Collection Description

The Boylston family papers consist of 86 document boxes, 59 cased volumes, and 6 oversize boxes and contain primarily the 18th-century personal correspondence, legal and business papers of the Boylston family of Boston and Princeton, Massachusetts, and London, Bristol, and Bath, England. Foremost in quantity are the thousands of letters, bills, receipts, wills, deeds, and inventories, together with scores of wastebooks, ledgers, journals, diaries, and letterbooks which detail the lives and commercial activities of Thomas (d. 1739), John (1709-1795), Nicholas (1716-1771), Thomas II (1721-1798), and Ward Nicholas Boylston (1749-1828), the last of whom changed his name from Ward Hallowell to fulfill a condition of inheritance from his uncle, Nicholas Boylston (1716-1771).

The collection documents the activities of the Boylston family in the American, Caribbean, and European trade, where they bought and sold miscellaneous dry goods, coffee, fish, potash, rum, sugar, wine, and whale oil. Of special note are the detailed accounts, inventories, price lists, and correspondence relating to the sugar and whale oil trade. Business partners included Timothy and Eliphalet Fitch, George Folger, Belcher Noyes, Joshua Pico, Samuel Sewall, William Smith, Benjamin Petty, Samuel Vaughn, and Jacob Wendell.

Also to be found in the Boylston family papers are letters, deeds, and other documents relating to the family's interests in Massachusetts, Maine, New Brunswick, New Hampshire, New York, and Nova Scotia lands. These include ventures in land speculation, as well as papers relating to Canadian land claimed in compensation for American property confiscated during the Revolution. Correspondents included John Erving, Thomas Goldthwait, James Lodge, James Swan, and Benning Wentworth.

As prominent Boston merchants, the Boylstons inevitably joined in the growing dispute over Parliamentary regulation and taxation of American commerce and goods. Both the business papers illustrating this traffic and the letters of friends and associates such as William Cooper, Harrison Gray, Benjamin Hallowell, Daniel Leonard, Daniel Lisle, and Charles Paxton, reflect the mounting opposition to British authority and policy. The correspondence contains discussions of the revenue acts of the 1760s and 1770s, the arrival of British troops in Boston, the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, the subsequent progress of the war, and the impact of the war on life and conditions in Massachusetts and Great Britain.

Both John and Thomas supported the Crown in the dispute and, as a result, removed to England following the outbreak of hostilities. Both re-established their trading houses--John in Bristol and Bath and Thomas in London. Ward Nicholas Boylston, who left Boston in 1773 for a tour of Europe and the Middle East, joined them in London in 1775. Their letters and careers in England provide a vivid account of the fate of the Massachusetts Loyalists: Thomas died insolvent after attempting for nearly a quarter of a century to recover his American property; John died a lonely bachelor; and Ward returned to his native Massachusetts in 1800, settled in Roxbury and Princeton, and continued to press the family claims. Among his correspondents are John Adams, Moses Gill, Charles Bulfinch, Thomas Pelham, and Sir John Wentworth.