Benjamin Bedison    

BENJAMIN BEDISON was born in Beaver County in 1810, a son of Shedrick Bedison. The father was a cooper by occupation but Benjamin after being educated in New Brighton failed to follow his father’s calling. Instead he went to Pittsburgh and learned the machinist trade. After seven years in that city he returned to his home town, serving four years at his occupation and became a contractor on the Beaver and Erie canal. After two years in which he acquired business experience he built the Star Flouring Mill on the canal below Ninth Street. He remained in the milling business for the next twenty years. After the construction of the railroad, when New Brighton had become the transfer point for freight from the canal to the railroad and vice-versa, he maintained the large “Bedison Warehouse,” as it was known to canal shippers and employees south of Ninth Street beside that waterway. It was a busy place most of the time but especially so in dry seasons when the low water in the Ohio River would not permit the canal boats to be towed from Rochester to Pittsburgh. All light freight in transit at such times was handled
through this warehouse, but heavier materials were unloaded at a dock near Sixth Street. The warehouse business declined after the completion of the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad in 1865, and Mr. Bedison became interested in brick manufacturing, oil prospecting, and several other pursuits. He retired about 1880 after serving the borough as councilman and tax collector and died about 1899. He was very well off financially at one time, but the brick manufacture in which he was associated in his later years proved an unfortunate venture; and although he saved enough to pass the remainder of his life in comfort and ease, his circumstances were much altered.

His nearest surviving descendants in New Brighton are Walter Bedison of Penn Avenue, a grandson, who is the father of Charles J. and George W. Bedison, and Mrs. May W. Martsolf, Alfred J. Winter, and Mrs. Amy W. Ritchie of McKeesport are children of Charles F. Winter and Adelaide (Bedison) Winter; Mrs. Winter was a daughter of the former early settler.

History of New Brighton 1838-1939, published by the Historical Committee of the Centennial, Butler, PA, pages 18-19. More Beaver County History Books  Search Hundreds of 1880s-1890s Pennsylvania County History Books for biographies and historical information on your ancestors.  View the book page images on line and print them out for your genealogy file!  Free Access to the old history books - plus birth & death records, census images and ALL other records at ancestry.com.