"I was working some three miles from home, and at 10 o'clock in the morning, everything was running as usual, when the idea struck me that I would go to America. I stood musing for a few moments when I was asked, 'What was the matter?' When I told them I had done my last work in Scotland they did not believe me, but when I put on my coat they thought differently ..."
Home, for Robert Brownlee, was the village of Bonkle, Cambusthnan Parish, Lanarkshire, Scotland, roughly 18 miles southeast of Glasgow. Born April 24, 1813, Robert was 22 when he heard about the fire that had destroyed hundreds of buildings in New York City in December 1835.
He had learned to read and write at his parish school, the Murdestoun Estate School, and had gone to work at age 11, first herding some 20 head of cattle for his uncle, then breaking stone with his father, a builder of parish roads.
After "some two summers," by his own recollection, Brownlee was apprenticed to his brother William to become a stone cutter: "Nothing of note happened as I liked the trade." Robert's brothers William and Alexander formed a partnership, and after his apprenticeship, Robert worked for them until he heard of the fire in New York and the need for skilled labor, and "the idea struck" to emigrate to America.
Robert was one of 11 children in a healthy, long-lived family. While they got used to the news of his plan and his mother began to make him some shirts, Robert said goodbye to his friends and extended family, "and besides," he adds, "I want you to know I had sweethearts to be attended to."
With a large chest of clothing, a shotgun, and provisions packed by his family (oatcakes, butter, cheese, boiled eggs), Robert sailed from Greenock (a port near Glasgow) on the Tasso. Of the ship's 22 passengers, five are listed as stone cutters.
For the first few days, Robert's seasickness was so bad that the ship's mate "gave me my choice--whether to swallow a piece of raw pork, or to drink a quart of seawater." Robert "chose the latter" and in calmer weather "got all right." (Was the offer of raw pork in jest?)
The Tasso landed at New York City on May 10, 1836. Robert had a letter of introduction to David Sterling, a stone cutter, and went to work for him promptly. "The boss was a complete Yankee, but a good man," writes Robert, who soon was earning an average of $2.50 a day and enjoying (compliments of his employer, it appears) "coffee and beef-steak for breakfast, roast beef and pie, for dinner, with fish Friday." While in New York, Robert sent $100 to his mother back in Scotland "as a token of love and affection."
The architect of North Carolina's state capitol came to New York City in September 1836 to recruit stone cutters. Robert Brownlee and David Sterling headed south for Raleigh. They got from New York to Petersburg, Va., "by sail vessel" and then as far as the Roanoke River by rail.
Because the stagecoach from the rail terminus on the Roanoke only ran to Raleigh three times a week and was fully booked for the next three trips, Brownlee and Sterling decided to walk, leaving their luggage behind, to be delivered later. They walked for two days; "The distance may have been 60 miles over the poorest country I have seen anywhere," writes Brownlee, "Crawfish land in every sense of the word."
Brownlee worked on the North Carolina State House for 16 months. While he appreciated the art and the craft that his fellow workers applied to the building's construction, his impression of the people of North Carolina was not favorable.
Of the farmers who came to market in Raleigh, he wrote, "As a whole they are a poor-looking ignorant set, as few of them could read or write. The most wonderful thing I ever saw them do was, when they would come around to look at the building, they would all squat down on their 'Hunkers' and would sit in that position for an hour. Seemingly they have no ambition for anything." He added, "I am bound to say the morals of Raleigh are very easy, that is, the feminine part."
By late 1837, Brownlee knew that the capitol in Raleigh was nearing completion, and that having come on the job last, he would be among the first dismissed. So he took note of an advertisement "for stone cutters to do the stone work of the Capitol of Arkansas." Brownlee and three other men from Scotland decided to go to Arkansas, where the construction of what we call the Old State House was already underway.
Brownlee left North Carolina for Arkansas with his fellow stone cutters James McVicar, Samuel McMorrin, and John Cooper. They made a seven-day trip by stagecoach from Raleigh to Guyandotte (now Huntington, W. Va.) on the Ohio River, where they boarded the steamer Cinderella and traveled down the Ohio, then down the Mississippi, to the now-vanished port of Napoleon, Ark.
Disembarking at Napoleon on Christmas Eve, Brownlee recalled, he took eggnog and observed the scene: arrivals, festivities, fights. "There was one man killed, but no notice taken of the fact." After a day of squirrel hunting, Brownlee and his party boarded a steamboat bound up the Arkansas River for Little Rock, where I hope to catch up with them in this column next week.
All of the quotations above are from "An American Odyssey: The Autobiography of a 19th-Century Scotsman, Robert Brownlee, at the Request of His Children. Napa County, California, October 1892," edited by Patricia A. Etter and published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1986.
Etter's commendable research makes up more than half of the text of this most enjoyable book. Brownlee worked on the Old State House and several other buildings in and around Little Rock. The house that he helped build for his brother James stands in its original location, now part of the Historic Arkansas Museum.