Thomas Danforth was born on May 22, 1703 in Taunton, Massachusetts. He was the ninth of fourteen children of Samuel Danforth, who was born in 1666, graduated from Harvard in 1683, and entered the ministry. His grandfather, Samuel, a graduate of Harvard in 1643, was ordained in 1650, and became a coworker with John Eliot, missionary to the Indians. Nicholas, the first colonial Danforth, left England in 1634 and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Thomas learned the pewterer's and brazier's trade.
Moving to Norwich in 1733 Danforth there opened a pewter and copper shop. Thomas engaged actively in the pewterer's trade until 1773, and from then on intermittently until his death. His products included plates, platters, trenchers, porringers, flagons, mugs, basins, salts, spoons, buttons, alphabet stamps, and various molds.
In 1730 Danforth married Sarah Leonard, who bore him five children; four months after her death in 1742 he wed Hannah Hall, who became the mother of nine.
His sons, Thomas and John, learned the pewterer's trade. The latter was the only native craftsman who used a date in his touch mark. A grandson--also a Thomas--opened a branch in Philadelphia, 1807-13, and his son Thomas fashioned pewter in Philadelphia and Augusta, Georgia. Sarah, probably the granddaughter of the first Thomas, married Oliver Boardman of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1781, and their son, Thomas Danforth Boardman, was the first pewterer of the Danforth-Boardman group.
