In the Beginning…of my Current Path
I was first introduced to Dr. Edward Fuller Bigelow 76 years after his death. This introduction transpired while reading a label adjacent to his photographic portrait, which hung in the staff stairwell of the Bruce Museum. I began working at the Museum nearly six years ago. After an unfortunate episode of unemployment for almost a year, I was hired as a seasonal employee at the museum’s satellite facility, the Seaside Center, a small, coastal, environmental education center. Preferring exercise to the elevator, I extensively use the museum’s staff staircase. On the walls of the stairwell hung a portrait of Bigelow. It is a formal picture, like the Olan Mills family portraits I participated in in the 1970s and ‘80s. This photo is by the Harris and Ewing Studio, signed by each in pencil. The image focus is soft, with an ethereal look lost in most photography today. His grand walrus moustache leans to the left from the slight smile he displays. He looks like someone's jolly grandfather. The portrait is smaller than the other curators and directors, but as I would later learn, Bigelow was neither small in stature nor life force. Much hidden in the Bruce Museum provides a glimpse into its history. This stairwell is one. Three stories in height and volumes in size, it barely hints of the grandness it indeed commanded when craftsman first turned its bannisters on a lathe in the mid-1850s. Covered now in hard-wearing office carpet and overlaid by thick white paint, it is further insulted with steel guard rails painted grey. I can imagine how it looked when the original dark-stained wood cast linear figures on the walls in the shadows of light scattering from a shimmering chandelier above. Strangely, I feel more at home in this modified staircase than in most places during my life.
It was during the first week of walking up and down these stairs, always stopping to look at this image (among others) and rereading the label text, that made me curious and want to know all I could about this man. That curiosity would later lead to an obsessive quest to document the man’s life. It would cause me to know a long-dead person more deeply than I have known any of my own family. It would also convert this conservation biologist into a historian.
One thing always piqued my curiosity more every time I read the label beside Bigelow’s portrait. There was mention of a nature camp called ArcAdiA, the headquarters of the Agassiz Association. What was with that spelling? Was it a mistake? Surely not; it must mean something. This question was the springboard for a journey, now over five and a half years in length. I have advanced through numerous titles during my time at the museum, such as seaside center naturalist, citizen science coordinator, natural history collections manager, and now collections manager. It is now a portion of my responsibilities to accumulate, organize, and curate Bigelow’s life. I am a conservation biologist specialising in freshwater turtles, something I have done for twenty-nine years. I have realised that my work on turtles has and will not change the conservation outlook for any species of this much-endangered group. Going forward, my legacy will be preserving this now-forgotten naturalist's legacy. My life’s work from this point on will be to preserve and share his life’s work — a task I do not take lightly and one that has been brought into focus through my research.
Over time, I have collected and curated every bit of information I can find about this gentleman to create an archive of his life. The reasons are twofold: to have a record of his life for posterity and to provide research sources for me to tell his story. The more I delved into his life, the more I learned about the museum’s history. The greatest thing I discovered was how little information and archives the museum had about itself. This seemed odd and reminded me of a quote I stumbled across when writing my Master’s thesis. Ryan Horvath writes in his 2012 thesis entitled “Study Nature, Not Books”: Education in 19th Century Natural History Museums, “Museums are, in part, created to preserve cultural heritage yet the field is allowing its own heritage to be forgotten.”
How could a museum tasked with curating the past know so little of its own, including the people who laid the foundation of the building — literally the person who built the original granite mansion? I have tasked myself to change this. I did not come to the research from a historian’s viewpoint; I truly am an accidental historian. I stumbled across this man and, through exposure to snippets of his world, felt a kindredness. Some slight parallels in his story pulled me closer. Although we lived in different times, there was a connection felt.
Emerson once wrote, “All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.” So, in composing Bigelow’s biography, I will relate history. Not definitive history, but that seen through his eyes and interpreted by me. In doing so, the reader will envisage a glimpse into the growth of a man, a museum, a town, and the great nature study organization, the Agassiz Association. Through snippets of Bigelow’s life, you will learn of a bygone era and see the many parallels of today. There is much to uncover from past and present, as well as the immutable connection between the two.
