Looking back with Ian Scott on Falkirk district's connections to the United States

Scotland has many historic links with the USA and this week I want to talk about the ones that connect our cousins across the pond with the Falkirk district. Now I don’t do this just because my father was born in New Jersey, of a Falkirk ironworker Dad, and that I am therefore a Yankee Doodle Dandie myself. It is because folk from our area have played important roles in the USA from the very start.

Take the Livingstons of Callendar House. In 1673 Robert Livingston, left for New York and before long the family were leading lights in the colony. Before the Vanderbilts, Roosevelts or Kennedys, the Livingstons were the aristocracy of the United States. They were bankers, lawyers and politicians with Philip Livingstone signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, another relative responsible for swearing in George Washington as first President and yet another negotiating the greatest land sale in history, the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ when 800,000 square miles of the Mississippi Valley was sold by Napoleon to the USA in 1803.

Then there was the Alamo in 1836 where cannons from Carron Company helped Davie Crocket and his pals against the Mexicans and where several guns have been unearthed in recent years.

Years earlier John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore, of Pineapple fame was Governor of the colonies of New York and Virginia. During the War of Independence he made the famous ‘Dunmore Proclamation’ offering freedom to any slave prepared to leave his master and join the British Army. This is still seen as a major step along the road to emancipation. Many children born to slave women were named ‘Dunmore’ though he did have 56 slaves of his own in Williamsburg, Virginia!

Two leading men in Falkirk’s iron industry James Smith and Stephen Wellstood worked in America and brought back stoves which were more efficient than British models. They copied these and sold them under their own name. Other Falkirk firms pinched the patterns and exported American stoves to every corner of the globe . . . including to the United States. Smith had worked for 20 years in Jackson, Mississippi and was a friend of Jefferson Davis, the ‘President’ of the Confederate states. His brother Robert fought in the army of the south and was killed in Kentucky in 1862.

Philanthropist Robert Dollar was born in Falkirk but moved to Canada and then the USA where he developed an export trade in lumber to the far-east through Pacific ports. To save costs he began to operate his own ships and soon the Dollar Line was dominating trade out of San Francisco to China. Dollar became one of the richest men in the USA and moved home to San Rafael, California where he was nicknamed ‘The Grand Old Man of the Pacific’. His former house in that town is called Falkirk of course!

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries Falkirk was the site of the greatest cattle fairs in Europe with tens of thousands of black cattle driven on the hoof from all over the north of Scotland. Many of the drovers and dealers who ran this complex operation found their way to the United States where they dominated the great cattle trails. In other words – those darned cowpokes learned their skills in Stenhousemuir!