Joshua Bennett

Joshua Bennett was born in Billerica on November 27, 1792, the son of James Bennett, a prosperous farmer whose family had come from Groton and settled near the Burlington line, south-east of the Shawshin schoolhouse. He grew up on his father's farm and was educated in the town's common schools and at the academy in Westford. When he was about twenty-four he began teaching a grammar school in Dorchester, and although he was always fond of books he gave up teaching after three years for business, devoting his evenings to trade even while he taught.

As the leading partner of Bennett & Felton of Boston he laid the foundation of a large fortune. Following his father, he became a very extensive dealer in hops, trading with most of the hop growers and brewers of the country, and he was also an exporter of hops and a distiller. Hurd's county history tells that in 1849, finding the hop trade depressed while he was in London, he bought back a large lot of hops he had himself exported and sent them home to America, "thus making two profits upon the same goods." Most of his wealth, however, came from shrewd investments in real estate, of which he held a large amount in Lowell and a much larger amount in Boston.

He was not a politician and took only the offices that his fellow businessmen gave him. He was a director of the Providence and Worcester Railroad and sat on the first board of directors of the Old Lowell Bank, chartered in 1828, beside Kirk Boott, Samuel Batchelder and the future Lowell mayors Nathaniel Wright and Josiah B. French. After thirty-three years as a director he was elected president of the bank in 1861 and led it through the Civil War, resigning because of failing health a few months before his death. At the start of the war he pledged his own wealth and his influence as a financier to the government, and he gave a special bounty from his own pocket to every soldier who enlisted from Billerica.

On October 8, 1815, he married Eleanor Richardson, daughter of Ebenezer Richardson of Billerica. They had two daughters: Ellen, born in 1816, who married George Holden of Boston, and Rebecca, born in 1818, who married William Wilkins Warren, a merchant at St. Thomas and later of Boston. In his early business years Bennett lived in Boston, but his favorite later home was his fifty-acre farm on the west side of Long Street (now Boston Road), in the north part of the village, which he had bought on August 15, 1821, and which the family later called Bennett Hall. He visited Europe once and spent several weeks each summer at Saratoga and Sharon Springs.

Joshua Bennett died on August 6, 1865, in the seventy-third year of his age, and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. His will was never signed, but his heirs paid all of its charitable legacies as he had intended: $25,000 to the Washingtonian Home in Boston and $3,000 to each church in Billerica, with smaller gifts to their pastors. The estate passed to his grandson and namesake Joshua Bennett Holden, with the understanding that his widow would live there for the rest of her life, and a portrait of Bennett given by that grandson hung in the directors' room of the Old Lowell Bank. In 1880 his widow built the Bennett Public Library in his honor.

References

1. Hurd, History of Middlesex County, vol. 2 (1890), p. 355, biographical sketch of Joshua Bennett
2. Hurd, History of Middlesex County, vol. 2 (1890), p. 356 (marriage, children, death and burial at Mount Auburn)
3. Hurd, History of Middlesex County, vol. 2 (1890), engraved portrait of Joshua Bennett facing p. 355
4. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register p. 11, BENNETT 2 and 3
5. Vital Records of Billerica to 1850 (1908), marriages p. 304 (Eleanor Richardson and Joshua Bennet, Oct. 8, 1815)
6. Billerica (magazine), vol. 1 (1912-13), "Historic Billerica: Bennett Hall"