Early years and education Franklin Sanborn was born at
Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, the son of Aaron and Lydia (Leavitt) Sanborn. In 1856, he became secretary of the
Massachusetts State Kansas Committee They had three sons, the poet
Thomas Parker Sanborn, the genealogist
Victor Channing Sanborn, and Francis Bachiler Sanborn. In 1880, Frank Sanborn built a large house on the banks of the
Sudbury River in Concord, placing a plaque with the name of his first wife, Ariana, in a gable end. It was in this home that the Sanborns' eldest son,
Tom, committed suicide in 1889, at the age of twenty-four, after which the Sanborns stayed for several months in the Emerson home. In 1891 Frank Sanborn moved his ailing and elderly friend, transcendental poet and walking-companion of Thoreau,
Ellery Channing, into his home, where Channing subsequently died in 1901. Although the Sanborns' second son, Victor Channing Sanborn, was engaged in real estate for a living, he wrote frequently about his father and authored a book researching their ancestor
Thomas Leavitt's origins.{{cite journal
Death and significance '' Frank Sanborn died February 24, 1917, of a broken hip after being struck by a railroad baggage cart during a visit to his son Francis in
New Jersey. He was buried at
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near the graves of his friends and mentors Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Bronson Alcott,
Ellery Channing, and Henry Thoreau. Concord's flags were flown at half-mast for three days. At the end of the month, February, 1917, just prior to America's entering World War I, the Massachusetts House of Representatives recognized Sanborn's dedication to the unfortunate, the diseased, and the despised, citing Sanborn's role as a confidential adviser to John Brown, "for whose sake he was arrested, mistreated, and nearly deported."{{cite book Sanborn was loved and hated.
Walt Whitman described Sanborn as "a fighter, up in arms, a devotee, a revolutionary crusader, hot in the collar, quick on the trigger, noble, optimistic."Henry David Thoreau feared the passionate Concord schoolteacher was "only too steadfast and earnest", a type, as Thoreau put it, "that calmly, so calmly, ignites and then throws bomb after bomb." Sanborn lived a long life. He was revered in the end as a relic from a golden age gone by—a tall and venerable figure moving picturesquely through Boston and Concord. ==Works (in order of publication)==