To those who knew him, it might be an understatement to say the late Alden Boynton had broad shoulders.
Boynton, 93, longtime selectman for the town of Whitefield, passed away at the Augusta Rehabilitation Center in Augusta Oct. 12, following a brief illness. Boynton was known as a devoted husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather.
Born in Whitefield Dec. 20, 1917, the son of Chester A. and Addie Knight Boynton. Alden Boynton attended Whitefield schools, graduated Cony High School, and attended Hebron Academy, leaving after only a year to go to work, so his siblings could then further their education.
The second child of seven, Boynton was working to help support the family at a time when his biggest concern should have been doing well at school and when he would next play “Hens Eggs” with his siblings and the Prescott kids, 13 in all.
It was during one such game that Boynton was tagged hard and fell down the hill by the road and his legs were run over by a dump truck carrying a yard and a half of gravel.
Both bones were broken through in one leg. He sustained extensive muscle damage, which left the leg permanently disfigured. This injury would later keep Boynton out of the service. While brothers George, Ira, Dana, and Albert served in WWII, Alden worked at BIW from 1942-’46.
At home in Whitefield, working a water-powered sawmill was a family affair and Boynton, as the eldest son, held the brunt of the responsibility, helping his father move logs from the pond through the water gate and up into the mill where the logs, all marked with the initials of their owners, would be sawn and then loaded onto the truck and delivered. Alden was doing such deliveries at 9 years of age.
Albert, the youngest of the Boyntons, who was born in the mill-camp, (the red building still stands across from the mill on the Mills Road in Whitefield) depended on his brother for many things over the years, and even jokes saying that, “I am who I am because of Alden.”
Alden apparently named Albert when out of frustration, he blurted out that Albert’s name would be Albert Robert Boynton when a persistent town record-keeper kept inquiring if his name had been chosen yet.
Albert does credit his brother with helping him become who he is and stated, “I’m sure going to miss him.”
Alden became so accustomed to looking after things around the mill and at home that Albert jokingly stated, “I never had to learn to do anything because Alden was always there to do it for me.”
The time came when Alden wasn’t there as he and his brothers traveled throughout New Hampshire, Massachusetts, even Connecticut, following the Hurricane of 1938.
In September 1938, the devastating storm caused extensive damage, which created a great need for lumber and lumber services.
Boynton patriarch Chester saw this need as an opportunity to regain what the business had lost in 1933 when the bank, where he held his mill operating money, closed for a holiday and never reopened. He lost the mill to foreclosure.
1933 was a hard year for the Boynton’s: Alden’s mother Addie had succumbed to kidney failure in January.
Having sold the family’s prize cow and cashed in a $20 gold piece to finance the 1938 trip and leaving the remaining family at home without a mother with a charge account at Crummett’s General Store (now the Whitefield Superette), failure was not an option.
In 1942, after four hard years of logging sawing and trucking lumber, Alden accompanied his father and brothers in a procession of trucks and equipment back to Whitefield where he would start up another sawmill and resume sawing lumber off his wood lot, also in Whitefield.
Alden would continue to saw lumber and provided many services to town and townspeople alike throughout his entire life.
Sometimes Doris, Alden’s wife, would get upset with him for not pursuing people who could not pay for his services, but that was just how he was, family members said. If he saw something that needed doing he just did it.
Sharon Clarke, Alden’s daughter, remembers, he would come home at lunch from the mill and run down to the garden and make a couple of passes down the rows with a hand run cultivator then run up to the house to eat lunch only to run back out to do a couple more rows before returning to the mill.
Clarke said, “Doris would holler out at him, ‘would you stop running everywhere.'”
Alden found his pleasure in the simple things, sometimes also a frustration for Doris. “He would go over to the market for a loaf of bread and not come back for two hours because he got to talking, but when he came through the door he would produce a balloon animal or something for us kids,” Sharon said.
In addition to lumber services, digging house cellars to homes built without them, serving as Whitefield’s road commissioner, and 30 years as a selectman, Alden also held a town-plowing contract for some 80 private driveways.
He was no stranger to plowing; his father plowed town roads, over 60 miles of them with a 1933 two-ton Dodge that carried plows big enough to stop the truck in its tracks, requiring a push by a pickup truck, also a ’33 Dodge, outfitted with a four-by-four oak push bar attached.
At 18, Alden would sometimes be out all night pushing the old plow truck.
Alden seemed to exemplify what family and community means. He never passed up an opportunity to watch a game at the school, spend time with family at his camp on Lake Damariscotta, or pitch in to do the job, even if it was one he did not relish.
Despite serving as a town selectman for 30 years, what many may not know, according to his family, is that he was never comfortable speaking to a large assembly. He avoided it if he could, and did if he had to; but he never liked it.
Alden’s most difficult task may have been living on after losing Doris in 2010; they were married just shy of 70 years.
Reminding her father that he had to keep on living, Sharon recalled saying to him, “Think how hard your father had it when your mother died,” (Addie Knight Boynton was only 45) to which Alden replied, “You’re right, how do you make spaghetti?”