(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.
Among them was, for instance, Dr. Mary Edmands, who was an early physician in San Francisco in the days when it took grit as well as brains for a woman to gain a medical education. She succeeded as a mother as well as a professional woman, her sons and daughter at present standing high in their respective callings.
