My father’s family had been in Maine for a longer time, his two great grandfathers, Samuel Bixby and Joseph Weston, going in from Massachusetts about 1770, and settling on the Kennebec River. Joseph Weston took his eleven year old son with him in the spring to find a location and prepare for his family to come in the fall. In September he left his boy and another of fourteen in charge of the cattle and cabin and went home to get his wife and other children. But he was balked in his purpose because of the setting in of an early winter and consequent freezing of the river highway. The boys had to stay alone in the woods caring for the cattle until spring made travel possible. When the family arrived they found the boys and cattle in good shape, the boys evidently being excellent Yankee pioneers.
By the middle of the nineteenth century Somerset County was full of Bixbys and Westons. When Rufus Bixby entertained at Thanksgiving dinner on one occasion he had one hundred fifty-six guests, all kinfolk. He was a brother of my grandfather, Amasa Bixby, the two of them having married sisters, Betsey and Fanny Weston. A third sister, Electa Weston, married William Reed Flint and became the mother of the two cousins who were father’s business associates all during his California life.
The Maine farms were becoming crowded and there was no land in the neighborhood left for the young folks. Father was one of an even hundred grandchildren of Benjamin Weston and Anna Powers, a sample of the prevalent size of families at that time. The early American farmers were not essentially of the soil, but were driven by the necessities of a new country to wring support from the land. At the first opportunity to escape into callings where more return for less physical output promised, they fled the farms. I remember that my uncle Jotham who had rather short stumpy fingers used to maintain that he had worn them down in his boyhood gathering up stones in the home pastures and piling them into walls.
In the spring of 1851, Llewellyn Bixby, an erect, square-shouldered young man of twenty-five, with gray eyes and black hair, was studying engineering at Waterville. He had finished his education at a district school and Bloomfield Academy some time before and had taught, had farmed, had even undertaken the business of selling books from house to house, for which latter effort he confessed he did not seem to have the requisite qualities. He then determined to go into engineering, a field of growing opportunity, and was well underway when one day his father appeared unexpectedly at the door of a shop where he was at work, with the proposal that he join his brother, Amasa, Jr., and his cousin, Dr. Thomas Flint, in a trip to California, whither the latter’s brother, Benjamin, had gone in 1849.
The plan appealed to him and he returned to Norridgewock with his father, to make an immediate start for that far off coast which was to prove his home for the rest of his life.
It was July, 1851, just too late to be technically called pioneers, that they reached San Francisco, but to all intents and purposes they belong to that group of early comers to this state who have had so large a part in determining its destiny.
The next year, two more of my father’s brothers, Marcellus and Jotham, ventured around the Horn, and ultimately the rest of the children followed,—Amos, Henry, Solomon, George, Francina and Nancy, (Mrs. William Lovett), making in all eight brothers and two sisters. Amos who was the last to come, was a lawyer and editor and had been instrumental in the founding of Grinnell College in Iowa and the University of Colorado in Boulder as he made his gradual progress from Maine to California. He founded and edited the first newspaper in Long Beach.
Allen Bixby, now state commander of the American Legion is the grandson of Amasa, the brother who accompanied my father in the first trip across the isthmus. It is this sort of bodily transplanting of young stock that has left so many of the New England counties bereft of former names, but has built up in new communities many of the customs and traditions of the older civilization.
Not only did my father’s immediate family come to this state but also many of his friends and cousins. I am told that at the presidential election in 1860 all the men in Paso Robles who voted for Lincoln came from Somerset county, Maine.
Because this migration is typical and because many of these cousins made names for themselves beyond the limits of the family, I am going to mention a few of them.