In her 1869 novel, Oldtown Folks (1869), Harriet Beecher Stowe presents the lives of people in a old Massachusetts town, based primarily on reminiscences of real individuals by her husband, Prof. Calvin Ellis Stowe, who grew up in South Natick. One of the prominent characters in Oldtown Folks is Sam Lawson, who also appears as the narrator in another work by Stowe, Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872). Sam Lawson was based on Sam Lawton, an actual resident of South Natick. As written in Proceedings of the reunion of the descendants of John Eliot “The Apostle to the Indians” at Guilford, Conn., Sept. 15, 1875; Second Meeting at South Natick, Mass., July 3, 1901, and the 250th anniversary of the founding of So. Natick, July 4th, 1901 (1901),

Near the tavern, about where Cooper’s drug store now stands, was the store, where was sold everything from hoe handles up to cambric needles, where the post office was kept, and where was a general exchange of news. There Sam Lawton, the village gossip and do-nothing, whose name Mrs. Stowe has changed in her story to Lawson, used to sit on a convenient barrel and swap stories with the farmers whose wagons stood hitched around the door, while their wives and daughters were shopping among the dress goods and ribbons.
“Sam Lawson” is the most unique character in the Oldtown story, and is also one of the most true to life. Those who remember the real Samuel Lawton say the sketch of him is not at all exaggerated.

In an article called “South Natick in Fact and Fiction,” (The New England Magazine, Vol. 23, no. 2. Oct. 1904, Edith A. Sawyer writes that

The “Sam Lawson,” or Lawton, house stands on Eliot street, between the Parson Lothrop house on the one hand and the tavern-site on the other, and not far from the Bacon Free Library. The basement, Sam used for his blacksmith shop. He occupied this place from 1798 to 1812, when he sold it, and leased a small one-story house with basement below, nearly opposite. Here he lived until his removal to Newton Lower Falls, in 1828, where he died.

The Sam Lawton House was purchased in 1812 by Benjamin Bird of Needham, who was also a blacksmith, and was occupied by his family after his death in 1836. In 1867 the house was sold to William Selfe. When Eliot Street was widened in the 1870s, the house was moved back 16 feet from the street to its present location.