Wednesday 28th October 2009 - In Memory of a Lost Friend

          The Beaver County Historical Centre occupies most of the second floor of the fine Carnegie Library in Beaver Falls.  It had a whole falanx of Grown-up Ladies, poised waiting for me.  They have a file on Glasgow itself.  It is a mine of information about all sorts of things.

          When the canal failed, Glasgow went into building riverboats.  They probably had geared up in hope of a continuing trade in canal boats.  But the file tells me that the first boat to run the Vicksburg blockade was the "Silver Wave", built in 1859 in Glasgow.  I'm not actually very sure what  "running the blockade" means: Vicksburg is on the Mississippi, down in Mississippi, so any Union boat coming up the river would surely have been running a long way through enemy territory either side of Vicksburg.  But I'm sure it means that "Glasgow-built" meant something on the Mississippi as well as on the oceans of the world. 

         

          Near the end of the file, I turned up a real gem: someone has written a little book about all the Glasgows in the Unuited States!  There was a copy sitting in the file, hidden in an envelope, with a letter from the publisher.  And when I say a "little" book, I mean it quite literally: it is a miniature book, substantally hand-made.

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It was published as a keepsake for the attenders of the Eighth Grand Conclave of the Miniature Book Society, held in Glasgow, Scotland in 1990. 

 I wonder how many copies still exist?  I wonder how I find out?  I wonder if there are any still in Scotland, any still in Glasgow, Scotland?

          It's a terrific thrill to find something like this, in the right place, but essentially lost because nobody is looking there.  I put it in the charge of a Grown-up Lady as quickly as I could.  It really is something special.

          It lists three "Glasgo"s, in Connecticut, Kansas, and New York, but only nine of the twenty "Glasgow"s I found, those in Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, two in Pensylvania (I think there's three), Virginia, and West Virginia.

 

          I also found a newspaper cutting about the Rev Ezekiel Glasgow, the first minister of Beaver Township Presbyterian Church in 1813.  I found another Grown-up Lady to refile that, since I thought that really shouldn't be where it was.

          Then my mind started to do some sums in the background, and before I knew where I was, I was realising that I had read that the father of George Dawson, who created Glasgow, was an elder of the Beaver Township Church ( I can't find that reference again) and George was the same age as the Rev. Glasgow. When I add to that the fact that Rev Glasgow died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1814 when he was only twenty-nine,

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I find a large, soft, warm, inviting conclusion waiting to be jumped to.

          And jump to it I will.  It's the only 'Glasgow' connection which has appeared.  Could he have named it for a much-missed friend of his youth?

 

          Generalising from a sample of one has always been one of my talents, if "talent" is the right word.  I do it so much, it's surprising I'm not an inveterate gambler.  In fact, I hardly gamble at all.  Well, not with money, anyway.