Mrs. Mary Euphemia Bigelow was the daughter of David and Eunice (Coon) Colegrove, and was born near Nile, N. Y., January 21, 1839, and passed from this life at the home of her son, D. Burdett Coon, in Boulder, Colo., March 23, 1926, being past eighty-seven years of age.
Her maternal grandfather was Deacon Pardon Coon, of DeRuyter, N. Y. When she was fourteen years of age she moved with her family to Pleasant Springs, one-half mile from Utica, Wis. The next year, while she was but fifteen years of age, she began teaching school. She taught a number of terms of school in Wisconsin.
December 3, 1858, she was married to Corydon A. Coon, a grandson of Elder Abram Coon, who was one of the organizers of and the president of the first Seventh Day Baptist General Conference.
In the fall of 1863, she and her husband went to Minnesota and took up a homestead in Transit, Sibley County. This was in the immediate vicinity of where the dreadful “Sioux massacre” of the preceding year occurred. For eight years they struggled along together on the prairies of Minnesota in the midst of the hardest pioneer experiences trying to make themselves a home. They knew what it meant to break up the native sod and put in the seed only to have droughts and grasshoppers spoil all prospects of a crop. Then her husband, after a long and sever illness with typhoid fever, passed away February 10, 1872.
She was then left with next to nothing of the world’s goods to face the future. She had two little boys six and eight years of age besides herself to support. She bent every energy to making suitable arrangements for the care and training of her boys. Some good friends counseled her to allow others to adopt her boys. But she turned a deaf ear to all such suggestions, declaring she would do her utmost to keep her little family together. Through the most kindly influence and help of her brother-in-law, George G. Coon, she was induced to go back to teaching school. She followed teaching for a series of years. The boys worked out for some of the farmers summers and went to school to their mother during the winter months. At length, to give the boys better school privileges, she made her home in the village of New Auburn, some ten miles from the old homestead.
Here, in the new home, May 26, 1880, she was married to W. W. Bigelow. He passed away from this life April 21, 1915. Since his death she has made her home with her older son, D. Burdett Coon.
When sixteen years of age, she was baptized by Elder Zuriel Campbell and united with the Utica (Wis.) Seventh Day Baptist Church. In January, 1965, she and her husband became constituent members of the New Auburn (Minn.) Seventh Day Baptist Church. Later in life, upon changing her residence to Battle Creek, Mich., and Ashaway, R. I., and Boulder, Colo., she united with the Seventh Day Baptist churches of these places. Her interest in these churches of which she was a member and in her denomination was always steady, strong, regular, persistent, faithful, intense. When she lived in her own home, that home was frequently the home of visiting ministers where problems of the religious life and of church and denominations were freely and prayerfully discussed.
When the father of her little boys passed away she called them together, as he had been want to do and read a portion from God’s Word and knelt in prayer with them. She prayed earnestly and fervently for the cause of God at large, for the church and the denomination, and most especially in those days that she might have wisdom from above for guiding and teaching her boys aright. She did not pray that they might become great or famous. She told the Lord that she did not care for them to become wealthy, nor that they should come to fill places of worldly power and influence. But she did pour out her very soul unto God asking that her boys might be good boys and grow up to be good men.
She was always at the church prayer meeting and at the Sabbath service of the church whenever able to be there, and was always ready to do her part in helping to make these services what they ought to be. Her daily life was in full keeping with her profession. She was thoughtful, earnest, industrious, unselfish, pious to the very last. She loved God and the Bible and was the rule of her faith and practice.
During her last sickness, that continued for six months with a most dreadful cancer on the inside of her throat, cutting off her power of speech for weeks, she bore the affliction with greatest patience and Christian grace and fortitude without complaint. She retained sound reason and excellent judgment to within a few moments of her going. She maintained deepest interest in the work of the church and the denomination to the very end. During all the years she had been a regular and faithful reader of the Sabbath Recorder. The day before she passed away she perused with genuine interest its pages. When power of speech was taken from her she failed not to give with pencil and paper wisest counsel concerning church and denominational problems. In the last days of her great suffering her smiling face and cheerful spirit were the wonder of all who knew the distressing physical conditions.
After her passing a slip of paper was found upon which she had written just a few data concerning her life. On the back of this slip she had copied, "Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind," and "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness"; and then added, "And all will be well."
She leaves of her immediate family to mourn their loss, two sisters, Mrs. Marion Coon, of Milton, Wis., wife of Deacon George G. Coon, and Mrs. Terrissa Lawton, of New Auburn, Minn., widow of E. T. Lawton, and two sons, D. Burdett Coon of Boulder, Colo., and Delano L. Coon, of Minneapolis, Minn., five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. According to her request her son and pastor, assisted by Rev. John Skeen, pastor of the First Baptist Church, of Boulder, Colo., conducted her funeral service in Boulder and, assisted by Rev. Charles D. Blaker, formerly pastor of the Baptist Church in New Auburn, Minn., now an official member of the First Baptist Church, of Minneapolis, Minn., conducted her funeral service in New Auburn, Minn. She was buried in the beautiful High Island Cemetery of New Auburn, where are buried her father and mother and her two husbands and other relatives in plain view of her old home. Of her it can be said as the Master said of another, "She hath done what she could." D. B. C.
