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.