Doctor Daniel Robins was born in Littleton in the Massachusetts Colony, October 12, 1758.  The family later moved to the nearby town of Harvard when Daniel was four years old.  He is decended from Robert Robins who emigrated from Great Britain around 1650.  Daniel’s parents were Jacob Robins and Anna Whitcomb.  Jacob was a Lieutenant in the Harvard militia company that responded to the Alarm at Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775.

Daniel grew up at Harvard and was working on the family farm when war with Great Britain broke out in 1775.  Eight months later and two months after his seventeenth birthday, he enlisted as a private in Captain Jonathan Danforth’s Company in Colonel Asa Whitcomb’s 6th Regiment of the Continental Line.

Daniel’s company was involved in various military actions throughout Massachusetts until August 1776, when they marched from Harvard to provide garrison duty at Fort Ticonderoga, the passageway to Lake Champlain.  Daniel’s name is shown on the Camp Ticonderoga muster roll dated November 27, 1776.  He completed his enlistment period there at the end of December 1776 and returned to his home at Harvard where he completed his studies and became a practicing physician.  In August, 1783 Daniel married Elizabeth Townsend of Marlborough, Massachusetts.  Daniel and his family lived at Harvard for five years before moving to Boxborough, Massachusetts around 1788, where he continued his medical practice and managed his farm.  He had five children, two boys and three girls born between 1784 and 1797.

In 1819, Daniel was 62 years old.  He and Elizabeth had both developed serious health issues.  Elizabeth could not perform any physical labor and Daniel could no longer work as a physician due to failing eyesight and the limited use of his limbs. During this time the family’s primary source of income was derived from the sale of produce on ten acres of cultivatable land being worked by their youngest daughter Asenath and her husband Cephas Hartwell.  This provided them an income of approximately forty dollars a year.  Daniel’s personal property now included a total of forty acres of land, a sleigh valued at five dollars and a hog valued at between five and eleven dollars.

In June of that year, Daniel filed a Pension Application for his service as a soldier in the Revolutionary War.  In his application, Daniel indicated that he had completed a one-year term of enlistment from January through December of 1776, at which time he was honorably discharged from the Massachusetts Line of the Continental Army.

Daniel’s pension application was approved October 18, 1819.  For his wartime service he was awarded a sum of eight dollars per month, payable commencing retroactively to June 12, 1819.

Doctor Daniel Robins died in 1837 at the age of 78 and was buried next to his wife Elizabeth in the South Cemetery at Boxborough.  His gravestone inscription reads: "Doct. Daniel Robins who died Jan 27, 1837."