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,
