A clearing was soon made on this land at a point which lies about one-half mile south of Centre Rutland, and a-half mile west of Otter creek on the slope of a high hill. It was then expected that Centre Rutland would be the capital of Vermont. In 1783, he erected amid the deep forests, broken only here and there by small clearings, a small framed house. He never occupied a log-house; as he was himself a skillful carpenter, house-joiner and cabinet maker and had been reared in a large village, a city, just as he left it, his taste did not allow him to dispense with so many of the comforts of his earlier life as many were compelled to relinquish. He returned to Middletown, and was married, Sept. 28th, 1783, to Mary, the eighth child and fifth daughter of Capt. Samuel Ward of Middletown, who had twelve children. The Ward family were of equal standing with his own. The newly married couple were each a helpmeet unto the other, and had probably known each other from early life in the same church and perhaps in the same public school. They were both always strongly attached to Middletown, their native place; it cost something to tear themselves away and betake themselves to a new settlement, which they knew must long want many of the advantages which they were leaving. I remember the pride and exhileration with which, in his extreme old age, he used to speak of Middletown, as he pointed out on his two maps, one of them elaborate, in his native city, the old familiar places. He revisited it from time to time during his long life, the last time in 1837, only a year and a-half before his death. In his journeys between Rutland and Middletown, which he visited with his wife, the second year after their marriage, he must have met many kindred by the way. His Uncle Daniel Boardman lived in Dalton, and his Uncle John in Hancock, Mass., while three brothers of his wife, and a sister, Mrs. Charles Goodrich, resided in Pittsfield. Mrs. Ward, his mother-in-law, lived also in Pittsfield with her children, till 1815, when she was ninety-six years old, her oldest son seventy-six, and her eighth child, Mrs. Boardman, over sixty. She and her son-in-law, Judge Goodrich, the founder of Pittsfield, who was of about her own age, lived, it is said to be the oldest persons in Berkshire Co. He had also a cousin Mrs. Francis at Pittsfield, and a favorite cousin Elder John Boardman, at Albany and another cousin, Capt. George Boardman in Schenectady. These three cousins were children of his uncle Charles of Wethersfield. His grandmother Boardman, the widow of the Maine land proprietor, also spent her last days in Dalton, and died there at her son Daniel's, about the time when Timothy first went to Vermont.