Enduring legacies: The stories of gifts that built a university: Part 1, John Boynton's founding gift

Made of rough-hewn native granite, Boynton Hall presents a rugged, hard face to the WPI campus. It is not unlike the stern countenance that stares back from one of the only known photographs of the man whose name graces WPI's first building.

John Boynton was born on his family's farm in Mason, N.H., on May 31, 1791, a descendant of a distinguished English family. In his day, poor farm boys had little time for formal schooling. He learned the rudiments of reading, writing and "ciphering," but then it was time to devote all of his energy to farm chores.

Boynton's ambitions lay beyond his father's fields, however. When he turned 30, he set out from Mason to the adjacent town of New Ipswich to learn the craft of tin making. In the early 19th century the American Industrial Revolution was about to hit its stride. But there was still good money to be made handcrafting products for the mass consumer market.

One of the more lucrative of these traditional trades was tin making. While the average household used porcelain crocks for cooking and storing food, tinware was beginning to gain popularity. Using an anvil, a hammer and a variety of templates, he stamped out plain tinplate pots and pans, coffee pots, sugar bowls and other everyday implements.

At first, he peddled his finished products on foot or on horseback. Eventually he was able to hire peddlers who set out across the countryside from New York to Canada in bright red horse-drawn wagons, bartering tinware for food and other goods. The goods were then sold in Boston, and the proceeds were used to buy supplies and raw material for the business.

In 1825 Boynton moved his company about 21 miles south to Templeton, Mass. It was the earliest documented tin shop in Worcester County. The price of tin products had dropped significantly and demand for the durable and attractive household goods had grown dramatically. Boynton was becoming a wealthy man with enough spare cash to lend money to area towns and to the state. Two decades later, he sold his interest in the business to his cousin, David Whitcomb, and retired at the age of 55.

John Boynton had become one of Templeton's most distinguished and wealthy citizens. He had served briefly as the town's postmaster and had represented Templeton in the state legislature. Dressed in his usual starched shirt, fan waistcoat, vest, and blue outer coat adorned with a solid gold pocket watch, he was a well-known figure on his walks through town. His Greek Revival home was one of the most prominent on the town common.

In the 1860s, having served for several years as the first president of the Millers River Bank in Athol, he resolved to use his modest fortune to help others avoid the hard life he had known as a young man. Recalling the poorly equipped school where he had spent precious few days, he gave $10,000 to the town of Mason in 1865 to establish the Boynton Common School Fund. The money helped buy books and supplies for the Mason Elementary School.

Having had no children and having outlived his wife, Abigail, he chose to use the bulk of his estate-$100,000-to create an educational institution. At the time, most of the nation's colleges taught the classics to future clergymen and lawyers. Boynton wanted to create a school where craftsmen, mechanics, farmers and others of the professional and working classes could receive a practical education-the kind he'd never had.

He considered placing his new college in Templeton, but was talked out of the idea by Whitcomb, who believed that the growing industrial city of Worcester would be a more logical choice. In early May 1865, the details of the school having been worked out, Boynton turned his $100,000 over to the trustees of the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science, and on May 10 the college received its charter from the commonwealth of Massachusetts. But he did not live to see his dream fulfilled. On March 25, 1867, during a snowy sleigh ride home to Templeton, he caught pneumonia and died soon after. Boynton Hall was dedicated on Nov. 11, 1868.

John Boynton was buried next to his wife in Pleasant View Cemetery in Mason.

More than 130 years after his death, John Boynton is still remembered in the county where he was born. As a fitting tribute to a man who held education and the future of the youth of the region so dear, the county school district in 1989 voted to name its new middle school for him.

The simplest, and perhaps the most elegant tribute to Boynton was established by WPI's Class of 1922 on the occasion of its fifth reunion. The class gathered the necessary funds to erect a simple monument-a bronze plaque attached to a chunk of native granite-that now greets visitors to the center of Mason. Beneath a concise summary of Boynton's life and death is a simple but appropriate caption: "He Opened the Door of Opportunity to Youth."