Memorials › Dwight Bisco

Dwight Bisco

27 Apr 1799 – 7 Dec 1882

Birth27 Apr 1799
Death7 Dec 1882
CemeteryPine Grove Cemetery
Leicester , Worcester County , Massachusetts , USA
Added byJames Bianco on 23 Aug 2014
FaGhttps://www.findagrave.com/memorial/97815129

Bio

From Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Worcester County vol 1 Dwight Bisco. son of Jacob Bisco, was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, April 27, 1799. For sixty years he was one of the leading citizens and business men of the town of Leicester, which adjoins Spencer, his native place. He was raised in Spencer and worked on his father's farm until twenty-two years of age, when with a silver dollar (as his biographer. Rev. Samuel May put it), as his only money capital, he came to Leicester and went to work for Cheney Hatch, manufacturer of card clothing -- a business of which at that time Leicester had almost a monopoly. "Bringing with him," Mr. May says, "good character, intelligence, habits of industry and self-control and not afraid of work, he steadily acquired skill in this intricate and difficult manufacture." In 1826 he associated himself as partner with Isaac Southgate, Joshua Lamb, John Stone and Joseph A. Denny, another house in the same business. In 1843 Mr. Denny and he bought the interests of the other partners and continued the business under the name of Bisco & Denny until Mr. Denny's death in 1875. It was then passed on by Mr. Bisco into the hands of his sons and of Mr. Denny's only son, he continuing to occupy himself in the factory until February, 1882, when he withdrew entirely. He was then in his eighty-third year. In middle life he had invested the chief part of his savings in the Leicester Boot Company. It was unfortunate, and was brought to end by the burning of the company's buildings and stock. The investment was a total loss. Mr. May says that with quiet courage he applied himself a gain to business as closely as in his youth, and was enabled in a few years to make good his loss and to present to his eight children at a Thanksgiving dinner table, $500 each. He was a leader in town affairs, repeatedly a selectman of the town, a member of the state legislature in 1847 and 1848, director of the Leicester Bank for eleven years and treasurer of the Pine Grove Cemetery Company for forty years, deacon of the Unitarian Congregational church, and for forty years the treasurer. He married, at Leicester, Massachusetts, Ruth Woodcock, daughter of John Woodcock, Sr. , and sister of John, Josephus and Lucius Woodcock, January 8, 1826, and they lived together more than fifty years when they celebrated their golden wedding, January 8, 1876. "we saw them," says Rev. Mr. Coolidge, "standing together a spectacle rarely witnessed, an unbroken family" -- parents, children and grandchildren -- a circle which death had then never entered. But in September of that year Mrs. Bisco died. She was born in Rutland , Massachusetts, December 13, 1802, and died in Leicester, September 20 , 1876. Mr. Bisco died December 7, 1882. In a notice of him in the Christian Register, Abraham Firth wrote of his public life, of "his marked faithfulness in all these relations and in every sphere of life in which he moved. He was always found on the side of virtue and of political and spiritual freedom. Brought up under the teaching of Calvinism, it never satisfied him." One who was long in daily business association with him wrote in the Worcester Spy "he was known among his associates as an honest, upright man, of superior sense and judgment." His pastor, during his later years, wrote of him, "I have never known a truer man, nor one of greater strength of character." A memorial book of Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Bisco has been published.

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