John Boardman (1758–1813) was a merchant and one of the earliest settlers of

Troy, New York Troy is a city in and the county seat of Rensselaer County, New York, United States. It is located on the western edge of the county, on the eastern bank of the Hudson River just northeast of the capital city of Albany, New York, Albany. At the ...

. Boardman was born in Preston, Litchfield Country, Connecticut, the fourth of a brood of six. In 1788, he acquired a plot in farmland that had been subdivided by the Van der Heyden family in the previous year. Other settlers of his generation included Stephen Ashley, Benjamin Covell, Samuel Gale, Benjamin Smith, Philip Heartt, Anthony Goodspeed, Mahlon Taylor, Ephraim Morgan, and Ebenezer and Samuel Wilson. As one writer later reminisced of these pioneers, “they were few in number, and possessed but little substance; but they were men of courage and activity…. They were men of shrewd minds. They saw that water power here abounded – and that River navigation to this point was easy. They judged that with its natural advantages, their enterprise could not fail.” On the night of January 5, 1789, Boardman and other residents gathered in Ashley’s Inn voted to give the settlement a new designation. Henceforth the town of Vanderheyden would be known as Troy. Thanks to the industry of entrepreneurs like Boardman, Troy grew steadily. It was incorporated as a town in 1791, and upgraded to a village in 1801. Three years after his death, Troy was chartered as a city. Boardman formed several mercantile partnerships in the course of his career. Morgan, Boardman & Coit was established as early as 1790, and his enterprise went through further permutations as Morgan & Boardman, and later Boardman & Hillhouse. Boardman built a house on the west side of Second Street in Troy on the Hudson River in New York. He served in a number of official capacities in the early history of Troy. He was among the first fire wardens, appointed to the office in 1799, 1801, and 1803, and served as assessor for the Second Ward in 1806. In 1800 he married Clarinda Starbuck of

Nantucket Nantucket () is an island in the state of Massachusetts in the United States, about south of the Cape Cod peninsula. Together with the small islands of Tuckernuck Island, Tuckernuck and Muskeget Island, Muskeget, it constitutes the Town and Co ...

(1773-1846), the daughter of Daniel and Mary (Folger) Starbuck of Nantucket. Through the Folger side of the family, Clarinda was related to both

Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin (April 17, 1790) was an American polymath: a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and Political philosophy, political philosopher.#britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Wood, 2021 Among the m ...

and

Lucretia Mott Lucretia Mott (née Coffin; January 3, 1793 – November 11, 1880) was an American Quakers, Quaker, Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position ...

. Although Clarinda had been raised a

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to the Religious Society of Friends, a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations. Members refer to each other as Friends after in the Bible, and originally, others referred to them as Quakers ...

, she had joined the

Presbyterian Church Presbyterianism is a historically Reformed Christianity, Reformed Protestantism, Protestant tradition named for its form of ecclesiastical polity, church government by representative assemblies of Presbyterian polity#Elder, elders, known as ...

when she married John, who was himself of

Puritan The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should b ...

stock. Their son, Henry Augustus Boardman (1808-1880) would become pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, and a denominational leader.John DeWitt, D.D., “Rev. Henry A. Boardman, D. D.” in William Mason Cornell, ''Cornell's Lives of Clergymen, Physicians and Eminent Business Men of the Nineteenth Century: With Recollections of the Olden Time'' (Boston: Howard Gannett, 1881), pp. 194-216.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Boardman, John 1758 births 1813 deaths People from colonial Connecticut Businesspeople from Troy, New York People from Preston, Connecticut 18th-century American merchants