Samuel Bennett and the “Scotch House”

The property upon which Boardman House stands was initially part of a land purchase made in 1648 by Samuel Bennett. Bennett was a house carpenter who came to Massachusetts from London in 1635, and received a grant of twenty acres in Lynn. Bennett seems to have been a contentious person, appearing in multiple court records of the time for various offenses and described by one of his contemporaries as “the verryest Rascoll in new England…”

Despite this, Bennett was prosperous, and through multiple purchases of land, had acquired several hundred acres in Lynn and the neighboring portion of Boston known as Rumney Marsh. The 300 acres that ultimately became the Boardman family’s farm were located in a narrow strip of land between Lynn and Malden that was later known as the “Chelsea panhandle,” and which was then a part of Boston.

Boardman House: Construction and Renovation

Though William Boardman purchased the property in 1686, it is now clear from recent dendrochronology that he did not construct the current building until 1692. Possibly during these six years he and his family lived in the Scotch House, as the ironworks had closed by 1670 and presumably the Scottish residents had worked out their articles of indenture by that time and moved on.

Originally Boardman House had a two-room plan, with a typical hall-and-parlor configuration around a central chimney stack. Two chambers above the hall and parlor, an attic under the steeply pitched roof, and a half cellar under the parlor completed the original structure. Evidence has also been found of two gables on the front of the building, though they seem to have been merely cosmetic, without extending the interior space in the attic.

Exterior of Historic New England’s Boardman House in Saugus, Ma.

Boardman Family: 225 Years of Stewardship

Over the course of 225 years, the property remained in the Boardman family. Though the house never changed families over the centuries, and was never moved from its original site, at various times over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Boardman House has been located in Boston, Lynn, Chelsea, and Saugus. The house was originally built directly on the town line between Boston and Lynn, and between 1708 and 1738 had the letters “BL” on the front door, to indicate it as a boundary marker. The Boardman family paid taxes on half the house and land to Lynn, and paid another set of taxes to Boston, which eventually became Chelsea.

In 1753 William Boardman Jr. conveyed the house and his property, including all his real and personal estate, to his sixth child, Aaron Boardman, born in 1724. William Jr. died less than a year later.  In this document we find evidence of a named enslaved person, a “Negro Man named Mark”, being transferred with the estate. While this is the only direct reference to slavery that we currently know of at Boardman House, enslaved people were commonly forced into domestic servitude in New England in the eighteenth century. The Boardman family may well have enslaved more people over the years besides Mark, however due to oppression, erasure, and suppression of marginalized groups there is a hole in the historical record where these stories might have been. The lack of documentation does not indicate the absence of enslaved people but it is further evidence of systemic racism and oppression.

Transition

In modern times we might call Jacob B. Wilbur a developer, as he promptly divided the land purchased from the last member of the Boardman family into small building lots, and entitled them “City Gardens.” The house stood on six of these lots, which were purchased from Wilbur by Clemento D’Andria in 1913.

The local community, concerned that these changes spelled certain destruction for the old house, appealed to William Sumner Appleton, founder and corresponding secretary of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England, and the purchase of the house was finally negotiated in 1914. Over the next year, Appleton had the foresight to purchase eight additional small lots surrounding the house, allowing it to stand in a comparatively open space and setting it apart from the close-set houses that eventually sprang up in the immediate neighborhood.

Becoming a Museum

William Sumner Appleton recognized the unique nature of Boardman House as soon as it was acquired, and called in a panel of local experts on seventeenth-century houses to assist him in restoring and planning for the house. These included antiquarians George Francis Dow and Thomas Franklin Waters, Norman Isham, and architect Henry Charles Dean, who had worked on Swett-Ilsley House (the first house acquired by Historic New England) and had worked with Wallace Nutting on the Ironworkers House in Saugus.

The first concern in the restoration was that structural repairs were needed on the chimney. A succession of beehive ovens cut into the center of the chimney over the years had caused damage and destabilized the stack. Further, the chimney tree in the parlor fireplace was missing entirely, and the charred appearance of the girt directly above it led Appleton to infer that it had been burnt out. Portions of the fireplaces were reconstructed using old bricks from an early house that had been torn down in Beverly, and the chimney was reconstructed from the roof up along the exact lines as found.

Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory Report

In the winter of 2009, the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory took twenty-seven new samples from timbers in Boardman House under a study funded by a grant from the Massachusetts Historical Commission. In 1975, when dendrochronology was still in its infancy, two samples had been taken from Boardman House that indicated a build date of 1687; however, these samples were no longer available and could not be examined to confirm that they had been accurately processed.

The 2009 study was able to sample the same timbers that were sampled in 1975, as well as ten more members in the main body of the house, including corner posts, tie beams, and joists. These samples firmly established that the main part of the house was in fact built in 1692. Another primary goal of the study was to ascertain the date of the lean-to addition, and the fourteen samples taken in that portion of the house established a clear date of 1731, showing that the lean-to had been completely reconstructed at that time. Interestingly, several timbers in the lean-to date from an earlier period, indicating that wood may have been reused from the original lean-to that we know was already part of the house before 1696.

These exciting findings continue to clarify our understanding of Boardman House, and increase its value as a study property for architectural historians today.