The journal is lovingly preserved in the Bigelow home's library. It describes events ranging from attending the funeral of John Quincy Adams, sixth president, to slogging west along the Oregon Trail. When Bigelow died 15 September 1905 at Olympia, nobody could remember one saucy story about him. A gentleman to the end. When Ann Elizabeth Bigelow died 8 February 1926, her family covered her coffin with a blanket of violets, for the orchard was blooming purple.
Violets still erupt every spring at the Bigelow place.
In 1966, Bigelow's grandson and Mary Ann's husband, Daniel S. Bigelow, investigated the possibility of saving the place by registering its historic merit. But there was no register, and not much thought of preservation in the rush to urban renewal. Daniel S. Bigelow called upon his former classmate at the University of Washington Law School, Henry Jackson, who was a United States Senator. Jackson pioneered the National Historic Preservation Act to save old buildings from developers and to establish the National Register of Historic Places. The Bigelow House, surrounded by more than an acre of the family's original land claim and located at 918 Glass Avenue east of downtown Olympia, proudly made the register in 1975.