Volume 11 Issues 1-2 Spring-Summer 2004
With Sketches Involving Some of His Customers
Simeon Higley was eighteen in December 1769 when he began keeping his own account book, one of the rites of passage for many young men in colonial America. Before that, his labor was undoubtedly folded into the business dealings recorded in a now missing account book kept by his father Captain Joseph Higley. Simeon’s first customer, and the only one between December 1769 and December 1774, was Ozias Pettibone. Pettibone, who had extensive land holdings in Simsbury, had in October 1764 purchased a house, home lot and meadows that abutted Joseph Higley’s property on three sides and other acreage in “Higley’s Plain.”