CHAPTER I.BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS TIMES.
On Milk Street, in Boston, opposite the Old South Church, lived Josiah Franklin, a maker of soap and candles.

He had come to Boston with his wife about the year 1682 from the parish of Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, where his family had lived on a small freehold for about three hundred years.

His English wife had died, leaving him seven children, and he had married a colonial girl, Abiah Folger, whose father, Peter Folger, was a man of some note in early Massachusetts.
Josiah Franklin was fifty-one and his wife Abiah thirty-nine, when the first illustrious American inventor was born in their house on Milk Street, January 17, 1706.

He was their eighth child and Josiah's tenth son and was baptized Benjamin.

What little we know of Benjamin's childhood is contained in his "Autobiography", which the world has accepted as one of its best books and which was the first American book to be so accepted.