Boutwell, Charles D.

Charles Boutwell and Benjamin F. Bridges were the dyers who kept this account book. Several villages in Franklin County, Massachusetts, are mentioned, but there is no other indication in the book of where they lived. However, there lived in Deerfield a Benjamin Franklin Bridges who was born in Vermont in 1797, the son of Isaac and Deborah Cobb Bridges. In 1811, Benjamin and one of his brothers walked to Deerfield, Mass., and he settled on a farm in Pine Nook in 1818. He married twice, first to Eunice Clapp and then to Harriet A. Hubbard, and had numerous children. He was still alive at age 90. Little is known about Boutwell. A couple of his accounts were recorded as being settled in Leverett, a village in Franklin County, and this may have been where he lived. He may have been the Charles Boutwell who was the son of Mary Hosmer and Ebenezer Boutwell, born in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, on January 31, 1798. This Charles Boutwell married Mary Lawrence Stone on September 9, 1824, and they had at least ten children.