John Muir's Birthplace

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Content updated Tue, 30 Jun 1998 00:24:38 GMT

John Muir's Dunbar... [home]

Victoria Harbour and Dunbar Castle

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

We hope we have been able to give you some insight into the small Victorian Burgh where John grew up and was schooled. This was where his adult traits were instilled. His harsh early life and schooling bred self-reliance, fortitude and stamina. His Grandfather, Aunt and the countryside about gave him a love of nature that was to find full expression in his beloved High Sierra of California. His memories of Dunbar never left him. After his return in 1893 he seems to have been determined to do something to alleviate poverty in Dunbar, which he recalled from his childhood and which was still widespread. Thus, for the next 20 years his cousin received 100 dollars each Christmas to be spend in aid of the poor. The last donation was sent just days before he died, on the fifth of December 1914.

His death was remarked upon in the local and National press. With time, and the passing of his classmates and remaining family, John's significance was in danger of being lost to his home town. However, in the States, with the establishment of his Californian home as a National Historic Site, the declaration of John Muir Day, his commemoration on a US Postage Stamp, and a plethora of biographies and memorials, his fame grew apace in the 1960s. A steady trickle of visitors then has become a stream today and many more will come. It has taken nearly a century for his prescient message to become an everyday concern to us all. There is now no doubt that humanity is increasingly restricting the natural world. John recognised that

'...the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature - inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste ... is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe.'

He ...read from the great book of Nature... and saw the ravages of sheep and cattle and foresters in areas once pristine. He came to know that uncontrolled development would soon destroy the seemingly inexhaustible countryside and devoted his life to the political struggle to conserve wild places.

We hope also that you have gained some idea of how the fabric and environment of Dunbar have changed. Of how it has adapted and evolved to suit altered circumstances: of how a town settled for over 2,000 years can look to the future.