His heirs challenged the will, but it was found valid. In 1887, Edward Charles Pickering convinced the trustees of Boyden's will to award the Boyden Fund to Harvard College Observatory, of which he was director. Although he initially planned to establish an observatory at Mount Wilson, those plans were abandoned (although the Mount Wilson Observatory was later built by a different group). Instead, needing an observation station for southern hemisphere skies, Harvard College Observatory established the "Boyden Station" at Arequipa, Peru in 1889.