John Muir's Birthplace

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Content updated Mon, 19 Jul 1999 23:21:09 GMT

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Exhibition Themes and Contents

Someone Else's Hero

Scottish Origins and Emigration

"When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild...I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and along the shore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of old Dunbar Castle."

John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)

John Muir was born on 21 April 1838 in the East Lothian fishing town of Dunbar. At Dunbar Grammar School, English, Latin, French, Mathematics and Geography were beaten into him along with the three Rs. Here Muir supped the salty broth of Scottish history and literature from Bannockburn and Flodden, to Burns and Border Ballads. Wallace and Bruce were his school-boy heroes, and he and his school-mates would daily re-enact the Wars of Independence.

Muir also encountered stern discipline in the home. The 1840s were a turbulent time in the Scottish Church, and Muir's father Daniel was a religious zealot who belonged to one of the stricter dissenting sects.

Escaping the pressures of school and home, Muir delighted in exploring his East Lothian surroundings, from the rocky beaches of the Forth estuary to the rural Lammermuir streams, influences he recalled almost seventy years later in his autobiography, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.

The young nations of North America seemed to offer boundless opportunities to millions of Scots, and in February 1849 Daniel Muir sailled from Glasgow, along with John, his sister Sarah and brother David, in search of religious freedom, cheap land and a better life. John's mother and remaining siblings followed later. Canada was the original goal but en route the Muirs were diverted by the promise of Wisconsin and the United States.

John Muir never forgot his Dunbar roots. He always regarded himself as a Scot, only taking American citizenship in his 70s, and throughout his life he spoke to family and friends in vernacular Scots.

If Wallace and Bruce were his military heroes, Burns was Muir's greatest literary influence, and constant companion on his epic journeys. The bard's compassion for the natural world was clearly in Muir's mind when he wrote:

"the eye of the Poet and Seer never closes on the kinship of God's creatures and his heart ever beats in sympathy with the great and small as earth-born companions and fellow mortals dependent on Heaven's eternal laws."

John Muir, The Thousand Mile to the Gulf (1916)

The democratic sentiments of Burns' A Man's a Man stood Muir in good stead in his dealings with the rich and powerful, including President Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Apart from Burns, Muir's other literary influences were Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg. Scots also featured among his scientific heroes, and he named two Alaskan glaciers after geologists Hugh Miller and Archibald Geekie.

Muir's Scottish origins and influences are recalled in the exhibition by contemporary photographs of East Lothian, Dunbar and its harbour and fishing boats, John Muir's Birthplace in Dunbar High Street and the old Dunbar railway station from which John Muir and his family set off on their first leg of their journey to the New World.