There is still preserved a letter from England, written in a fine hand,
with red ink, dated Obeydon? Feb. 5, 1641, and directed,
"to her very loveing sonne
SAMUEL BOREMAN,
Ipswich in New England
give this with
haste."
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.
Your ever loving mother,
"JULIAN BORMAN."
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 L742,
15_s_, 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: