Charles Pierce Burton

Charles Pierce Burton was born in 1862 in Anderson, Indiana. His mother and father were natives of New England and they returned to Adams, Massachusetts when Burton’s mother became ill. An only child in a household of adults, the young Burton roamed the area behind his grandparents’ house, a 200-foot ridge called Bob’s Hill on the eastern slope of Mt. Greylock. This would be the setting of most of Burton's successful books, the Bob’s Hill series.

Burton and his father eventually moved to Aurora, Illinois, where Burton’s father had purchased the Aurora Weekly Beacon Express. Burton attended East Aurora High School, where he graduated in 1880. He liked to joke that he was the brightest boy in his high school class (he was in fact, the only boy in his high school class).

Burton worked for his father as a printer’s devil and became a newspaper reporter in Aurora. He also wrote business articles for magazines like Harper’s. He married, and he and his wife had three children.

In 1905, an editor friend of Burton’s remarked that he was looking for a new series of books for boys. Burton, thinking back to his childhood, said that he’d like to try to write one.

Burton wrote The Boy from Bob’s Hill. The story followed the summer adventures of eight boys whose escapades invite disaster in the pursuit of fun. The book was an immediate success, and Burton followed it quickly with three more Bob’s Hill books. The fourth book, The Boy Scouts of Bob’s Hill, was praised for its early adoption of the Boy Scout movement.

For 20 years, Burton was also the editor of The Earth Mover magazine, the monthly publication of the Austin-Western Machinery Company. He developed an interest in many technical fields, and some of his later books are about mining and construction. Burton wrote a newspaper column for the Aurora newspaper and was in demand as a speaker.

Burton published twelve (12) Bob’s Hill books, the last in 1939, 34 years after the first book. Some of the later books have distant settings inspired by Burton’s world travels.

Charles Pierce Burton died in 1949 of heart disease at age 85. He was buried in Aurora, where he had lived most of his life.

The Bob’s Hill book series is still in demand by book collectors, with used copies listed on the Internet at premium prices.