Near Balfron, in the valley of the Endrick, lie Buchanan, Kilmarnock, and Drymen, whence came many Ryegate and Barnet people.

From Gargunnock, in the north part of Stirlingshire, adjoining Balfron, came Col. Alexander Harvey, and others of Barnet. This is a very picturesque parish, lying on the Forth, which is here remarkably sinuous.

The Leitch and Ritchie families originated at Roseneath, a most beautiful place on Gairloch, the Firth of Clyde and Loch Long.

It has been stated in more than one publication that the Scotch element in Newbury was an overflow from the Ryegate colony. That the Scotch who settled in Newbury were attracted there by its proximity to the settlement of their countrymen is probable, but the fact remains that nearly all in that town came from Fifeshire, on the east coast of Scotland, and most of them from the neighborhood of Markinch. The Goodwillies were the only prominent family in Ryegate or Barnet, which originated in Fife.

A journey through those portions of Scotland, whence our colonists came, would take us among some of the most interesting scenes of a land where, upon every hill and valley, glows the light of history and song. There is no more attractive section in Great Britain, and we may wonder how people could bring themselves to leave it for the wilderness of North America.

A very few sentences taken here and there from the works which we have cited, explain much of this:

"Lace-making," says Mr. Semple, in 1792, "is much carried on at Renfrew, and girls are apprenticed to learn the work. Many of them are taken from hospitals and other establishments for the care of destitute children. It requires three or four years to learn the work, and when learned one may earn 10d, or one shilling a day." "In a return made some years ago of the rates of wages paid agricultural laborers in the different counties of Great Britain and Ireland, it was found that Renfrewshire men were the highest paid. The wages for out-workers in 1792, were one shilling per week in winter, and five shillings in summer. Wages for servants are £9 per year for men, and £4 for women. In 1772, they were just one-half those sums."

No wonder that men and women in those highly favored localities turned their thoughts toward emigration, but it is probable that comparatively few of those who contemplated the change were able to surmount the difficulties attending it. It was not easy to sever the ties which bound them to their native land, and not a few turned back at the last moment.

The expense of the voyage to America, in those days, varied as widely as now. The newspapers of the time, in Glasgow, and other seaports, contain advertisements of ships about to sail for American ports, and refer the inquirer to the captain, or the owners, for information, as to rates of passage. . It would seem that people made individual bargains for their conveyance. The young men, usually, worked their way as common seamen. Few, probably, could pay for a cabin passage; most went in the steerage, which, in the best of weather, must have been dismal enough. In storms the hatches were battened down, and the emigrants had, for days, no light or fresh air. Six weeks was a quick passage, which calms or contrary winds sometimes stretched to six months. Only the young and hardy attempted the voyage, and the records of. some of our families give, after a name— "Died on the passage to America." Some contracted ship fever, from which they never entirely recovered.

The journal of Rev. David Sutherland of Bath, in his voyage to America in June-August, 1803, gives some interesting particulars. The passage occupied eleven weeks, in which there were eleven days of calm, when they made no progress; thirteen days of head winds, when .they were driven out of their course; eight of fog, and seven of violent tempest, leaving only about forty days of favorable weather. Yet the voyage was considered a very good one. We can only imagine what a fearful thing a winter passage must have been. Most of the emigrants, in after life, remembered the voyage with little pleasure. When the subject of laying a telegraph cable between England and America was first contemplated, two elderly Scotch people in Newbury were discussing the idea, and one said, "Mr. Ross, you and I, who have crossed the ocean, know that such a thing canna be!"

Mrs. John Barron, who lived on the river road, in Bradford, used to relate how the Scotch people, on the way to Ryegate and Barnet, used to stop to rest at her house, men, women and children, and of their insatiable thirst for buttermilk.

Their ports of landing were, usually, Portsmouth, Newburyport, Boston, and New York. Later emigrants came to Hartford, completing the journey on foot, sending their goods by boat.

Col. William Wallace kept tavern in Newbury, and never failed to welcome his country folk with a bountiful meal, and other creature comforts, while all were sure of rest and rejoicing at the end of their long journey.

We do not know how many emigrants left Scotland for Ryegate in the earlier years, or the number who finally reached here. In the letters written to Scotland by James Whitelaw from 1773 to 1800, he mentions many names not given by Mr. Mason or Mr. Miller as residents, and his correspondents in Scotland mention several persons as having left the country for Ryegate. Of Hugh Gemmell and family, Patrick Reid and sons, George Oswald, William and James Wilson, who were among those that came here we know little or nothing.

In 1824, Gen. Whitelaw prepared an account of Ryegate for Thompson’s Gazetteer, in which he says that in 1775 sixty persons left Scotland for Ryegate, at one time, and reached Boston just before the battle of Bunker Hill. Only one of the company—Elizabeth Shields who married James Smith—was allowed to proceed on her journey, the rest were detained in Boston by General Gage, who gave them their choice—to join the British Army, go to Nova Scotia, or return to Scotland. Most returned to Scotland; a few went to Nova Scotia, of whom only two, John and Robert Hall, are known to have, many years later, come to Ryegate. Letters written from Scotland about that time give the names of some of them—William Bowie and family, James McBride and wife, Thomas Halley, William Tassie and sons.

Mr. Mason, in one of his sketches, contrasting the portions of Scotland which we have described, whence the Ryegate colonists came, with the untamed wilderness which lay before them here, almost wonders that they did not give up the task in despair and go back to their native land. There were, no doubt, some misgivings, when they contemplated what must be done before the dense forest could give place to fruitful farms, but they had not come here just to go back again. In their journey from the seaports where they had disembarked, they had passed through portions of New England where they could observe the successive advances of civilization into the wilderness. In 1773, the older portions of the country had been settled as long as Ryegate has been settled now. As they advanced into the interior they would be informed that periods of peace with the Indians were marked by wide areas of new settlements. In the older places the country and its dwellings had the aspect of long established communities. As they proceeded, the country became new and newer, till they came to Newbury and Haverhill, whose remarkable advance had been the work of only ten years. They found there a condition which had surprised the commissioners, where people seemed to have an abundance of the necessaries of life, and lived in a state of plenty which they had not known in Scotland. What Yankee grit had done in Newbury, Scotch grit could do in Ryegate, and they bent their minds and bodies to the task before them.

Some of the young men who came to this town worked for awhile near the sea coast, or among their countrymen in the vicinity of Londonderry, N. H. Others worked for a season or two in Newbury or Haver-hill and earned money to pay for their land, or took their pay in cattle or sheep with which to begin farming for themselves. Meantime they learned Yankee ways. It will be remembered that only part of those who settled here were members of the Company, and thus entitled to shares of the land; the others were outsiders who purchased land where they could get it.

If the whole territory of Ryegate was now covered with such a forest as clothed its hills in 1773, the lumber would be worth more than the assessed value of the real estate and personal property now in the town. Such has been the rise in value of a product then considered as an incubus, to be disposed of in the easiest way.

No one could have foreseen then, or predicted the changes which time was to bring. Many farms were cleared in Ryegate, on which there were once happy homes, surrounded by fields where men worked; firesides around which the household gathered; where the father "took the Book"; whence the evening psalm and the evening prayer ascended; and, later, the stars and the hills watched over the sleeping farm house, where there is now only a cellar with a few apple trees keeping guard over it and broken walls show where once were well tilled fields. The old people went to their long rest; the younger ones scattered; the farm sold; the buildings went to decay. Many such the sad memories of the older people recall.

It has been often suggested that Whitelaw and Allan might have selected a better location than Ryegate for their colony, and their reasons given for their choice have seemed inadequate to many. It is easy, in the light of subsequent events, to criticize the actions of people so long ago, but it seems to us that their choice was a prudent one. It must be remembered, that in 1773, only a narrow strip along the eastern edge of the continent, had been settled. At that time, what is now the great state of Ohio, had not a single English settlement. It would not have been safe to push far beyond the settled parts of the country. The lands in the Mohawk Valley were then the frontier of civilization, and were rich and valuable, but the commissioners did not like the people, and their impressions of the inhabitants are like those recorded in the journal of Gen. Jacob Bayley, of Newbury, and Rev. Henry True, of Hampstead, who passed along the valley in the Old French War.

Had they formed a settlement there, they might have perished in the revolution, as did the settlers of Cherry Valley, a Scotch-Irish colony, in the massacres of 1778.

The commissioners chose Ryegate because it lay in the midst of a country which was rapidly filling up with inhabitants more like themselves than any other which they had visited, and where they felt that the civil and religious ideas, in which they had been trained, would be best preserved.

They were doubtful of this result elsewhere, and doubtful of the influences in other localities. The first settlers of Newbury were a religious people, and had hardly become settled in their log cabins before they had obtained a minister, and stated preaching of the gospel, and the church, organized in 1764, the oldest, but one, in the state, has always been one of the strongest in the Connecticut Valley. The Scotch settlers of Ryegate liked the English settlers of Newbury, the Newbury people liked them, and their minister, Mr. Powers, took them under his pastoral charge, while he remained.

Among the papers of Col. Thomas Johnson, preserved in Newbury, are many letters from the early settlers of Ryegate and Barnet, which indicate the regard and esteem with which the people of the whole valley held these colonists, and we can only consider it as a favorable circumstance that their lot was cast among congenial people. Had they settled in an unfriendly community, with whom they could have had little intercourse, where their religious views had met with opposition, it is certain that dissatisfaction and removals would soon have depopulated the colony.

Other considerations, as well as fertility of soil, mildness of climate, or ease of cultivation, make a place desirable for the residence of people -like the settlers of Ryegate and Barnet.

In a previous chapter we mentioned some of the causes of the emigration from Scotland, which first settled the town. As the years went on, other reasons for leaving the old country contributed to increase the tide. The conscription which attended the wars of Napoleon caused many young men to come to America in order to escape service in the army.

The introduction of spinning machines, and later, of the power loom, threw thousands of weavers and spinners out of employment, many of whom found means to come to this country. But the strongest inducement to emigration was the prosperity of their friends who had been here for some years.