Asa Babcock

Biography

For forty-three years, Asa Babcock kept a store in Truxton, in Cortland County in central New York. He arrived in 1814 from neighboring Madison County, New York, and a county history published during his lifetime identified him as a merchant of long standing. A later town account supplies the business’s outline: his first store stood behind the site of a later commercial building; in 1834 he built the newer store, and in 1857 he sold the business to S. Goddard. Those dates give substance to the earlier historian’s forty-three-year reckoning. His career belonged to one town through decades of its growth.

Asa was born in Rhode Island in 1786, a son of Gideon and Mary Chesebrough Babcock. His family moved to the Brookfield area of central New York while he was young. He married Elizabeth S. Noyes at Brookfield in January 1812, two years before establishing himself at Truxton. Their children included Elizabeth, Richard, Mary, Clara, Edward, John, Henry and Frances. Births extending from 1814 into the 1830s place the raising of this large family alongside the building of his business.

The family’s surviving chronology also records losses within that long household history. His daughter Mary lost her first husband in the burning of the steamer Erie in 1841; she later married Edward Bartlett Wicks. Asa lived to see her second family established. He died at Truxton in September 1860, about three years after selling his store.

His father also appears in family records as Gideon Picket Babcock; the middle-name form remains a family variant.

The burial listing associates Asa Babcock with Truxton Rural Cemetery, Truxton, Cortland County, New York, United States.