Back in England, the Civil Wars were progressing under Oliver Cromwell and, in 1650, thousands of Scottish soldiers were captured at the Battle of Dunbar. Sixty-two of these prisoners were transported to New England and became indentured servants at the nearby ironworks (now the Saugus Iron Works, a National Historic Site). In 1651 a house was built for some of these Scottish prisoners on Bennett’s land, approximately 100 yards away from the current Boardman House.

The position of the “Scotch House,” as it was known in deed records throughout the seventeenth century, combined with the age of the current house, led to a common belief that Boardman House and this earlier building were one and the same. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, when more detailed architectural research was done, and a closer investigation of boundary lines was made, that it became clear that the Scotch House must have been a different building, and that the existing house was built by William Boardman.

In 1658, Bennett transferred ownership of the 300 acres and the house upon them to Phoebe Franklin in consideration of debts owed, and over the next thirty years, the property passed through several different hands. The Scotch House is last mentioned specifically in a boundary perambulation of 1678, and in 1686 the property was sold “to William Bordman of Maulden… Joyner.”

The original house had casement windows, which, according to a Boardman family descendant, were made “of small diamond shaped panes of very poor glass” and were stored in the attic of the house when he was a child in the mid-nineteenth century. Also now missing from the house are the pendants that traditionally adorned the corners of the front overhang. An old resident of Saugus in 1914 remembered them as being in the form of “twisted tassels,” but unfortunately the pendants are not documented in any existing photographs.

Sometime between 1692, when the house was built, and 1696, a lean-to kitchen was added to the house. We know this because William Boardman died in 1696 at the age of thirty-eight, and an inventory of the house at that time includes the rooms of the lean-to and their contents. The unusual timing of this construction, with the lean-to being added only a few years after the original house was built, supplies us with some of the most important architectural evidence in the house, as the addition was attached to the existing house in such a way that the original clapboards, skirt board, and roof boards were preserved.

The 1696 inventory also gives information about the Boardman family and the way that they lived in their house. The 1692 hall, with its massive hearth for cooking and beehive ovens, was called the “best room” in 1696, when the food preparation activities had moved out into the kitchen in the new lean-to, accompanied by a milk room, or dairy. The specialization of household spaces which was taking place in new houses in the eighteenth century was in evidence here, as the work of the house began to be separated from social activities.

Upon William Boardman’s death, the property passed to his son, William Jr., with Boardman’s daughters Mary and Lydia passing their rights in the farm to their brother. William Boardman Jr. appears to have spent the greater part of his life on the farm, marrying in 1708 and having at least eight children. It was during the lifetime of William Jr. that further renovations were made to the house, including updating the front stair hall with an open banister and paneling in the early eighteenth century. Dendrochronology has also revealed that the entire lean-to addition was reconstructed in 1731.

However, over the following two centuries, very little was changed, and features that remained untouched by the family are now valuable elements of architectural evidence. Ceiling joists and brickwork that were never plastered over, seventeenth-century shadow-molded sheathing, original stairs, and floorboards all contribute to the remarkable document that is Boardman House.

Aaron Boardman died in 1799, and a complicated division of the house and land took place among his widow and children. Ultimately the property passed to his son Abijah Boardman. In 1803 Abijah petitioned the General Court to alter the town line just enough to put his house and land in Chelsea. This change was granted, only to be amended again in 1841 when the Court passed another act to transfer a portion of Chelsea to Saugus, changing the location of the Boardman property once again.

By the time of Abijah’s death in 1856, the original 300-acre farm was much reduced in size. The inventory of his death showed that the land the house stood on was little more than twenty-four acres, and the land was once more divided at his death among his five children. His daughter Celona B. Howard inherited the house and a little more than four acres. Celona lived in the house with her husband and her sister Miss Sarah Boardman until her death in 1893, when her will left the property to a nephew, Elmer B. Newhall. In 1911 Newhall sold the property to Jacob B. Wilbur, and the house passed out of the hands of the Boardman family for the first time since its construction more than two hundred years before.

Appleton removed wallpapers, uncovering some very early decorative paintwork in the hall chamber and the upstairs stair hall. He also removed one small room divider from the parlor chamber, where a Boardman descendant had remembered a room being created as a “shoe shop” for a son of Abijah Boardman’s, killed in the Civil War. Lastly he found that the sills needed overhauling, as several had rotted completely away.

For the most part, though, Appleton left the house in the unspoiled condition in which it was found. Abbott Lowell Cummings expressed it best when he wrote: “Even with the best of restorations, these houses have been robbed of a certain authenticity upon which the scholar and historian must depend. A few houses at least should be allowed to remain in a condition which cannot in any way impair their fundamental value as documentary sources to the student and connoisseur, and certainly there is hardly another house in New England so richly equipped to perform this function as the Boardman house in Saugus.”