Allen-Johnson family.

Joseph Allen (1790-1873), the son of Phineas and Ruth Smith Allen, graduated from Harvard in 1811. He then studied for the ministry and in 1816 was called by the town of Northborough to be its third minister. It was a post he held for forty years, until he voluntarily relinquished his pulpit duties and his salary. He remained, however, engaged in church affairs as senior pastor.

Until the disestablishment of the church in Massachusetts in 1833 Allen, as the Congregationalist minister, was minister of the entire town of Northborough and chairman of the district school committee. It was a role he relished: the school children were invited to play in his extensive gardens; he arranged for young women to earn, through their handiwork, money to purchase books for a library; and he instituted a series of public lyceums.

Soon after arriving in Northborough, Joseph and his wife opened a school to earn extra income and eventually to be able to educate their own family of seven children at home. The Allen School was a Northborough institution for decades.

Joseph Allen was a beloved figure in his community. He was more widely honored by being chosen as a delegate to the Paris Peace Convention in 1849 and as a representative to the Massachusetts General Court, for a four-month term in 1864. His influence in Unitarian circles was far-reaching. Within a month of his death, memorial services to him were preached from pulpits in Quincy, Ill., and San Francisco, Calif.

Lucy Clark Ware Allen (1791-1866) was the daughter of Henry and Mary Clark Ware. She was their eldest surviving child and the eldest of his nineteen children. Her childhood was spent in Hingham, Mass., but in 1855 the family moved to Cambridge on the occasion of Henry Ware, a Unitarian luminary, being named Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard.

Proximity must have played a role in Lucy and Joseph's romance as Joseph studied with Henry Ware. In February of 1818 the couple was married and the young minister brought his bride to Northborough to a newly built house across the common from the church. They arrived from Cambridge, after dark, in a rainstorm. In later years Lucy remembered "how pretty the village looked, when arriving at the top of the hill by Capt. Hunt's. Mr. Allen said, 'There is Northborough!' and peeping out from behind my umbrella I saw the lights in the village a short distance below and beyond."

Lucy was well qualified by temperament and experience to preside over a large family- her own plus the student boarders. Her intelligence, patience and humor enabled her to survive the occasional "talking and racketting and thumping" of the boys as well as the muck "tracked through the house by our 20 pairs of feet." In addition to her regular duties, she acted as the manager and taskmaster necessary to the production of two early student newspapers- "The Meteor" and "The Nosegay", printed in 1835-1836.

During the last eight years of her life Lucy was an invalid. The effects of a stroke kept her confined to the parsonage where she was lovingly cared for by her family. Her death was lamented but also welcomed as a release from her long suffering.

Joseph and Lucy married on 3 February 1818. They had seven children: Mary Ware; Joseph Henry (1820-1898), who married Anna Minot Weld (1820-1907); Thomas Prentiss (1822-1868), who married Sarah Alexander Lord (1825-1904); Elizabeth Waterhouse (1824-1893); Lucy Clark; Edward Augustus Holyoke; and William Francis (1830-1889), who married [1] Mary Tileston Lambert (1842-1865) and [2] Margaret Loring Andrews (1839- ).

Mary Ware Allen Johnson (1819-1897), the eldest child of Joseph and Lucy Clark Ware Allen, was born in Northborough. She was educated at home and in private schools in Brookline and Northampton, Mass. In December 1837 she entered the Greene Street School in Providence, R.I.

Mary attended the Greene Street School for less than a year but it was a life-altering experience. She had the good fortune to have had Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) as a teacher and congenial classmates who became life-long friends. The four journals she was required to keep while at the school are valuable resources for students of Margaret Fuller. As well, they afford insights into Mary's intellectual life. Many years later, after her daughter Harriet had spent some years in school in New Bedford, Mass., Mary wrote to her, "Providence was to me what New Bedford is to you and the memory of it is still very precious."

In 1840 Mary married Dr. Joshua Jewett Johnson. They settled in Northborough where they remained until 1857 when they moved to Keene, N.H. Their final move to the parsonage in Northborough in 1866 was made so that Mary might help to care for her aging father. The great tragedy of Mary's life was the loss, through illness, of five of her six children. Even little Ethel, whom she adopted in 1861, died in 1865. Only her eldest child Harriet survived.

Joshua Jewett Johnson (1809-1884) was the only child of Lewis and Sarah Robinson Johnson of Westmoreland, N.H. His father died when he was only eight years old. Sarah went to Boston to earn a living as a housekeeper and nurse, sending young Joshua to live with his Grandfather Robinson in Berlin, N.H.

Joshua was next sent to a Friends' boarding school in Bolton, Mass., which he considered his first real home. He attended the Academy in Northfield, Mass., and passed a term or two at Amherst prior to receiving a medical diploma from Dartmouth. He then studied with Dr. Amos Twitchell (1781-1850) in Keene, N.H., before attending Harvard Medical School.

He attempted to establish a practice in Northborough but was discouraged by the competition. After a trip to Quincy, Ill., he returned east and in 1839 became engaged to Mary Ware Allen. They were married in 1840, settling in Northborough where he began his medical practice.

By all accounts Dr. Johnson was held in high regard by his patients. A successful practice, however, did not ensure financial security. To bolster their income, from the beginning of their marriage, the Johnsons took in patients to board. One of them, Isa Loring (1840-1913), lived with them for part of the year for decades, and finally permanently.

In the winter of 1856-1857, Joshua leaving his young family with Mary's parents, traveled to Europe to explore his family's roots. Upon his return, after a brief sojourn in Worcester, Mass., he moved his family to Keene. It was a happy situation for them marred by the devastating loss of young Robbie and Harry in an outbreak of diphtheria in 1861. The last eighteen years of his life were spent in Northborough.

Harriet Hall Johnson Johnson (1842-1929?) was the eldest child of Joshua Jewett and Mary Ware Allen Johnson, the only one to survive to adulthood. She must have been deeply affected by the early deaths of her siblings. Indeed, her sister Sarah died on her birthday and later Harriet wrote, "My only birthday custom for many years was to be taken by my mother to lay flowers upon her grave."

Harriet was educated in Northborough, New Bedford, and Keene. Although she taught school for a short time she chose not to attend normal school or to continue to teach. In the years between her school days and her marriage, in addition to being employed at home, she regularly visited her friends and relatives. Her longest trip was to Madison, Wisc., where she spent the winter of 1869-1870 with her Uncle William Allen and his family.

In 1873 she married William Henry Johnson who operated a local nursery. They lived on a farm in Westborough, Mass., until they moved to the parsonage in Northborough with their four children, becoming the third and fourth generations to live in the old homestead.

William Henry Johnson (1840-1907) was a farmer, orchardist, dairyman, inventor, and community activist. He held strong opinions that he sought to disseminate through his writings for newspapers and journals. The collection contains five boxes of these handwritten articles with no indication of how many were published. He served on various Northborough town committees but it seems that no project interested him more than the establishment of a town public park.

Sarah Robinson Johnson, (1790-1878) was one of seven daughters of Jonathan Robinson of Surry, N.H. Although she was a widow for sixty-one years, she managed to provide for herself and her son, Joshua, until he married and could offer her a home. She was a useful, if sometimes difficult, presence. She often visited her relatives in Surry and Boston.

Lucy Clark Allen Powers (1826-1909) was the fifth child and third daughter of Joseph and Lucy Clark Ware Allen. She attended the normal school in Lexington, Mass. In 1857 she married Albert Ebenezer Powers (1816-1911), a widower with two children, one of whom had been a student at the Allen School. Albert was a prominent businessman of Lansingburgh, N.Y.

It was a happy marriage except that initially Lucy missed her family and deplored the relative isolation of Lansingburgh. "I never knew anything like the deadness of society here," she complained in a letter to Mary. Later she wrote that she saw only "houses and fences." With the birth of their son Joseph Allen Powers in 1858 and the adoption of their daughter, Mabel, Lucy became too immersed in domestic concerns to complain of loneliness. The family ties were kept strong through frequent visiting and letter writing.

Edward Augustus Holyoke Allen (1828-1898) was the sixth child of Joseph and Lucy Clark Ware Allen. He was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the only Allen son to attend neither Harvard College nor Divinity School. Edward was an educator serving as a teacher or administrator at the Friends' Academy in New Bedford, the Allen School in West Newton, Mass., and the Friends' Seminary in New York City, among others. In 1855 he married Eugenia Sophia Teulon (1836-1926), with whom he had eight children.

From the description of Papers, 1759-1992. (American Antiquarian Society). WorldCat record id: 191334654