Jump to the biography. Source: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. In Samuel received a parcel of land in Cornwallis for his work, but he returned to New Bedford. The Bordens were farmers, tilling the rich tidelands rescued from the sea generations earlier by the expelled Acadians. Three years later Andrew married Eunice Jane Laird, the daughter of John Laird, the village schoolmaster and a classical scholar and mathematician of local repute.
Robert was born in and was followed by a brother, John William, a sister, Julia Rebecca, and another brother, Henry Clifford, born in Andrew did not take to agricultural pursuits and left management of the farm to Eunice and the children. In due course, lessons with the village schoolmistress were interspersed with visits from his uncles, who introduced him to the poets Horace and Virgil. When he was nine, in , his parents sent him as a day student to the local private academy, Acacia Villa School, presided over by Arthur McNutt Patterson.
Borden excelled at Greek and Latin. Soon his instructor, James Henry Hamilton, also had him studying Hebrew. The classical poetry and literature stayed with Borden all his life. A volume in Latin or Greek, perhaps one of each, was on his bedside table until the day of his death. The contrast with his chores at home was sharp and telling.
Teaching at Acacia Villa had more than its share of routine, and his failure to complete his schooling precluded study at university. Still, teaching hinted at a better way of life. Self-education, he discovered, had its own satisfactions.
It was the first time he had ever been away from home and he was desperately lonely in the fall of But he was not alone. A ferry ride away in the great metropolis of New York his half-brother, Thomas, a sailor, and his wife lived.
