Author: Bolton, Nathaniel
Biography:
BOLTON, Nathaniel (1749-1820: ancestry.com)
The son of Nathaniel and Deborah Bolton, he was born at Bridgewater MA on 15 Dec. 1749. He became a rural schoolmaster, farmer, and landowner. On 18 Dec. 1777 he married Jane Thompson (d 1814) in Bridgewater and they had five children, some of them born in Rhode Island and Connecticut before the family returned to Massachusetts and settled at Oakham. During most of his life, Bolton wrote occasional verse for local consumption. His Poem on Infidelity (1808) is a riposte to the doctrines of Thomas Paine. He died on 15 July 1820 at the home of his son Oliver in Dover NH. There is a collection of family papers, including a few unpublished poems, in AAS. (ancestry.com 10 July 2025; Charles K. Bolton, "Nathaniel Bolton, a Forgotten New England Poet," Publications of the American Antiquarian Society n.s. 41 [1931]: 405-20) HJ