John Osborn

John Osborn was a painter, paint dealer, and member of the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company who purchased the first Harrison Grey Otis House from Otis when he moved to Mt. Vernon Street in 1801.

John Osborn was a painter and paint dealer, and his family in Boston was involved in that trade for at least 100 years. His father, also John, had a shop on Orange Street in 1789, and his uncle, Thomas Osborn, was a painter in the North End at Prince Street. John’s father died in 1792, and the son, residing then on Atkinson Street, inherited the business. In 1793, Osborn purchased a store at No. 1 Long Wharf owned by William Williams, a seller of mathematical instruments, who died in March of that year. At the estate sale, Osborn paid £1060 for the wooden building that was 20 x 30’. At his new establishment, Osborn sold paints, oils, and brushes, varnish, glazier’s diamonds (small diamonds set in a tool for cutting glass), and clock and window glass. By 1796, Osborn had another shop on Orange Street.

Osborn was also significant for his participation in the artillery company of Massachusetts, for which he was recruited in 1793. He served alongside Thomas Bartlett, an apothecary; Nehemiah Freeman, who became lieutenant of artillery in the US Army the following year; and other men who were shopkeepers of varying trades. 

Osborn and his family were connected to the Otises, especially the Otis House. After Harrison Gray Otis and Sally Foster Otis moved to the south slope of Beacon Hill in 1801, John Osborn and his family moved into the property known today as the Otis House. Harrison Gray Otis declared in a letter to his wife that the Osborns were “tickled” with the purchase. The Otis house was built by Charles Bulfinch, making this the second time Osborn was drawn to a building designed by the famed West End architect; in 1798 he owned a unit on 18 Franklin Street, opposite Bulfinch’s Tontine Crescent – a brick block that made the street a “select neighborhood” in its own right, according to a 1916 collection of documents about Old Boston by Walter Watkins.

In 1807 Osborn sold the property to Nehemiah Parsons and bought the Otises’ second house on Mount Vernon Street. However, in 1814, John Osborn repurchased the first Otis house, and his family occupied it until his death in 1819, at the age of forty-eight.