1821-1891
Adoniram Judson Bigelow
Entrepreneur VT/CA
Rod Bigelow of the Bigelow Society shared this biography of his great-grandfather, Adoniram Judson Bigelow:
Adoniram Judson Bigelow was the son of Barna and Elizabeth (Boynton) Bigelow and was born at Hubbardston, VT, on 20 April 1821. His marriage was on 27 October 1857 to Martha Jane Munroe who was born in Jefferson, ME, on 18 April 1831. He was named after an early missionary to Burma. An early immigrant because of the Gold Rush, he sailed from New York City on 17 March 1849 and arrived in San Francisco on 10 October 1849 and resided there until January 1859 when he moved to Sacramento, CA.
He first started a soap factory in San Francisco and later sold out and moved to Sacramento. Somewhere along the line his bachelor brother, Parcellus Kendrick Biglow, also came West, and the two were associated much of the time. When Adoniram died in 1891, he appointed by will Parcellus Kendrick to be the guardian of his son, David Carlton Orvis.
Adoniram was something an historic figure. Having noted that there was a shortage of domestic bees in the State of California for the propagation of plant life, he determined to alter the situation. In the next ten years he made two transcontinental trips to bring bees from the East Coast to California. He was California’s pioneer bee man. He made the trek by sea to the Isthmus of Panama, walked across to the Isthmus, and boarded other ships to continue.
Bringing bees to California for pollinization.
On the second trip he married Martha Monroe of Vermont and brought her West. Her father was a preacher and had seven daughters, most of whom came to California and located in the San Francisco Bay area. Adoniram Judson Bigelow was both an intellectual type and a doer. He wrote a brochure on the care and management of bees in transit with particular attention to a method to insure their survival when carried on mule-back across the steaming jungles of Panama.
Near where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers join lies roughly a right-angled triangle, approximately forty miles on the sides, terminating at the cities of Antioch, Stockton, and Sacramento. In 1849 this area was all swamp, interspersed by many little, interconnecting rivers. At low tide the land was above water, and at high tide it was under water four to six feet, depending upon the season.
Adoniram Judson Bigelow and a man named Upham saw where this swampland, now known as the Delta, could be reclaimed by building a levee to keep the water out at high tide. They hired Chinese Coolies (the railroads having just been built, thousands were released and available to work) and with wheel-barrows and two-horse scrapers they built a levee and reclaimed about 6,000 acres of land lying at the confluence of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin Rivers. The levees permit intensive farming; the crops include pears, apples, tomatoes, grain, corn, beans, soy beans, and much of the asparagus reaching the East Coast comes from this area.
When he was in his early sixties Adoniram sold out to Upham and purchased the land that now is the eastern half of the Town of Antioch. Adoniram died in Antioch, CA 07 January 1892 (1891?). Martha died 11 October 1891.[1]
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[1] Rod Bigelow, “Adoniram Judson Bigelow,” http://bigelowsociety.com/rod8/ado86321.htm (c) Copyright 2011 Bigelow Society, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.