This collection contains 548 receipts, bills, and related financial records pertaining to James Wood Hayward's dairy distribution business in Worcester and Middlesex counties, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1857.
The first item is a receipt for a payment Hayward made to Hariet [sic] and James Fletcher for 8 weeks' tuition at a local school in November 1844. The rest of the material concerns his purchase of milk from numerous venders in and around Acton, Harvard, Boxborough, and Littleton, Massachusetts. The majority of the items are receipts and, to a lesser extent, lists of purchases, all of which document the cost of the large quantities of milk Hayward bought, often by the can. A few documents record the amount of milk he and his brother, Stevens Hayward, collected from various vendors over the course of a month. Several providers, including Benjamin Houghton and Ira Banfield, appear frequently throughout the collection, though Hayward dealt with a large number of dairy farmers throughout the region.
James Wood Hayward, the son of James Hayward and Eunice Wood, was born in Boxborough, Massachusetts, on May 31, 1810. He had 6 siblings: Eunice, Susannah, John, Stevens, Lucy Ann, and Paul. Wood worked for his father and taught school until his mid-20s, when he began to market produce, a job he held for approximately 10 years. Around 1845, he became a dairy distributor, shipping milk from Middlesex and Worcester counties into Boston via railroad. After his career in the dairy industry, which he continued until at least 1857, he lived in West Acton, Massachusetts, where he had a farm. He and his wife, Hannah Elizabeth Conant (1818-1892), had nine children. James Wood Hayward died on September 29, 1891.
