"AMERICA 250"
Aaron Fuller, Philip Skene, and the World Ruth Francisco Left Behind
(Author's note: Sometimes as a family historian you find a story too incredible not to tell. This is what American patriotism actually looked like — not "cage fighting" but rather a man in a cave, his daughter chopping wood in her brother's clothes, his wife watching through the logs in the dark with a babe in her arms. As always, unapologetically, unedited.)
There is a letter written in 1833 by a man named Hopestill Bigelow to his son Artemas. Hopestill was born in 1786 at Whitehall, New York — the settlement that had been called Skenesborough before the Revolution remade it — and he was writing to make sure his son understood something about where he came from. The letter runs long. It covers two wars and several generations. But the part that stops you cold concerns a cave, a scarlet cloak, and a man named Aaron Fuller.
Aaron Fuller was Hopestill’s maternal grandfather. He was also, in all probability, the brother of Ruth Francisco — the woman at the center of a proof argument about a Mayflower line, the weaver identified only by her first name in her husband’s pension file, the woman whose maiden name took years of research to establish. We found Ruth through Aaron. His name is in her son’s family Bible, recorded as the officiant at Solomon Francisco’s wedding in 1787. But the Bible does not tell you who Aaron Fuller was. Hopestill Bigelow’s letter does.
To understand the letter you need to understand Philip Skene.
The Man Who Built Skenesborough...
Philip Skene was a British army officer who arrived in the Lake Champlain region in the 1750s and saw opportunity where others saw wilderness. He obtained a land grant, built a settlement at the southern tip of Lake Champlain, and named it after himself. Skenesborough. He recruited tenants, built mills, developed his land, and made himself the dominant figure in the region. By the early 1770s his settlement comprised roughly thirty households. Among his tenants were Aaron Fuller and his brothers, Henry Francisco, Moses Sawyer and his son, and Ebenezer Vine — names that appear together in Skene’s own ledger of promissory notes, the same ledger that now sits in the New York State Library and is one of the primary documents establishing Ruth’s identity.1
Philip Skene was also a Loyalist. When the Revolution came he chose "the other side" — or rather, he chose the side he had always been on, the side of the Crown that had given him his land and his commission and his position. In 1775 he was arrested. His property was seized. He went to Canada, and his son and daughter followed him, abandoning the settlement he had built.
They left in such haste, or with such cold calculation, that they left behind the body of Philip Skene’s wife. She had died some years earlier and Skene had kept her unburied, enclosed in a leaden coffin in the cellar of their house, collecting an annuity on her estate that required her to be technically still living. The body stayed in the cellar. The family fled to Canada. The settlement they had built was now, effectively, abandoned enemy property.
Hopestill Bigelow recorded what happened next.
The Cave...
Aaron Fuller — Justice of the Peace, community patriarch, the man whose name appears in the Skene Papers and whose signature appears in Solomon Francisco’s family Bible — was appointed by the provincial congress of New York to confiscate Skene’s estate for the use of the Continental Army. It was the right thing to do. It was also extraordinarily dangerous. Philip Skene, upon learning of it, offered 1,600 crowns for Aaron Fuller’s scalp.
Sixteen hundred crowns. In 1777.
Hopestill Bigelow wrote:
The liberal bounty made it very dangerous for him to attend to business, as the tories and indians were numerous and on the lookout for him. He was therefore obliged to ride in the night, and in the daytime hide in a cave in the edge of a dense swamp. Well do I remember when I was a small boy of my mother leading me and two older sisters to the cave, and telling us the story till the hair of my head would seem to stand erect and every rustle of a leaf would appear to be the step of an indian or a tory. I have suffered more thereby, and fireside war tales, than years afterward by the roar of cannon, the rattle of small arms, the beat of the muffled drum, the groans of the wounded, the sting of the bullet, and the flow of blood in the war of 1812.
He was not speaking metaphorically. The cave was real. Hopestill was born in 1786 — years after the Revolution — and his mother Elizabeth led him and his two older sisters to the cave when he was a small boy, telling them the story of what had happened there. The hair standing on the back of his head was a child’s response to a story his mother had lived.
But Aaron Fuller did not simply hide. He had work to do. The army needed supplies. He had to move. So at night, Hopestill records, he would put on his wife’s long scarlet cloak and her bonnet, mount his horse, and ride out. If he was likely to meet anyone he would fling both legs to one side of the horse — riding sidesaddle, as a woman would — pass on as quickly as possible, and then with a leg aside put spurs to his horse and ride away. A Justice of the Peace, a man of standing in his community, confiscating a Loyalist estate for the Revolution, in a scarlet cloak and a bonnet, riding through the night with a 1,600 crown bounty on his head.
Hopestill adds, with the precision of a man who remembers what matters: “Well do I remember the cloak.”
The Women He Left Behind...
While Aaron Fuller was in his cave, his family was managing without him. He had sons in the army.
His daughter Elizabeth — Hopestill’s future mother, then about twelve years old — took over the farmwork. Hopestill describes it without sentimentality:
She laid aside her own dress, and adopting her brother’s she foddered the cattle, yoked and hitched the oxen to the sled, then she drove to the woods, chopped down trees, cut them into proper lengths, loaded and drew them home, where she prepared the wood for the fireplace. Thus she did all necessary work during the winter.
And while Elizabeth worked in her brother’s clothes, her mother — Aaron’s wife, whose name Hopestill records elsewhere as Rebecca — walked the house at night watching through peepholes between the logs, a babe in her arms, no fire lit, no light showing, watching for tories or Indians who might set the house alight hoping to flush Aaron from hiding. On nights when the fear became too much, she would send the children into the woods. Elizabeth, twelve years old, would sit in the middle of a blanket spread on the ground, gather her brothers and sisters around her, pull another blanket over them all, and sit through the night keeping watch to make sure no one suffocated.
The bounty on her father’s scalp stood the whole time.
After the War...
Aaron Fuller survived. He emerged from the cave, set aside the scarlet cloak, and became exactly the man Hopestill Bigelow describes him as in peacetime: a Justice of the Peace, a man “very noted in public business in that region.” Known ever after as Squire Fuller. One of five justices at Washington County’s first post-war court session in 1786. A landholder. A community patriarch. The man who in 1784 appears in the forfeiture records of Skene’s estate — the estate he had been appointed to confiscate, whose former owner had put a price on his head — as a neighboring landowner, designated “Aaron Fuller Esqr.”
In 1787, three years after that, he officiated the wedding of Solomon Francisco and Mary Freeman. He recorded it in Solomon’s family Bible as “Mr. Aaron Fuller, Esq.” — the same title, the same man, ten years past the cave and the cloak and the bounty.
In 1814, the Lansingbury Gazette reported his marriage to “the amiable and sprightly Mrs. Jane Bennett, age 75” — Aaron was 76 at the time, though the notice said 79. One of the primitive settlers of the county, marrying again at 76. The man contained multitudes.
One curious footnote: for all of this — the sequestration appointment, the confiscation of Skene’s estate, the cave, the bounty on his scalp, the night rides in a scarlet cloak — Aaron⁶ Fuller Jr. does not, as far as can be determined, appear in the DAR’s roster of recognized patriots. Commissioner of sequestration is a documented category of patriotic service under DAR standards, and his appointment by the provincial congress of New York is on record. Whether he has simply never been submitted as a qualifying ancestor, or whether the documentation has not yet been assembled in a form the DAR would accept, is an open question. It seems one worth answering.
He died sometime before 1820, probably the “Mr. Fuller recently deceased, aged between eighty and ninety” that Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale mentioned when he visited Whitehall in 1819 to interview Henry Francisco, the reputed 134-year-old Revolutionary War veteran. Silliman found Henry’s wife weaving cloth. He estimated her age as more than eighty. She was probably closer to seventy-four — Henry’s own pension schedule, sworn the following year, said so directly.
Her name was Ruth. Her maiden name, almost certainly, was Fuller.
Why This Matters...
Ruth Francisco is the subject of a forthcoming proof argument to be published in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in July 2026, identifying her as Ruth⁶ Fuller, daughter of Aaron⁵ Fuller and Ruth Sawyer of Colchester, Connecticut, and sixth in descent from Mayflower passenger Edward Fuller. The argument rests on multiple independent lines of evidence. One of them is Aaron⁶ Fuller Jr.’s appearance as the officiant in Solomon Francisco’s family Bible.
The proof argument does not tell you about the cave. It does not tell you about the scarlet cloak, or the 1,600 crowns, or Elizabeth Fuller chopping wood in her brother’s clothes, or Rebecca watching through the peepholes with a babe in her arms. Those details live in Hopestill Bigelow’s letter, in Ward Roylance’s compilation of Fuller family records, in the footnotes of the genealogical literature rather than its body.
But they are the world Ruth Francisco came from. The brother who officiated her son’s wedding was the man in the cave. The Skenesborough settlement where she met and married Henry Francisco was Philip Skene’s plantation, the one whose owner fled to Canada leaving his wife’s body in the cellar. The ledger that places Henry Francisco among the Fuller brothers is Philip Skene’s ledger — the record of debts owed to a man who would later put a price on her brother’s head.
"The brother who officiated her son’s wedding was the man in the cave."
Genealogy at its best is not a list of names and dates. It is the recovery of lives. Ruth Francisco was a weaver who appears in one pension document and then disappears from the record. Her brother was a man who hid in a cave in a swamp and rode out at night in a scarlet cloak to supply a revolution. Their father brought the family from Connecticut to a frontier settlement on Lake Champlain and settled them there in the 1760s, alongside the Sawyers and the Vines and, eventually, an itinerant Frenchman of implausible age who would become Ruth’s husband.
The Bigelow letter survives because Hopestill wanted his son to know who he came from. Ruth Francisco survives in the record because in 1820 Henry Francisco swore a schedule of property naming his dependents and wrote down his wife’s name and her age and her occupation.
She was a weaver. She was about seventy-four years old.
Her name was Ruth.
Sources
1. “Notes of hand & Bonds of Different persons at Skenesborough,” 1767–1773, Philip Skene Papers, Box 1, Folder 01, New York State Library, Special Collections, Albany, N.Y.; Document ID 90534.
2. Hopestill Bigelow letter of 1833, reproduced in Ward J. Roylance, Remingtons of Utah with Their Ancestors and Descendants (Salt Lake City: the author, 1960), pp. 65–68.
3. Henry Francisco pension file, no. S44864, Case Files of Pension Applications, 1800–1900, Record Group 15, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; National Archives Catalog ID 54606831. Schedule of property dated 30 Aug. 1820.
4. Solomon Francisco Family Bible Record (1768–1886), NSDAR Ancestor File No. A041636, NSDAR Library, Washington, D.C.; digital images at FamilySearch, IGN 007949717, images 652–653.
5. Jeffery Allen Record, “Ruth Fuller, Wife of Henry Francisco of Whitehall, New York,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 157 (July 2026): 231–236.
6. “Fuller—at Whitehall on the 10th Inst. by S. Hatch—Aaron Fuller, age 79 years, one of the primitive settlers of the county of Charlotte to the amiable and sprightly Mrs. Jane Bennett, age 75,” Lansingbury Gazette, 22 March 1814, as reproduced in Roylance, Remingtons of Utah, p. 64.
7. Benjamin Silliman, Remarks Made on a Short Tour Between Hartford and Quebec, 2nd ed. (New Haven: S. Converse, 1824), pp. 184–191.
