A man of such character, and of so fair an education would, of course, soon be valued in any community, and be especially useful in a new settlement where skill with the pen and the compass are rarer than in older places.
He was appreciated and was soon made town clerk of Rutland, and county surveyor for Rutland county. He was also in time made captain of the militia, in recognition perhaps, in part, of his Revolutionary services. He was also made clerk of the Congregational church, I have some of his church records. On Nov. 20th, 1805, he was elected a deacon. He was also on the committee to revise the Articles of Faith and Rules of Discipline. About 1792, he bought fifty acres of good land lying west of his first purchase, and on this ground, one hundred rods west of his previous home, and about half a mile south-west of the spot first occupied, he erected in 1799, a good two-story house, which is still in excellent preservation, where till his death, he lived in a home as ample and commodious as the better class of those with which he had been familiar in his native state.
In sixteen years after coming to the unbroken forest on what has since been called “Boardman hill,” he had won a good position in society and in the church, and a comfortable property. He was afflicted in the death of his oldest daughter and child, Hannah, October 26, 1803. But this was the only death that occurred in his family for more than fifty-three years. His six remaining children lived to an average age of about eighty.
The Congregational church in West Rutland, one of the oldest in Vermont, had been formed in 1773, nine years before his arrival. He became a member in 1785, and his wife in 1803. Not long after his coming, Rev. Mr. Roots, the pastor, died, and the widely known Rev. Samuel Haynes, a devout, able and witty man, became their pastor, and so continued for thirty years, until his dismission in 1818. Timothy Boardman’s children were early taken to church, were trained and all came into the church under, the ministry of Rev. Mr. Haynes.
He said that he would sooner do without bread than without preaching, and he was always a conscientious and liberal supporter of the church. He appreciated and co-operated with his pastor. In the great revival of 1808, five of his children were gathered into the church. One of them, perhaps all of them, were previously regarded by their parents as religious.
In politics he was a Federalist. In respect to the war with Great Britain 1812-1815, his views did not entirely coincide with those of some others, including his associate in the diaconate, Dea. Chatterton, who was a rigid Democrat. This eminently devout and useful man, was so burdened with Dea. Boardman’s lukewarmness in promoting the second war with Great Britain, against whose armies both had fought in the Revolution, that he felt constrained to take up a labor with him, hoping to correct his political errors by wholesome church discipline. It must have been a scene for a painter.
Perhaps no better man or one more effective for good, ever lived in West Rutland than Dea. Chatterton. In both politics and religion he was practical and fervid. The church meeting was crowded.
The occasion compelled my grandfather, as Paul was driven, in his epistle to the Corinthians, and as Demosthenes was forced in his oration for the crown, to enter somewhat upon his own past record. Though a very modest and unpretentious man, yet it is said that the author of the Log-Book, on this memorable occasion straightened himself up, and boldly referred his hearers to the glorious days of the war for Independence, which had tried men’s souls, and when he had forever sealed the genuineness of his own patriotism, by hazarding his life both by sea and land for his country.
Weighed in the balances on his own record, so far from being found wanting, his patriotism was proved to be of the finest gold; and his place like that of Paul, not a whit behind that of the chiefest apostle. Though he did not feel it to be his duty to fall in behind the tap of the drum, and volunteer to fight, beside the aged democratic veteran who served with him at the communion table; yet he showed that the older was not a better soldier; that with diversities of politics, there was the same loyalty, and that his own patriotism was no less than his brother’s.
The tremendous strain which the struggle for American Independence put upon the generation who encountered it, was touchingly illustrated in the lives of these two men, a generation, or two generations after the struggle had been successfully closed. Amid the quiet hills of Vermont, the minds of both were affected for a time, with at least partial derangement. Dea. Boardman labored temporarily under the hallucination, that he was somehow liable to arrest, and prepared a chamber for his defence. He was obliged, for a time to be watched, though he was never confined. A journey to Connecticut, on horseback, with his son Samuel, when he was perhaps sixty years old, effected an entire cure. Dea. Chatterton in his extreme old age, after a life of remarkable piety, became a maniac and was obliged to be confined. He had suffered peculiar hardships, perhaps on the prison-ships, in the Revolution; and his incoherent expressions, in his insanity, sixty years afterward, and just before his death, were full of charges against the “British.”