♂Benjamin Webster

Benjamin Webster (24 February 1802 – 15 June 1884) was a mechanic and clock repairer of Kingfield, Franklin County, Maine, described in a family memorial as one of the town’s early settlers. He married twice and had ten children, and his estate was still paying out to his heirs six years after his death, reaching a daughter in Kansas. He was the great-great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Eldora M. Webster (1846–1913), her son George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and his son Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Early life

Benjamin was born at Wilton, Maine, on 24 February 1802, the eldest of nine children of Joseph Goss Webster (1769–1831) and his second wife, Ruth Butterfield (1779–1854). Both parents were natives of New Hampshire: his father was born at Plaistow and his mother at Temple. His father also had four children from an earlier marriage. A memorial of the Webster family, compiled in 1904 by Benjamin’s son John C. Webster, records that Joseph “lived and died in Wilton” and was buried in the family burying ground on the old homestead.

Marriages and family

On 2 April 1823 Benjamin married Mehitable Eustice. They had four children, Daniel, Calista, William and George, born between 1823 and 1829. Mehitable died on 31 May 1831, and his father died that November. On 26 January 1832 Benjamin married his second wife, Harriet Clough (1809–1887). They had six more children, born between 1833 and 1850: Sybil, Benjamin C., John C., Conway, Eldora and Emma.

The children went well beyond Kingfield. Daniel settled at Lawrence, Massachusetts. William became an engineer in the United States Navy and afterwards, according to the memorial, ventilation engineer to the United States Senate. The memorial does not say how long he held the post. George, the youngest son of the first marriage, died unmarried of consumption in 1853. Of Harriet’s children, Benjamin C. served in the Civil War. John C. was a printer at Concord, New Hampshire, when he married in 1862, later worked in insurance, and became a vice-president of the Ætna Life company at Hartford. Sybil moved west to Kansas.

Kingfield

The census of 1850 found Benjamin, then 48, at Kingfield and working as a mechanic. Harriet, the two grown sons of his first marriage and the younger children lived with him. He was still listed as a mechanic in 1860. In a town where most of the other householders on the census page were farmers and farm laborers, it was a distinctive trade. In 1870, aged 68, he was still at Kingfield with Harriet and their daughter Emma, then 19. By 1880, aged 78, he gave his work as clock repairer, and his daughter Emma’s death record of 1921 calls him a jeweller. In 1880 he and Harriet shared their house with Emma, her husband Peleg G. Sanford, a tannery worker, and their three-year-old son.

Death

Benjamin Webster died at Kingfield on 15 June 1884, aged 82. The Lewiston Sun-Journal printed a death notice from Kingfield six days later, on 21 June 1884. The memorial says he was buried in the family lot of the town cemetery at Kingfield, beside both wives and his son George. A cemetery card naming Riverside Cemetery, Kingfield, agrees on his age, and the stones there record him and Harriet, who died in 1887, on the same lot. His estate was still being settled years later. When his daughter Sybil died in Kansas in 1890, the account of her own estate included $28.27 “received from the Estate of Benjamin Webster”. The Maine probate file itself has not been examined.

Notes

A 1994 family chart gives Kingfield as the place of both his 1832 marriage and his death. The death at Kingfield is backed by the dateline of the June 1884 death notice, but the 1832 marriage place rests on no record seen so far. The notice gives his age as 82 years and six months, although the birth date of 24 February 1802 gives 82 years and under four months. His trade appears three ways in the records: mechanic in 1850 and 1860, clock repairer in 1880, and jeweller on his daughter’s death record.