Standing on Framingham Centre Common facing north east, it is hard to miss the stately white colonial with a semi-circular porch located just south of the Plymouth Church. Upon closer inspection one will notice the plaque which reads “The Otis Boynton House, c1825. “ Now one wonders, who was Otis Boynton?
Otis Boynton (1798-1882) was a bookbinder who settled in Framingham in May of 1822. Otis and his wife Sarah bought a one acre house lot adjacent to Framingham Centre Common from Thomas Buckminster on March 12, 1825 on which they built their home.
In 1826, the bookbindery business must not have been doing very well, so Otis and Sarah mortgaged their house and land to Nathan Stone for six hundred dollars. According to the agreement, if the Boyntons repaid the six hundred dollars in full within one year, the house and land would revert back to them. Evidently this mortgage was paid off as the family continued to live in the house until 1876.
John J. Marshall (1800- ??) joined Otis’ bookbindery business in 1833. The business was expanded to include a book and stationary shop in addition to the bindery. The American Antiquarian Society has in its collection a Boynton and Marshall Bookbindery’s account book for the period between May 13, 1850 and June 23, 1852. According to this record, the company sold school books to several towns including Framingham. They also sold novels, religious works, dictionaries, almanacs, paper, pencils and pens, ink, drawing and writing books, envelopes, greeting cards, and sealing wax. The bookbindery bound books for printers and publishers. Notable among these was the job of binding thousands of copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the John P. Jewett Company in 1852. The Boynton and Marshall partnership lasted until February of 1864 when the bookbindery was sold to Moses Mellen of Boston.
Otis and Sarah had six children, five boys and one girl. The oldest son, William Courtland (1824-1825) died in infancy. Their daughter Sarah Elizabeth (1827-1844) died of consumption at age 17 years. Otis Howard (1832-1872) never married. Courtland (1834- ??) and his wife Mary E. (1836-1898) had two children who died in infancy. Timothy Spaulding (1840-1863) died at age 23 years in Newbern, North Carolina. Timothy was a member of Company C, 44th regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers in the Civil War. It is through their third child, William Henry (1829-1905) and his wife Margaret Anna Church Boynton (1839-1927) that the Boynton name has lived on. The couple had at least one child survive to adulthood, a son, Dr. Richard Wilson Boynton who married and had a family.
Otis Boynton died on January 18, 1882 at the age of 84 years. He was laid to rest in Edgell Grove Cemetery alongside his wife, Sarah.
Facts
Otis Boynton (1798-1882) was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts to William and Eunice (Atherton) Boynton on May 18, 1798.
Otis married Sarah Wilson (1799-1859) of Lancaster, Massachusetts on August 29, 1822.
At the time of his death, Otis owned 7 parcels of land in Framingham Centre purchased from Thomas Buckminster, Benjamin Wheeler, Moses Edgell, and others. The land was bordered by the Centre Common, Sudbury River and Auburn Street.
William Henry Boynton, Otis’ son, was an artist with no business sense. He was friends with Nathan Dole, of Dole Pineapple fame, and Mr. Watson, partner to Alexander Graham Bell. Dole wanted William to invest in his pineapple plantations in Hawaii, but William refused, not seeing any value in investing in a strange fruit grown half a world away. Watson wanted him to invest in the telephone, but he saw no future for this invention! Instead, after the Civil War, he invested in cotton, and subsequently lost the house on Framingham Centre Common.
Bibliography
American Antiquarian Society. Manuscript Collections. “Boynton and Marshal Company. Account Book, 1850-1852.” Collection Description. https://www.americanantiquarian.org/Findingaids/boynton_and_marshall_company.pdf Accessed 25 Mar. 2020.
Herring, Stephen W. Framingham, An American Town. The Framingham Historical Society, The Framingham Tercentennial Commission, 2000.
Otis Boynton, 1798-1882.” Ancestry.com. https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/otis-boynton-24-5n7ycp Accessed 25 Mar. 2020.
“Otis Boynton.” Memorial no. 19189778. Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/191879778/otis-boynton Accessed 25 Mar. 2020.
Southworth, Margaret Boynton. “The Story of the Otis Boynton House.” Paper given at the meeting of the Framingham Historical and Natural History Society, Jan. 20, 1974.
Temple, Josiah H. History of Framingham, Massachusetts, 1640-1885. New England History Press, 1988.