He had come to
Boston with his wife about the year 1682 from the parish of
Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, where his family had lived on a
small freehold for about three hundred years. His English wife
had died, leaving him seven children, and he had married a
colonial girl, Abiah Folger, whose father, Peter Folger, was a
man of some note in early Massachusetts.
Josiah Franklin was fifty-one and his wife Abiah thirty-nine,
when the first illustrious American inventor was born in their
house on Milk Street, January 17, 1706. He was their eighth child
and Josiah's tenth son and was baptized Benjamin. What little we
know of Benjamin's childhood is contained in his "Autobiography",
which the world has accepted as one of its best books and which
was the first American book to be so accepted. In the crowded
household, where thirteen children grew to manhood and womanhood,
there were no luxuries. Benjamin's period of formal schooling was
less than two years, though he could never remember the time when
he could not read, and at the age of ten he was put to work in
his father's shop.
Benjamin was restless and unhappy in the shop. He appeared to
have no aptitude at all for the business of soap making. His
parents debated whether they might not educate him for the
ministry, and his father took him into various shops in Boston,
where he might see artisans at work, in the hope that he would be
attracted to some trade.
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