Lyman W. Durgin (1827-1874) was born in Sanbornton, New Hampshire, and died in Los Angeles, California. His uncle Elijah Durgin was a laborer who lived adjacent to the Baker family's farm in Sanbornton Bridge (now Tilton), New Hampshire, while Mary Baker Eddy was growing up there. Durgin was the eighth of his parents' nine children and was two years old when his mother died. His father remarried, and Durgin reportedly had a difficult relationship with his stepmother. Accordingly, when he was 11 years old, likely through his uncle's connection, he moved into the Bakers' home and became their farmhand and chore boy in about 1838. Eddy was 17 years old at the time and was teaching the infant Sunday school class at the Congregational church she and her family attended in Sanbornton Bridge. Noting that Durgin was not a strong reader and had no religious training, over the following four years Eddy undertook to help him learn to read and recite verses from a copy of the New Testament that she gave him as a gift. In later years he was known to reflect with fondness and gratitude upon his association with Eddy. In 1856 Durgin married Helen M. Durgin (b. McAlpine) in Lowell, Massachusetts, and by 1860 they were living in Cleveland, Ohio, where Durgin worked as a machinist. They moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, by 1870, where he became the foreman of a railroad manufacturing and maintenance shop. In 1874, seeking to improve his ailing health, he moved to Los Angeles but passed away soon thereafter.

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