16312.7   Asa ⁶ BIGELOW, son of David ⁵  ( David ⁴, John ³, Joshua ², John ¹) and Patience (FOOTE) BIGELOW,

     Asa Bigelow [16312.7], the seventh child of Patience (Foote) and David Bigelow, was born on 18 January 1779 in Glastonbury , Hartford County, CT. His childhood playmate, Lucy Isham, born 22 September 1780, would later become his wife. The following is an excerpt from Margaret Clapp's biography of Asa's son, the diplomat John ⁷ Bigelow, Forgotten First Citizen:
     Ishams had settled in Barnstable, MA in the seventeenth century; in the early eighteenth they had pioneered to Colchester, CT, and there, before the Revolution began, Lucy's father, Samuel, was making a profitable living from a farm, a tavern and a general store. In only one respect did John Bigelow's maternal ancestry differ markedly from the paternal side. From either he could have derived the practical sense and the physical vigor which characterized his maturity, but only in his mother's family was there a strain of nonconformity in religion which was to recur, in another guise, in his own life.
     Early records of Barnstable list no Ishams among the baptized or the church members, nor did the John Isham who first lived there become a freeman until 1691, after religious qualifications for citizenship had been removed. In days when nonconformity was perilous, he may even have been a Quaker; certainly he counted Quakers among his friends. His son and his son's son remained equally apart from the organized churches of their communities, though in the fourth generation Samuel Isham, Lucy's father, joined the Congregational church in Colchester.

     The following story of Asa, meanwhile, is taken from Bartlett's History of Ulster County published in 1884:

     While yet a lad of fourteen, Asa entered the store of David Kilbourn, a merchant in the town of Farmington, in the State of Connecticut, and was at the same time received into Mr .Kilbourn' s family on the footing of a son. His school education was limited to four winter months' attendance at the district school in that place. He remained with Mr .Kilbourn till he became of age, when he opened a store on his own account in the town of Colebrook. While residing there, and on the 18th day of February, 1802, he married Lucy Isham. ..he in his twenty-third and his wife in her twenty-second year. He was reasonably successful in his business, and in the course of four or five years accumulated a few hundred dollars, but, fancying there was a wide sphere of action for young men in the "far West," he mounted his horse one day, and with all the money of which he was possessed stuffed into his saddlebags, started for the State of New York -the "far West" of that period - accompanied on another horse by his brother-in-law, Dr. Roswell Bradley, who had married Mrs. Asa Bigelow's sister, Sally Isham.
     The pilgrims crossed the Hudson River at Catskill, and travelled southward along its west branch as far as Flatbush. Here Mr. Bigelow was inclined to purchase a tract of land on the river and settle, but upon a more careful study of the situation concluded to return to the Dutch settlement at Saugerties, some eight miles farther north. He there purchased the house and store on the corner of Main Street now known as Russell's Block...and commenced a general shipping and commission business. He bought or advanced on the produce of the surrounding country, which he shipped to the New York market and sold, making his settlements largely in merchandise. He was quite prosperous, and seems very soon to have been recognized as one of the leading men of the county.
     In 1811 the county of Greene was carved out of the counties of Ulster and Albany, and at the same time Saugerties, theretofore a part of the town of Kingston, was itself incorporated into a town. Mr . Bigelow was elected the second supervisor of the new town, and was re-elected every year till he took up his residence elsewhere. Upon his application, a post-office was established at Saugerties, and he was its first postmaster. He continued to hold this office also till he moved to Bristol, now called Malden, about two miles north of Saugerties. The navigation of Saugerties Creek in those days was subject to serious interruptions from freshets and shoals, which proved such an inconvenience to his business that after five years experience, Mr .Bigelow determined to go two miles farther north, where he could have his dock privileges and warehouse directly on the river, with plenty of water. ..The only house in Bristol, when Mr .Bigelow arrived there, was an old fish-house, which stood upon the site now occupied by the Malden House.
     He had purchased in 1808, a tract of about two hundred acres, for which he paid six thousand dollars. ..Upon the upper end of this property he built a frame store, on the south side of the road leading to what was known as the Isham wharf. He erected for his own use the first dwelling-house in the place...Soon after settling there he commenced building the brick store into which he moved in 1814. Four years later he took his brothers-in-law, Charles and Giles Isham, into partnership with him, under the firm name of Bigelow and Isham. Giles Isham had been his clerk for several years previous. Not long after this partnership was formed Mr. Bigelow withdrew from it, built the stone store on a property adjoining on the north, that which the firm had occupied, and which he purchased from John van Steenberg on the 22 June 1813. Its water privileges constituted its chief value. Here he re-established himself, first alone, and afterwards associated with him his son-in-law, Stephen Kellogg, and his two oldest sons, Edward and David. He here prosecuted a prosperous business till he retired with a handsome competence about 1846.
     Though diligent in business, Mr .Bigelow did not forget or neglect his duties to the public. He erected the first two hotels in Bristol; he procured the establishment of a post-office in the place, which led to a change of its name to Malden, and the appointment of one of his clerks, Judson H. Catkins, as postmaster. He, with his two brothers-in-law, bore almost the entire expense of constructing the first church and parsonage in Malden. He procured the charter for the turnpike which unites Malden with the mountain settlements in its rear, and furnished most, if not all the money for building it. He also built the fIrst academy in Malden, and the first sloop that was ever constructed in the town of Saugerties. She was called the Phoenix, and plied between Bristol and New York.
     Mr .Bigelow's habits of business bore the impress of strong individuality, and go far to explain his uninterrupted success as a merchant, and his influence in whatever community he was a citizen. He never bought what he could not pay for at the time; he never gave a note in his life, nor endorsed but one, and that he had to pay. It was for one hundred and fifty dollars, on behalf of a relative, and before he left Connecticut. This note is still in the family. He often spoke of this as one of the indiscretions of his youth, but at the same time he regarded the money it cost him as the best investment he ever made, for it cured him for life of any disposition to use or lend his financial credit. It is needless to say that there was no house on the Hudson in better financial standing.
     During the war of 1812, the scarcity of currency compelled him to issue his own paper in the form of currency, redeemable on presentation, for the convenience of his customers. The venerable Peter Schutt, who is now one of the two or three oldest inhabitants of the town of Saugerties, says he remembers when the Bigelow 'shinplasters were the only currency of the place,' adding 'and we were all glad enough to get them.'
     Mr .Bigelow was educated in the Presbyterian faith, and during the last twenty years of his life was a consistent professor of religion. Though he had enjoyed the most limited opportunities for education, Mr. Bigelow was so liberally endowed in every way by nature that he was sure to occupy a prominent place in whatever sphere of life he might be placed. He was about six feet two inches high, and of prodigious strength in early manhood. He died on the 12 February 1850, in the seventy-second year of his age, leaving [five] children -Emmeline, who was born in Colebrook, and married Stephen Kellogg of Troy; Edward who was born in Saugerties; and David, John and Adeline, who were born in Bristol.- Mrs. Asa Bigelow survived her husband three years, dying at her residence in Malden 14 September 1853, in the seventy-third year of her age.

In his Retrospectives of an Active Life, published in 1909, Asa's youngest son, John, describes life in the Bigelow Homestead and the community of Malden:

     My father. ..had a country store by the riverside and several sloops, all of which were built on his premises and which plied between Malden (as it came to be called instead of Bristol) and New York. He had besides a farm of almost one hundred and fifty acres.
     In his store he kept supplies of every nature required by the people living within travelling distances - dry-goods, groceries, hardware, tools, some medicines, stationery, molasses, vinegar, potatoes, in fact everything for which there was a market in our neighbourhood. He bought in turn whatever the people had to sell, most of which he shipped to New York for a market. Much of their produce his captains sold for his customers, simply charging them the freight. In those days the chief articles he shipped were bark, lumber, leather, wood, butter, hay and sometimes grain.
In return he brought supplies for the store, and hides which were sent up to be tanned into leather in the Catskill Mountains at Hunter, Lexington, Hainesville and the neighbourhood, where there was an abundance of hemlock forest, the bark of which, in those days, was then used exclusively for tanning hides. These hides had to be transported by land eight or ten miles to the tanneries, and when tanned, the leather had to be carried the same distance back to the wharf, and constituted one of the most profitable articles of freight for our sloops. Soon after the time of which I am speaking, and as the supply of hemlock bark was nearly exhausted, a chemical process was discovered by which hides could be tanned far more economically and expeditiously than by the use of bark. Of course the tanneries were then soon abandoned, and bark had no longer any market value. Almost simultaneously it was discovered that the Catskill Mountains and their foothills were a pretty continuous and solid mass of stone deposited in layers which adapted them for paving-stone. The purchase and transportation of this stone at length supplanted pretty much all other kinds of business at Malden.
     While my father conducted the business of his farm, store and sloops, he and his family lived almost exclusively upon the produce of his farm and garden. He kept cows, horses, poultry , pigs, oxen and sheep, and he raised all the fruit and vegetables and grain which were consumed in the stables or in the house, beside raising quite a surplus for sale. The stream which I have spoken of as passing through the swamp lot operated a grist mill about two miles off, where our corn and wheat were carried to be ground, and from it were made the bread consumed in the family, and the 'stir-about' for the pigs and chickens and cows and turkeys and hogs. Of these latter we usually killed from six to eight in December, and the impression which that slaughter left upon my youthful mind was far more profound than any account I have yet read or heard of the carnage at the siege of Santiago. There were no butchers in those days to bring us meat, nor shops from which to buy it. It could only be had from a farmer here and there who chanced to raise a little more stock than he required for his own use, or was brought from New York.
     Immediately following the hog-killing came the making of sausages. First the meat had to be chopped in large wooden bowls. This was a process in which we were sometimes permitted to take a hand. When fInished, their long links were taken to the garret and hung across cords, high above the reach of rats and mice or the heads of visitors, where before the following morning they were frozen solid. From that time until March, every morning one or more of these frozen links were very sure to be sent for, put into the frying pan and of these, with cakes from buckwheat grown on the place, flavoured with the gravy from the sausage instead of butter usually, and made yet more toothsome by the good old- fashioned New Orleans molasses, the like of which has not been seen now for many years, with a cup of very weak coffee, we made our breakfast. I say that no such molasses has been seen for many years, for the modern process of extracting the sugar from the cane-juice impoverishes it to such a degree that the molasses is not at all like what was used in those days, and is otherwise unfit for the table.
     Our kitchen was the largest room in the house. The fireplace was so large that it would take a log of a length and weight requiring at least two men to lift. There was no stove coal used or even known to exist in the whole United States, as far as I know, at that time. Wood and corn-cobs were the only fuel which I had then ever seen used. Corn-cobs were used chiefly for smoking the hams cut from our hogs; and for that service a little house was built apart from the main building sufficiently large to hang and smoke fifteen or twenty hams at a time, the smoke of burning cobs being thought to give the hams a special flavour...........................to be continued

Reprinted with permission from an address given 10 October 1999 by Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, a descendant of Asa Bigelow.

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