The Peter Reid Story
(abridged from Far Spread the Sparks from Cantire by Mary MacKay)
Peter Reid was born April 18, 1829 in the parish of Saddell, Kintyre, Argyllshire, Scotland, the only son of Peter Reid and Mary McGeachie. His father’s name appears in the Edinburg registry as Patrick Rid married to Mary McGeachy, with three children, Margaret, Mary and Peter.
The Reid home in Kintyre was called Upper Ugadale. The upper slopes of their main farm sloped steeply to the coast road and the sea.
Peter and his two sisters were left orphans at an early age. His father was the skipper of a ship, presumably a small one, used to bring cattle from Ayrshire across the Clyde estuary to Kintyre. It is probable also that this ship was used in the herring fisheries of Loch Fyne which extends to the north. The waters of the Firth of Clyde, especially the part near Kintyre called Kilbrannon Sound, can be dangerous in a storm because of the rocky shores about three miles apart. There are no good harbours except Campbeltown.
Peter and his two sisters were left orphans at an early age. His father was the skipper of a ship, presumably a small one, used to bring cattle from Ayrshire across the Clyde estuary to Kintyre. It is probable also that this ship was used in the herring fisheries of Loch Fyne which extends to the north. The waters of the Firth of Clyde, especially the part near Kintyre called Kilbrannon Sound, can be dangerous in a storm because of the rocky shores about three miles apart. There are no good harbours except Campbeltown.
On his last fateful journey, Peter’s father was returning to his home port, probably Carradale or Campbeltown, when his ship foundered at the foot of the slope below Upper Ugadale. It sank in the storm within sight of Peter’s mother who was watching anxiously from the shore. Mary McGeachie was left with three small children. No doubt that experience was a great shock which may have contributed to her early death, however the immediate cause is not known.
 |
| Campbeltown, Kintyre |
Peter and his two sisters were brought up by an aunt in Campbeltown. Letters between various relatives seem to indicate that the aunt, whose name we do not know, lacked means to support her adopted family, and no doubt there was every incentive for them all to become self-supporting as early as possible. As a result, Margaret and Mary each went off to work at an early age.
Margaret, Peter’s oldest sister, married Lachlan Bowie and became the mother of nine children. The family moved from Stirling to Lanark and later to Cumberland following the development of the coal and iron industries in those places. Margaret died of cancer in 1869.
Peter’s younger sister, Mary, married John Brown. After a year or two as tenant farmers at Dalvarven near Ardrossan, Ayrshire, they settled on his father’s holding at Shedock Farm, Shiskine, Isle of Arran, Buteshire, Scotland. Mary and John Brown had seven children.
Our ancestor, Peter Reid, grew up in his aunt’s home in Campbeltown. We believe that he attended school only a couple of years, which in the circumstances seems likely to be all the time he would have been allowed. Yet he learned to read and write English and could at least speak and read Gaelic. His Gaelic bible is well thumbed and, not surprisingly, much blackened by daily use. His letters, in English, were written quite legibly and well expressed; but briefly, and of course they are few since he probably wrote little except when it was necessary to correspond with the Old Country. His day book containing entries from 1878 to 1892 is legible and clean, showing a command of arithmetic and accounting sufficient for the need.
The main feature of his education, of course, was his apprenticeship as a blacksmith. At that time, any apprenticeship required seven years. Peter was apparently apprenticed to a blacksmith at Tayinloan, a small village on the west side of Kintyre.
Our pioneer fore-father came to Canada as a young man in his twenties single, and as a journeyman blacksmith, looking for employment. It would be natural for him to go to Paisley, Ontario, and to Elderslie where the names Taylor, Blue, Muir, Stewart, McAllister, McNeil, McDonald and Munn must have made him feel very much at home.
Peter’s employment at Paisley was with J. B. McArthur, blacksmith and carriage-maker. He must have spent at least a year or two here. In 1860 he married Christina Taylor, whom he had known as a child in Scotland.
The Christena Taylor Story
Christena Taylor was born on a croft called Monielea near the village of Clachan on the west side of the Kintyre Peninsula, Scotland. She was the youngest of six children born to Alexander Taylor and his wife, Margaret Walker. The family were tenant crofters or farmers on Monielea, seventeen acres of wet land, a triangle, now forested. They lived in a very humble dwelling that was part of a large area presumably controlled by the Duke of Argyll. Along with other residents, the Taylors were encouraged (perhaps an understatement) to leave their Argyllshire homes; the Campbells, Dukes of Argyll, wanted the land for other purposes.
Unlike Peter, who came to Canada leaving his two sisters behind, Christena came with her parents and older sister Margaret, who was about 30, and three brothers, Donald, 28, John, 23, and Neil, 20. None of the family was married, probably due to lack of money to establish a home.
 |
| Christina (Taylor) Reid with her brothers Donald (front), Neil and John |
In 1851 or 1852, the Alexander Taylor family left their Kintyre home, along with their neighbours, the Blues. After six stormy weeks on the Atlantic, the sailboat Melissa reached Quebec. Christena Taylor could not remember very much about how they travelled up the St. Lawrence and arrived at King Township in York County. They evidently stayed for a period in King Township, probably with Scottish settlers who had preceded them. We have no information about how they reached Owen Sound. From there they made their way on foot through the Queen’s Bush to Elderslie, Bruce County, where some land had been selected for them by John Gillies, a relative.
The Taylors and the Blues spent a few weeks in a shelter formed by leaning strips of bark against a fallen tree. Shanties and log buildings came later. Elderslie Township was surveyed in 1851. The farms were claimed very quickly and in 1854 the government held a historic land sale at which time settlers received deeds for lands on which they had been living as squatters.
 |
| Peter and Christena had known each other back in Kintyre |
Peter Reid and Christena Taylor were married in St. Andrew’s Church, Paisley, Ontario, by Rev. Mr Bremner in 1860. They spent the first year of their married life in Erin, Ontario, where we believe Peter Reid was employed as a blacksmith during railway construction. It was here that their first child, Mary Reid, was born on October 22, 1861. Soon after they returned to Elderslie and made their home on Lot 13, Con. 5, beside her brother John. Peter set up his forge in the shop beside the “burn” (or Struan) of Cantire Creek, close to the road where he practiced his trade for many years. It was in the house near the blacksmith shop that the next eight children, Margaret (1863), Peter (1866), Tena (1868), Sandy (1870), Neil (1872), Donald (1875), Kate (1873) and Annie (1881) were born. In the early 1880s that house was replaced by a solid brick dwelling to the east and south of the original one. A large timber frame barn was built and Peter’s shop was moved closer to the house and barn. It now serves as a shop and implement shed.
 |
| The Reid farm, Ontario |
For almost four decades Peter Reid served the community by shoeing horses, repairing implements, setting tires, etc. Most of the work was horse shoeing and other jobs related to everyday operations on the farm.
Patrons very often paid for their work not in money but in goods or services; for example, Peter’s day book notes that two bushels of oats were credited toward horse shoeing; a side of pork helped to pay for fitting a set of harrows with teeth.
In 1894 Peter Reid made his only excursion to his native Scotland where he visited numerous friends and relatives. His sister Margaret Bowie had died in 1869, but her family was there.
It was fortunate that Peter made his trip to Scotland because he died the following February, 1895, at the age of sixty-six.
From the Paisley Advocate
February 7, 1895
The community was shocked on Tuesday morning upon learning of the death of Mr. Peter Reid of Elderslie. The deceased was taken ill with influenza about ten days before and the disease rapidly developed into pleurisy and pneumonia which could not be checked, and death claimed him on Monday night. The funeral took place yesterday.
At the time of his death his three oldest children were married. Mary (Mrs. Robert Muir) lived in Turnberry Township. Margaret (Mrs. George Muir) and Peter (m. Henrietta Balfour) were homesteading in North Dakota. His second son, Sandy, also in North Dakota, did not marry (Nettie Muir) until three years later. His fifth child, Tena, married (Jim Moffat) two years after her father’s death and also went to North Dakota to live. Neil, Donald, Kate and Annie were all at home. When they did leave, Neil (m. Agnes Aitken) lived on lot 1, Concession 12, Elderslie, Donald (m. Clara MacIntyre) took over the home place. The youngest, Annie (Mrs. Peter Fraser), went west to Hannah, North Dakota, and eventually moved to Pilot Mound, Manitoba after her marriage in 1916.
The Later Years of Christena Taylor Reid
Christena Reid, who was approximately ten years younger than her husband, survived him by almost three decades. No doubt the early years of her married life were strenuous ones when she had to participate and direct work in the fields while her husband plied the hammer and tongs at the anvil. However, in her mature years she lived among her sons’ and daughters’ families but chiefly in the Reid home on Lot 13. She was a gentle, white haired lady who had interesting stories to relate about her youth, and who spoke good English with the accent of one whose first language was the soft lilting Gaelic. That was the normal language of the Reid household in the early years. Her oldest daughter, Mary Reid, spoke Gaelic until she started school.
 |
| Four generations, 1916. Margaret (Reid) Muir (at right) with grandson George Trann and her daughter Christina (standing), with Christina (Taylor) Reid, on a visit west. |
Christena Reid lived to enjoy four visits in Dakota with her sons’ and daughters’ families there. On one of them she and Mary, her oldest daughter, attended the wedding of her youngest daughter, Annie, to Peter Fraser in 1916. She travelled to Winnipeg by train and then continued south to Hannah, N.D.
 |
| The wedding of Pete Fraser and Annie Reid, at the home of James and Tena Moffatt, North Dakota |
Christena Reid died May 28, 1925, in her eighty-seventh year.
Far from their ancestral Argyllshire, Peter Reid and Christina Taylor were laid to rest in the little rural St. Andrew's Cemetery, on the fourth concession of Elderslie, less than three miles east of their Canadian home, where they had brought up their family, and made their worthy contribution to their adopted country during its pioneer era.
Far from their ancestral Argyllshire, Peter Reid and Christina Taylor were laid to rest in the little rural St. Andrew's Cemetery, on the fourth concession of Elderslie, less than three miles east of their Canadian home, where they had brought up their family, and made their worthy contribution to their adopted country during its pioneer era.
