Daniel Richardson Bigelow

*From Nancy L. Halbert "THE BIGELOW HOUSE MUSEUM. OLYMPIA, WA, Built by Daniel Richardson Bigelow ", Forge : The Bigelow Society Quarterly, VOL. 25, NO. 3 , JULY 1996.

Daniel Richardson Bigelow was born 21 March 1824 in Belleville, Jefferson County, NY. He was educated as a lawyer and studied under Daniel Webster at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1849. Suffering from a serious eye disease, Daniel feared he would go blind before he had a chance to see the western territories. He appears in the state of Wisconsin on the 1850 census. By 1851 he had joined a wagon-train and headed west on the Oregon Trail to Portland. That year in November he sailed up the Washington coast in the schooner Exact to Puget Sound, establishing a law office at Olympia, then called Smithfield. Although he never lost his sight, he was always plagued by eye problems.

On June 18, 1854, he married Ann Elizabeth White, the first school teacher in the area. Her "schoolroom" was in the Packwood family home near the Nisqually River. Ann was born 3 November 1836 in Illinois, and had arrived in Olympia with her family at the age of 15 in late 1851. Daniel and Ann first lived in the tiny cabin on Daniel's land claim. This cabin, substantially altered, can still be seen on the site. Soon after, they constucted the 16 room, two-story home now known as the Bigelow House.

Daniel Bigelow was to become a leading citizen not just of Olympia but of the entire Pacific Northwest. In 1852, he was elected Treasurer of the newly created county of Thurston. During the summer of 1853, he was one of three commissioners who completely rewrote the laws of Oregon Territory at Salem. Their recommendations were accepted by the Legislative Assembly and enacted into law, creating the new territory of Washington. This reflects the prestige Bigelow had already achieved by 1853 in legal and legislative affairs.

Bigelow was elected in 1854 as a member of the upper house of the first legislature of Washington Territory. He served several additional terms and outlived all other members of that first legislature. He was also keenly interested in education. He was elected Superintendent of the Olympia School in November 1853, and was President of the Board of Trustees of Puget Sound Wesleyan Institute, the forerunner of the University of Puget Sound.

Bigelow, loyal husband and father of nine, was Thurston County prosecuting attorney and probate judge and territorial auditor and Olympia postmaster and city councilman and superintendent of schools. All at once. Long before anyone considered the notion of quality time.

He supported women's rights when they were called suffrage, minority rights when they were called abolition, and liquor laws when they were called temperance.

"He was," Mary Ann Bigelow said, "an intellectual. He was always referred to as a cultured gentleman. In those days, people made an effort to be interesting."

Daniel Bigelow's interest was writing. Coming west on the Oregon Trail, he continued a diary started in 1848 and concluded when he ran out of paper - but not thoughts - in 1854. He wrote in a prim hand, using a quill he dipped into an ink bottle every few words.

The diary is lovingly preserved in the Bigelow home's library. It describes events ranging from attending the funeral of John Quincy Adams, sixth president, to slogging west along the Oregon Trail. Scanned images will be found on the Washington State Library website: http://www.secstate.wa.gov/history/.

"There's not another document in Washington like it," Stevenson said.

When Bigelow died 15 September 1905 at Olympia, nobody could remember one saucy story about him. A gentleman to the end.

When Ann Elizabeth Bigelow died 8 February 1926, her family covered her coffin with a blanket