BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
GEORGE SEWALL BOUTWELL, LL. D.,
Boston and Groton, the first commissioner of
internal revenue, secretary of the treasury under
President Grant, and for many years one of the leading
international lawyers, is the son of Sewall and Rebecca
(Marshall) Boutwell, and was born in Brookline, Mass.,
in what is now the old part of the Country Club house,
January 28, 1818. He comes from old and respected
Massachusetts stock, being a lineal descendant of James
Boutwell, who was admitted a freeman in Lynn in 1638,
and of John Marshall, who came to Boston in the ship
Hopewell in 1634. The family has always represented
the sterling qualities of typical New Englanders. Tradition
asserts that one of his paternal ancestors received a
grant of land for services in King Philip’s War. His
maternal grandfather, Jacob Marshall, was the inventor of
the cotton press, an invention originally made, however,
for pressing hops. His father, Sewall Boutwell, removed
with his family in 1820 from Brookline to Lunenburg,
Mass., where he held several town offices; he was a member
of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1843
and 1844 and of the Constitutional Convention of 1853.
Mr. Boutwell attended in his early years a public school
in Lunenburg, where he became a clerk in a general store
at the age of thirteen, thus gaining a practical as well as a
* Copyright, 1900, by the Mason Publishing and Printing Co.
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