This is an account of Bigelow’s life, his wife’s genealogy, and perhaps most interestingly, his courtship and marriage.
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TIMOTHY BIGELOW ROMANCE
by Jeanette A. W. Ramsay, D.A.R.
March 9, 1909
Among the Scotch settlers in Worcester, there came over an Irish family by the name of Rankin. They had several daughters, the youngest of whom was Anna — beautiful Anna Rankin!
At that time there was a family here, very respectable for the times, by the name of Andrews. One of the boys was named Samuel, who was at the time an undergraduate in Harvard College.
Samuel came home to spend a vacation and while at home he saw Anna Rankin and taking a liking to “her neck,” which, like Kathleen Bawn’s, was “so soft and smooth without a freckle or speck,” he “fell in love,” as the novel-writers say. He forthwith threw Latin and Greek to the dogs, mad love to Anna and in due time married, and purchasing a farm on the west side of Quinsigamond Lake, he settled down and became an industrious and frugal yeoman.
In that occupation he prospered so well that in a few years he quitted his farm and moved to the village, and built him a house on the very spot where the stone jail was subsequently erected (on the corner of Lincoln square and northwest corner of Summer Street).
Afterward he built him a larger and better house on the ground now occupied by the block of brick houses, opposite the Courthouse. (Please note the locality. Lincoln in his History gives it so, page 281, also using the word “dwellings.”)
Father and mother both died, leaving an only daughter named Anna, after her mother Anna Rankin, with an estate that made her the principal heiress of Worcester in those times.
In the rear of the Andrews house, “Tim” Bigleow had a blacksmith’s shop where he blew the bellows, heated and hammered the iron, shod the horses and oxen, and mended the ploughs and chains for the farmers of the country about him.
Now Tim “was as bright as a button,” more than six feet high, straight and handsome, and walked upon the earth with a natural air and grace that was quite captivating.
Tim saw Anna and Anna saw Tim and they were well satisfied with each other.
But as he was then, nothing but Tim Bigelow, “the blacksmith,” the lady’s friends, whose ward she was would would not give their consent to a marriage. So, watching for an opportunity, the lovers mounted fleet horses and rode a hundred miles to Hampton, in New Hampshire, which lies on the coast between Newburyport and Portsmouth, and was at that time the “Gretna Green” for all young men and maidens for whom true love did not run a smooth course in Massachusetts.
They came back to Worcester as Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Bigelow.
He was a man of decided talent, and well fitted by nature for a popular leader.
All the leading men of the town at that time were tories.
He espoused the cause of the people, and soon had a party strong enough to control the town and being known as a Patriot, he was recognized by Hancock, Samuel Adams, Gen. Warren, James Otis and others of the Patriot party, throughout the province.
He was sent as a delegate from Worcester to the “provincial congress” and as a captain of the Minute Men, he led his company from Worcester to Cambridge, on the 19th of April 1775, at the summons of a messenger who rode swiftly into town that day, on a large white horse, announcing that the war had begun.
For a long time afterward that express man was always spoken of as “death on a pale horse.”
Timothy Bigelow soon rose to the rank of major, and afterward to that of colonel of the Fifteenth Massachusetts Regiment, which was composed almost exclusively of Worcester countrymen.
He was at the storming of Quebec, at the taking of Burgoyne, in the terrible scenes of Valley Forge and on almost every other field made memorable by the fierce conflicts of the Revolution.
When the war was over, he returned to his home, his constitution shattered by hard service for his country. His occupation gone, his money matters in sad derangement, in consequence of that formidable depreciation of the currency, under which $40 was scarcely sufficient to pay for a pair of shoes.
He died at what was long known as the “Bigelow mansion,” formerly the Andrews house, just after he had passed the 50th year of his life.
And thus ended the “love affair” which produced a prodigious excitement in its day.
His direct descendants: —
First: Nancy, born January 2, 1765, married the Hon. Abraham Lincoln, long selectman, etc.
Second: Timothy, born April 30, 1767, married Lucy Precot, died at Medford, May 18, 1821, aged 54 years.
Third: Andrew, born March 30, 1769, died November, 1787.
Fourth: Rufus, born July 7, 1772, died in Baltimore, December 21, 1813, unmarried.
Fifth: Lucy, born May 13, 1774, married the Hon. Luther Lawrence of Groton.
Sixth: Clara, born December 29, 1781, married Tyler Bigelow, Esq. of Watertown.
A son of Col. Bigelow bore the name of his father and was for a long time a prominent lawyer at Groton, and afterwards at Medford in Middlesex county. John P. Bigelow, formerly secretary of state — and some time mayor of Boston, was a son of Timothy Bigelow, 2nd.
Mrs. Abbott Lawrence (Katherine), a sister of John P. Bigelow and daughter of Timothy 2nd (and I am thinking that they have no occasion to be ashamed of their descent from the poor Irish emigrant).
Anna Rankin, the beautiful daughter of the Irish emigrant James Rankin, who married the young collegian Sam Andrews, whose daughter, Anna Andrews, was the wife of Col. Timothy Bigelow, the patriot blacksmith of the Revolution.
Thus by irresistible destiny, runs the chain of life’s changes, linking on generation after generation, and binding together the last and first of the human race.
First: The humble emigrant, James Rankin, born in Londonderry, Ireland, where his ancestors had lived for 200 years.
Second: His daughter Anna, who married Samuel Andrews, the young collegian.
Third: Their daughter, Anna Andrews, the heiress, who eloped with Tim Bigelow.
Fourth: Timothy Bigelow, the younger, the lawyer and statesman, and John P. Bigelow, his son, who was secretary of state and former mayor of Boston and his sister Katherine, who married the millionaire Lawrence, who represented the United States at the “Court of St. James.”
Fifth: The sons and daughters who, if not already known to fame, may be hereafter.
Note in Lincoln’s History: — After Timothy Bigelow returned from the army, the war being over, he erected a trip hammer and other iron works, on the site of the Court Mills, afterward owned by Stephen Salisbury, Esq.
–From Wheelock’s memoirs and other sources.
Kinsmen and Kinswomen 