Albert Gardner Boyden was born in South Walpole, Massachusetts, on February 5, 1827, the son of Phineas and Harriett (Carroll) Boyden.

      Young Albert was no stranger to hard work.

      His father was a farmer and blacksmith, and Albert aided him in both of these undertakings.
      Like many of his contemporaries, he attended district schools during both the summer and winter sessions. Inspired by two of his own teachers, he turned his hand to teaching at the age of 14, serving as an instructor in the town of Foxboro during three winter terms.

     In 1845, Julius Carroll, one of the teachers who had kindled Albert’s interest in the profession, wrote the following recommendation:

       "The bearer of this paper, Mr. Albert G. Boyden, is a young man of industrious habits, superior talents, and a good moral

character. He has distinguished himself as a scholar of the first order at the school he has attended in this place, and which I have had the pleasure of teaching for years, and in my opinion is well qualified to take charge of a Common District School.

     "I, therefore, hesitate not to recommend him, as one fully competent to teach the branches taught in our schools, and as one also that is perfectly worthy of trust and confidence in any business in which he may see fit to engage."

       Armed with this and other recommendations, Albert Gardner Boyden entered Bridgewater in 1848.

    Principal Nicholas Tillinghast signed his certificate of graduation on July12, 1849, although Mr. Boyden stayed on for a postgraduate term.

     Sixty years later, after he had resigned as principal, he reminisced fondly about his student days at the normal school.

      He jokingly recalled that since there were two more women in his class than men, the two surplus women served as chaperones.

     He also remembered the social gatherings every two weeks at the principal’s home; the lyceum; the Normal Offering [the early school newspaper and later yearbook]; and taking part in “round” baseball and football, a rigorous game played without protecive equipment.

      He also remembered attending a lecture by Louis Agassiz, who told the normal school students, “I see before me many bright eyes, I have come to help you see,” and who then proceeded to draw a grasshopper on the board as he discussed how the insect lived and used its sense organs.

      Mr. Boyden wrote of the student body that they were “…

working students from the middle ranks who knew the value of time and money.”

    While Mr. Boyden had managed to save some expense money from his teaching, he supplemented his income by performing janitorial duties including tending fires.

     After graduation, he taught in a Hingham grammar school, but in 1850, he received an invitation from Principal Tillinghast to return to his alma mater:

      "The place of assistant in this school will become vacant at the end of this term by Mr. Colburn’s leaving The Board of Education has made a change in the appropriation, which gives the school a principal and a permanent assistant, and a sub-assistant, who receives a salary of $300 per annum, which may be raised to $400.
    "This situation I offer to you, and should be very confident that I subserved the best interests of the school by obtaining

your assistance. You know the situation as well as I do, and can as accurately measure its advantages and disadvantages. Please write me immediately as the term draws to a close."

    As noted, Mr. Boyden greatly admired Principal Tillinghast and attempted to model his own teaching on the principal’s example.

     He wrote of his mentor: "He was a man of strong religious feeling, pure character, an unflinching devotion to principle, with a real, heroic abnegation of self; modest, accurate, thorough, of great analytical power, reading character readily

and accurately, he had power over pupils which is seldom attained.
     "The secret of his power lay in his own personal character;

he was himself what he sought to have his pupils be."

​