Since the late 1700s, Boardmans have lived on Islesboro. The youngest descendant of this prolific lineage is six-year old Davis Lamar Boardman, who only recently mastered the concept of property ownership. Her anxious response was to admonish her parents to never, ever sell off any of the family’s land on the island. Pondering the matter further, she asked her parents if there was a college on Islesboro; told there was not, she unhesitatingly and emphatically informed her parents, “Well, then I’m not going.”
Like everything else Davis knows about Islesboro, this tenacious love of the island seems to have been learned from her beloved grandfather, Paul Boardman, who died peacefully on March 19 at the Islesboro home in which he had been born 85 years earlier. Davis came to know Islesboro’s past, and her ancestors’ role in it, from the colorful stories and faded photographs with which her grandfather regaled her while she sat on his knee in the family rocking chair.
Paul Boardman loved growing up on Islesboro in an era when islanders still used horse-and-buggy rigs to get around the island. Cars did not invade Islesboro until 1934, the year Paul graduated as Islesboro high school class valedictorian. According to Paul’s son Bill (Davis’s dad), the world outside his dad’s window when he was growing up was filled with a cast of larger-than-life characters like Captain Hobart Dodge, Uncle Ed Eames who shipped out on a coaster, and Uncle Bent, who had his teeth pulled out by Paul’s dad while holding onto the picket fence. Paul’s deeply-ingrained notions of honor, integrity and the importance of citizenship in one’s community were derived from the example set by these unique old Yankee characters.
Paul was the youngest son of Maybelle (Pendleton) and Millard Boardman, the son of first cousins Isaiah and Mary. Isaiah was the son of William and Jane (Ames), and William was the son of Deacon Joseph Boardman and Mary (Pendleton), among Islesboro’s very first settlers. Deacon Boardman, as the story goes, fled Boston shortly after the Boston Tea Party, of which he was reputed to be a member. He landed on Islesboro in the spring of 1774, and married Mary in October 1774, at the first wedding recorded on Islesboro. The first gathering of the Baptist church was held on Board-man property the following year, and the first church baptisms took place in nearby Boardman’s Cove (now known as Charlotte’s Cove).
After graduating high school, Paul attended the University of Maine for just one year before being called back to Islesboro to help his parents on the family farm. Although very athletic, he had inherited weak “Pendleton Knees,” which kept him out of the service. Later moving to Connec-ticut, he worked for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft for 35 years – and met his wife, Eileen, on his way to the workplace. Eileen recalls that she and her girlfriends drooled over Paul as he walked past their office, and one day Eileen – overcome with her own brand of “weak knees” – fainted, prompting Paul to come to her rescue with a glass of water. Four months later they were married and stayed happily so for 58 years.
Eileen’s first visit to Islesboro to meet her in-laws took place while she was first “in the family way.” She was sick, and the ride across the bay in a mailboat didn’t help matters. Being a Hartford girl, she thought she had arrived at the end of the world. Now, she can’t imagine living anywhere else except amid the loving, caring Islesboro community that welcomed her.
With Paul and Eileen living mainly in Connecticut during the 60s and early 70s, a “hippie invasion” engulfed the vacant old homestead. The house became a haven for Paul’s youngest son Bill and his cronies, who lived there unfazed by the lack of running water. It wasn’t until 1976 that a well was dug and the house reclaimed for the return of Paul and Eileen. Howard Boardman told Paul that the wild 60s behavior to which the house had been witness during this period wasn’t much worse than any that had gone on in generations before. “Paul,” he asserted, “they’re just doing on the front porch what’s customarily been done on the back porch.”
After summering on Islesboro throughout the 1950s and 60s, Paul and Eileen retired to the Boardman family homestead in 1978. It had been a struggle to keep up the property while raising five children in Coventry, Connecticut, but there was never any question that the Islesboro land would stay in the family. Bill Boardman doesn’t have many childhood memories of Coventry, but has always thought of Islesboro as home. His dad spoke frequently of Islesboro and its colorful cast of characters, and the Coventry home was filled with furniture from the Islesboro homestead.
Paul devoted much of his time to civic concerns on Islesboro after moving back to the island in 1978. He served on the Board of Selectmen for eight years, four of them as First Selectman. He worked with the town on many projects, among them the acquisition and development of the Maddy Dodge Field, the town’s recreation park, and was involved with the town’s first Comprehensive Plan. He and his wife were staunch supporters and loyal fans of Islesboro Central School’s sporting events.
Paul instilled his love of Islesboro and the family genealogy in all his children. His daughter, Eileen, remembers that her dad gave her her first typing job recording the family genealogy, and sons John, Richard and Bill have or are building homes on Islesboro family land. All the children retain fond memories and strong ties to this magical and historic place.
Bill Boardman, now general manager of Pendleton Yacht Yard on Islesboro, feels blessed to able to raise a child on the island. After moving out of “hippie haven,” he built a log cabin in 1978 on the site of an old cellar hole where his great-aunt Lindy Boardman’s house once stood. When the original house burned down in 1926, the widow Lindy responded by moving into the barn, where she lived with the cows. After the barn burned down, she became a little odd. It was rumored that she had booby-trapped her property with bear snares set up to stop any potential suitors in their tracks. Bill’s present home is built on the foundation and steps of Lindy’s old homestead with nary a bear snare in sight – much to the relief of wife Lisa and daughter Davis.
The Boardman family feel comforted that Paul died in the home where he was born, surrounded by people who loved him, and able to gaze out his window at a changed yet very familiar neighborhood. His love of Islesboro and its history, and the role Boardmans have played in that history for more than 200 years, have been passed on to everyone who knew him, and especially to his granddaughter, Davis. Her fond memories of him may one day lead her to take her own grandchildren on her knee to retell family adventures and study ancestors’ faces in old photograph albums.