Skip to main content

Abigail Ashton

Abigail Maye Ashton, née Kamp, was the matriarch of the Ashton family's Providence household and, with her husband Erwin, one of the two progenitors from whom the whole Briarmont line descends. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1779, she married into the Ashton name and raised the sons — Samuel and Caleb — who would later lead the family west to Northern California.

Abigail herself never made that journey. She outlived Erwin by nearly thirty years, remaining in Providence, and died there in 1864, by which time her sons and grandsons had already fixed the Ashton name in the timber town of Briarmont a continent away. Little is recorded of her own life; she is remembered instead as the source of a line that would come to matter greatly to a town she never saw.

Back to top