gave a public charge to the governor to judge righteously, with the text: “The cause that is too hard for you bring it unto me, and I will hear it,” “Thus,” says Bancroft, “New Haven made the Bible its statute book, and the elect its freemen.” The very atmosphere of New Haven is still full of the Divine favor distilled from the honor thus put upon God’s word in the foundation of its institutions. There were five capital qualities which greatly distinguished the early New England Puritans. I. Good intellectual endowments; they were of the party of Milton and Cromwell. II. Intense religiousness; the names Pilgrim and Puritan, are synonymous with zealous piety. III. Education; many were graduates of colleges; they founded Harvard in 1636. IV. Business thrift; godliness has the promise of the world that now is, as well as of that which is to come. V. Public spirit; they immediately built churches, schools, court houses, and state houses.

The newly married son to whom Julian Borman, the Puritan widow, with seven children, wrote from England in 1641, obviously partook of these common characteristics. He was soon recognized as a young man to be relied upon. “Few of the first settlers of Connecticut,” says Hinman, author of the genealogy of the Puritans, “came here with a better reputation, or sustained it more uniformly through life.”

In 1646-7-8. He was a juror.

1649. Appointed by the Gen. Court, sealer of weights and measures.

1657-8-9-60-61-62-63, and many years afterward, representative of Wethersfield in the Legislature of Connecticut, styled “Deputy to the General Court.”

Hinman says, few men, if any, in the colony, represented their own town for so many sessions.

1660. On the grand jury of the colony.

1670. Nominated assistant.

1662. Distributor of William’s estate.

1662. Appointed by Gen. Court on committee to pay certain taxes.

1665. Chairman of a committee appointed by the Legislature, to settle with the Indians the difficulty about the bounds of land near Middletown, “in an equitable way.”

1660. On a similar committee to purchase of the Indians Thirty Mile Island.

1665. Chairman of a committee of the Legislature to report on land, petitioned for by G. Higby.

1663. Appointed chairman of committee to lay out the bounds of Middletown.

He died just two hundred and twelve years ago in April, 1673. His estate was appraised by the selectmen of Wethersfield, May 2, 1673 at £742, 15s, about $4,000. His son Isaac then 31 years old is not named in the settlement of the estate, and had perhaps received his patrimony. He had ten children, seven sons and three daughters, of whom the youngest was six years old; he had three grandchildren, the children of his oldest son, Isaac. All his children received scriptural names, as was common in Puritan families. His descendants are now doubtless several thousands in number. Only a very small part, after two hundred and fifty years, of a man’s descendants bear his name. His daughters and their descendants, his sons’ daughters and their descendants, one-half, three-quarters, seven-eights, diverge from the ancestral name, etc., till but a thousandth part, after a few centuries retain the ancestral name, and those who retain it owe to a hundred others as much of their lineage as to him. Such is God’s plan; the race are endlessly interwoven together; no man liveth unto himself. But a few comparatively, of the descendants of Samuel Borman can now be traced. His own name, however, has been carried by them into the United States Senate; into the lower house of Congress; into many State Legislatures; to the bar and to the bench; into many pulpits, and into several chairs of collegiate and professional instruction. Yet these can represent but a few of his descendants who have been equally useful. Probably a larger number of them are still to be found in Connecticut than in any other state. Among them is the family of Rev. Noah Porter, D. D., LL. D., the President of Yale College, who married a daughter of Rev. Dr. N. W. Taylor. The prayers of Julian Borman for “her good sonne” – “her very loving sonne, Samuel Boreman” already reach, under the covenant promise of Him who remembers mercy to a thousand generations, a widely scattered family.

In the above letter the name is spelled both with and without the letter “e” after “r;” the letter “d” is not found until 1712. The letter “a,” was not inserted until 1750; so that the descendants of Samuel, may still bear all these names, Borman, Boreman, Bordman or Boardman, according to the generation at which the line traced, reaches the parent stock. It is said that the name, however spelled, is still pronounced “Borman,” at Wethersfield. The rise of Cromwell in England, the long Parliament, the Westminster Assembly, the execution of Charles the First, the establishment of the commonwealth, its power by sea and land, the death of the Protector, the restoration of Charles the Second, were events of which Samuel must have heard by letter from his brother and sisters, as well as in other ways. He doubtless had numerous kinsmen on the side of both his father and his mother, who were involved in these movements of the times in England. Perhaps Richard Boardman, one of the first two “Traveling Methodist Preachers on the continent,” who came here from England in 1769, was among the descendants.

At the same time the pioneer legislator in the Colonial General Court just established in the wilds of America, was aiding to lay Scriptural foundations for institutions of civil and religious liberty in the New World. He left a Thomas Boreman, perhaps an uncle, in Ipswich, Mass. During the thirty-seven years of his life, after his emigration, he saw new colonies planted at many points along the Atlantic coast. He saw the older colonies constantly strengthened by fresh arrivals, and by the natural increase of the population. Several other Boremans came to New England very early, some of whom may have been his kindred. He accumulated and left a considerable estate for that day, derived in part undoubtedly, from the increase in the value of the new lands, which he had at first occupied, and which he afterward sold at an advanced price. Some in every generation, of his descendants have done likewise; going first north, and east, and then further and further west. One of the descendants of his youngest son Nathaniel, now living, a man of distinguished ability, Hon. E. J. H. Boardman of Marshalltown, Iowa, is said to have amassed in this manner a large fortune.

Samuel Boreman died far from his early home and kindred. He was not buried beside father or mother, or by the graves of ancestors who had for centuries lived and died and been buried there; but on a continent separated from them by a great ocean. He was doubtless buried on the summit of the hill in the old cemetery at Wethersfield, in a spot which overlooks the broad and fertile meadows of the Connecticut river. In the same plot his children and grandchildren lie, with monuments, though no monument marks his own grave. In his childhood, he may have seen Shakespeare and Bacon. He lived cotemporary with Cromwell; and Milton, who died, a year after he was buried at Wethersfield. His wife Mary, the mother of us all, died eleven years later, in 1684, leaving an estate of $1,300. As his body was lowered into the grave, his widow and ten children may have stood around it, the oldest, Isaac, aged 31, with his two or three little children; the second, Mary, Mrs. Robbins, at the age of twenty-nine; Samuel, Jr., twenty-five; Joseph twenty-three; John twenty-one; Sarah, eighteen; Daniel, fifteen; Jonathan, thirteen; Nathaniel, ten; Martha, seven. Most of these children lived to have families, and left children, whose descendants now doubtless number thousands. Isaac had three sons and one daughter and died in 1719, at the age of seventy-seven. Samuel had two sons and three daughters, and died in 1720, at seventy-two years of age. Daniel, then fifteen; from whom Timothy Boardman, the author of the Log-Book, was descended; had twelve children, nine sons and three daughters, and died in 1724, at the age of seventy-six. Jonathan had two sons and three daughters, and died September 21, 1712, at the age of fifty-one. Nathaniel married in Windsor, at the age of forty-four, and had but one son, Nathaniel, and died two months after his next older brother Jonathan, perhaps of a contagious disease, November 29, 1712; at the age of forty-nine. The descendants of Nathaniel are now found in Norwich, Vt., and elsewhere; and those of Samuel in Sheffield, Mass., and elsewhere. But the later descendants of the other sons, except Samuel, Daniel and Nathaniel, and of the daughters, I have no means of tracing. They are scattered in Connecticut and widely in other states. During the lives of this second generation occurred King Phillip’s war, which decimated the New England Colonies, and doubtless affected this family with others. Within their time also, Yale College was founded, and went into operation first at Wethersfield, close by the original Borman homestead.

The writer of this has made sermons in the old study of Rector Williams, the president of the college, near the old Boardman house, which was standing in 1856, the oldest house in Wethersfield. The second generation of Boardmans, of course occupied more “new lands.” Daniel, the fifth son of Samuel, owned land in Litchfield and New Milford, then new settlements, as well as in Wethersfield. Jonathan married in Hatfield, Mass.

The third generation, the grandchildren of Samuel, the names of twenty-nine of whom (seventeen grandsons and twelve grand-daughters), all children of Samuel’s five sons, are preserved; went out to occupy territory still further from home. We have little account however, except of the nine sons of Daniel, the seventh child of Samuel. Daniel the great-grandfather of Timothy, the author of the Log-Book, was married to Hannah Wright just a hundred years before the marriage of that great-grandson, June 8, 1683, while the war-whoop of King Phillip’s Narraganset savages was still resounding through the forest. Of his twelve children, two sons, John and Charles, died before reaching full maturity, John at the age of nineteen, near the death of two of his uncles, Jonathan and Nathaniel, in 1712; and Charles the youngest child, at the age of seventeen, very near the time of his father’s death, in 1724. One son died in infancy. Of his daughters, Mabel, married Josiah Nichols, and for her second husband John Griswold of New Milford; Hannah married John Abbe of Enfield; and Martha married Samuel Churchill of Wethersfield. Of his six surviving sons, Richard was settled at Wethersfield; he married in Milford, and had three children. His second son Daniel, born July 12, 1687, was graduated at Yale College in 1709, became the first minister of New Milford in 1712 and died in the ministry with his people, August 25, 1744. Hinman says: “He gave character and tone to the new settlement, by his devotion and active service.”

He was a man of deep piety, and of great force of character. It is related that an Indian medicine man, and this Puritan pastor met by the sick-bed of the same poor savage. The Indian raised his horrid clamor and din, which was intended to exorcise according to their customs the evil spirit of the disease. At the same time Mr. Boardman lifted up his voice in prayer to Him who alone can heal the sick. The conflict of rival voices waxed long and loud to see which should drown out the other. Mr. Boardman was blessed with unusual power of lungs like his nephew Rev. Benjamin Boardman, tutor at Yale and pastor in Hartford, who for his immense volume of voice, while a chaplain in the Revolutionary army was called by the patriots the “Great gun of the gospel.” The defeated charmer, acknowledged himself outdone and bounding from the bedside hid his defeat in the forest. Mr. Boardman died about the time his parishioners and neighbors were on the famous expedition to Cape Breton and the capture of Louisburg and when Whitfield’s preaching was arousing the church. He was twice married and had six children. His second wife, the mother of all but his oldest child was a widow, Mrs. Jerusha Seeley, one of nine daughters of Deacon David Sherman of Poquonnoch. Their children were:

I. Penelopy, Mrs. Dr. Carrington.

II. Tamar, wife of Mr. Boardman’s successor in the pastorate at New Milford, Rev. Nathaniel Taylor; mother of Major-General Augustine Taylor, of the war of 1812; and grandmother of Prof. Nathaniel W. Taylor, D.D., of New Haven.

III. Mercy, the wife of Gillead Sperry, and grandmother of Rev. Dr. Wheaton of Hartford.

IV. Jerusha, wife of Rev. Daniel Farrand of Canaan, Ct., and mother of Hon. Daniel Farrand (Yale, 1781), Judge of the Supreme Court of Vermont. This judge had nine daughters, one of whom married Hon. Stephen Jacobs, of Windsor, also a Judge of the Supreme Court of Vermont.

Rev. Daniel Boardman left but one son, the Hon. Sherman Boardman, who was but sixteen years old at the time of his father’s death. From the age of twenty-one he was for forty-seven years constantly in civil or military office. He was for twenty-one sessions a member of the General Assembly of Connecticut, of which his great-grandfather Samuel, had been so long a member. His four sons, Major Daniel (Yale, 1781), Elijah, Homer, and David Sherman (Yale, 1793), were all members of the Connecticut Legislature, in one or both branches, for many years. Elijah was also elected a United States Senator, from Connecticut in 1821. He founded Boardman, Ohio, and died while on a visit there Aug. 18, 1823. His son, William W. Boardman (Yale, 1812), was speaker of the house of the Connecticut Legislature, and elected to Congress in 1840. He left an ample fortune, and his large and comely monument stands near the centre of the old historic cemetery of New Haven, Ct., in which city he resided. This branch of the family, second cousins of the author of the Log-Book, though descended from the Puritan pastor Daniel Boardman, are now associated with the Protestant Episcopal church.

The brothers of the pastor, grandsons of Samuel, were scattered in various places. Richard settled in Wethersfield, as already noticed. Israel settled at Stratford, and had two sons and one daughter. Joshua, received by his father’s will the homestead, but afterward removed to Springfield, Mass. Benjamin settled at Sharon, and received from his father lands in Litchfield and New Milford, lands which the family had probably purchased while the son and brother was preaching there. Timothy, the ninth child of Daniel, only twelve years old when his brother became pastor at New Milford, died only a few days before the birth of his namesake, and first grandchild, the author of the Log-Book. He lived and died in Wethersfield. His enterprise however, like that of his grandfather who emigrated from England, and that of his father who acquired lands in Litchfield and New Milford, went out, as that of many of their descendants does to-day, in the west, for “more land.” He and his brother Joshua, and other thrifty citizens of Wethersfield, fixed upon the province of Maine as the field of their enterprise. Timothy and Joshua owned the tract of land, thirty miles from north to south, and twenty-eight from east to west, which now, apparently, constitutes Lincoln Co. They had a clear title to eight hundred and forty square miles, about twenty-two townships, along or near the Atlantic coast. By the census of 1880, the assessed valuation of real estate in this county was $4,737,807; of personal property $1,896,886. Total $6,634,693. It embraces 3,213 farms; 146,480 acres of improved land, valued, including buildings and fences at $4,403,985; affording an annual production, valued at $759,560. The population was 24,326 of whom 23,756 were natives of Maine.