By Roger J. Di Paolo
Record-Courier Editor
Martin Boszor was only 15 years old when he became a mail carrier.
He worked only one day a week but the job the teenager held for four years was an important one: He provided the only mail delivery service between Brimfield and Franklin Mills, the community that later became known as Kent.
There were only three houses between the two settlements when Martin Boszor began handling the mail route in 1839. And the trip between them that now takes a driver less than a half-hour could be a challenging ordeal.
"The roads were different then. They were rough, hilly and swampy in turns. Part of the way was lined with woods," according to a 1914 Kent Courier story in which Bos-zor, then a 91-year-old Kent resident, recounted his days as a mail carrier.
Regular mail service began in Portage County in 1805, when a route from Warren to Cleveland was established with stops in Deerfield and Ravenna. Service was irregular and letters were delivered only when the recipient could pay for them. (Stamps weren't introduced until 1847.)
Brimfield's first post office opened in 1835. The community had two postal stations -- at Brimfield Center at the intersection of present-day S.R. 43 and Tallmadge Road and at Thorndike, the crossroads community in the western part of the township at Mogadore and Tallmadge roads.
Martin Boszor's family was among the first to settle in Brimfield. His father, Henry, a German immigrant, came there in 1816 and settled on a farm on present-day Howe Road, about a mile west of Brimfield Center. Henry was one of the first elected officials in the township, which was organized in April 1818.
Born June 2, 1824, Martin Boszor was the eighth of nine children born to Henry and Polly Boosinger Boszor. He apparently took on the mail route in addition to the duties expected of a young man growing up on a family farm.
The route took his horse-drawn rig from Brimfield to present-day Summit Road and into Franklin Mills, which in the early 1840s was a small riverfront settlement experiencing a burst of prosperity thanks to the opening of the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal.
Sharing his memories 75 years later with the Kent Courier, Martin Boszor recalled only a handful of houses in Brimfield along his route to Kent. The homes of Champlain Minard and Nathaniel Packard were located near the Boszor residence. The third was the Converse residence, located north of the township, he said.
Boszor mentioned -- and apparently worked for -- three Brimfield postmasters, including Capt. Constant Chapman, a Revolutionary War veteran who opened the township's first post office in 1835. He also noted Edward Parsons, whose sons, Timothy G. Parsons and Edward Parsons, founded the Parsons Lumber Co. in Kent. The third was Samuel Carver.
Among the stories he recalled was the tragic tale of Nathaniel Packard, who went mad after being bitten by a rabid dog that had attacked several animals. Packard had refused to have his wound cauterized, believing treatment was unnecessary because it was minor, and didn't develop symptoms of rabies for three months.
Unable to swallow water -- a sign of what once was called "hydrophobia" -- he learned that he was past medical treatment and went home to his farm to die. Martin Boszor's father, Henry, and another neighbor cared for him as he lingered for a week, receiving numerous visitors until he died.
The young mail carrier, like his father and brothers, became a farmer, making his home on what was known as Boszor Hill, a mile north of Brimfield Center. After his first wife, Mattie, died in 1871, he married Harriet Cackler, granddaughter of Christian Cackler Sr., one of Franklin Township's pioneers.
Brimfield lost its post office in 1907, when Kent took over rural mail delivery for Brimfield Center and Thorndike. By then Martin Boszor was a Kent resident, having moved there in 1900, when he was 76 years old.
At 91, as he reminisced with the Courier, he was the last surviving member of his family -- he noted that one of his brothers had lived past 100 -- and he was able to look back on a long life, although not without regret: He missed being a farmer.
"It's the most independent of all vocations," he told the Courier. "It gives plenty of exercise and no man need injure himself if he takes proper care. ... If I had my life to live over again, I would live it on a farm."