Born in 1848 in Glasgow, Scotland, Abigail Pearson immigrated to California with her parents in the early 1850s. Her father, John McFarland Pearson, built the famed Pearson Sodaworks Building on Main Street in 1859, where he sold ice to affluent community members and operated a soda company.
The Blairs – fellow Scotsmen with a lumberyard located just next door – encouraged the introduction of Abigail to their younger brother Robert in the early 1870s. The couple soon began courting and were married shortly thereafter. Together, Abigail and Robert raised a family of four children from their residence at the corner of Cedar Ravine and Pacific Streets in Placerville. Their daughter, Jessie, went on to marry neighbor William “Bert” Combellack and raise a family of her own just a few doors down on Cedar Ravine. Abigail Pearson Blair was a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother who was highly involved in maintaining a sense of closeness with extended Blair family members as the elder Blairs, such as John and James, began to pass away. Her husband, Robert, was the last surviving original Blair brother when John Studebaker returned to Placerville in 1912 for a reunion with the old-timers who were there at the time of the gold rush. It is through the scrapbooks of Abigail and her daughters that many accounts of Blair family history have been preserved.