As the plaque beside the entrance explains, this is the birthplace of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. He left Edinburgh in 1870 when he was 23 years of age, settling first in Canada and then in the United States. After a couple of years, he had set up a school for training teachers of the deaf in Boston (both Bell’s mother and wife were deaf), just as his father had done in Edinburgh, at Dumbiedykes. He then became a professor at Boston University, and in 1876 he successfully demonstrated his great invention which was to change the world of communications. Bell patented his telephone immediately and went on to co-found the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885.
Glance up at Edinburgh Castle on its rocky perch and remember that this was where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to a son in 1566. He was crowned King James VI of Scotland barely a year later, and in 1603 he became King of England as well. It was James who granted the charters for the new colonies in America, notably Jamestown in Virginia, which was established in 1607 (that is thirteen years before the Plymouth Colony was founded by the Pilgrim Fathers). James VI was therefore the first British monarch to rule over the new American territories.
Listen to the traffic on Princes Street; a goodly proportion driven along here in the past were Fords. This may not have been the case had it not been for a far-seeing Edinburgh-born industrialist and banker. John Gray, who had emigrated to America, was initially none too impressed by the new contraption about to be manufactured by Henry Ford, the ‘gasoline buggy’ as it was called, and had to be persuaded rather reluctantly to invest $10,000 in its development in 1903. He quickly changed his opinion, however, having been made the new company’s first president, and grossed $36 million!
Up on Lothian Road there are a couple of film complexes, and it is worth remembering that Edinburgh gave Hollywood two of its greatest stars. One was Ernest Torrence, who became one of the great villains of the silver screen in the 1920s. The other, slightly better known nowadays, was Sean Connery, an actor of supreme talent, who skillfully handled a multitude of roles, most notably as Secret Agent 007 in the early James Bond films of the 1960s.
This monument is a tribute from men and women of Scottish descent and sympathies in the United States of America to the Scottish effort and sacrifice in the Great War. It was designed and produced in the USA. A lone kilted soldier sits, rifle on his knees, gazing expectantly towards the coming conflict. Behind him, the bias relief frieze shows a pipe band leading a battalion of kilted troops, who are followed by a large group of Scots from many walks of life. This is a symbolic response to the call to arms, and the scene represents a cross-section of Scottish manhood in 1914.
The monument is the work of R. Tait McKenzie from Philadelphia, and was executed between 1923 and 1927. The sculpture was cast at the Roman Bronze Works in Brooklyn, New York. The architectural concept is by Reginald Fairlie, who went on to design the National Library of Scotland. Finally, the stone-carved motto employs the words of Ewart Mackintosh (who was killed in the Great War):
If it be life that waits, I shall live forever unconquered;
If death, I shall die at last strong in my pride, and free.
This is the largest painting in Scotland, and it is by an American artist. The full title is ‘Alexander III of Scotland Rescued from the Fury of a Stag by the Intrepidity of Colin Fitzgerald.’ The artist was Benjamin West, who hailed from Pennsylvania, and five years after his arrival in London in 1768, he was elected as a founder-member of the Royal Academy of Arts, having become an established portraitist and painter of historical subjects. His painting of ‘Death of a Stag’ created a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1786. Quite apart from its huge size (it measures some 12 feet high by 17 feet wide), it proved to be a powerful piece of dynastic propaganda for Francis Humberston Mackenzie, the last hereditary chieftain of the Seaforth line of Clan Mackenzie.
The painting was produced on the scale of a royal or state commission, at a price equivalent to West’s annual stipend as official history painter to King George III. It shows an incident which supposedly took place during a royal hunt near Kincardine in the later 13th century, in which Colin Fitzgerald wrestled a furious stag to its knees before dispatching it with his spear. It may be seen as a skillfully stage-managed and politically-driven celebration of the preservation of the monarchy by the legendary ancestor of the Clan Mackenzie.
Having made the effort to get here, notice the grand resting-place of Scotland’s greatest philosopher, David Hume, who was a close acquaintance of one of America’s major figures of the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin. In 1759, Franklin became London agent for the province of Pennsylvania, and, having made the acquaintance of several expat Scots while down south, decided to visit Edinburgh. He lodged on that occasion in the Old Town, where he spent what he later described as “six weeks of the densest happiness I have ever met with in any part of my life.” Franklin encountered many of the famous figures of the Enlightenment, whom he described as “a set of as truly great men as have ever appeared in any age or in any country.” Before leaving Edinburgh, he was installed as an honorary burgess of the city.
Benjamin Franklin returned to Edinburgh twelve years later, in 1771, and lodged with the famous philosopher David Hume, in his new house in South St David Street. This must have been a most exciting place to stay, for it was regarded as the meeting house for the leading men of the age. Even so, Hume and Franklin do not seem to have got on terribly well, and Hume later accused him of being a factious man, commenting “Faction, next to Fanaticism, is of all passions the most destructive of morality.” However, even brilliant minds can get things wrong on occasion, because five years later, in 1776, Benjamin Franklin made one of the greatest of anti-factious remarks as he added his signature to the American Declaration of Independence, when he said “Now we must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Sources:
From Benajmin Franklin to to Lord Kames, 3 January 1760.
Atiyah, Michael. “Benjamin Franklin and the Edinburgh Enlightenment.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 150, no. 4, 2006, pp. 591–606. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4599027. Accessed 27 May 2025.
From David Hume to Adam Smith, Feb. 13, 177(x).
‘Benjamin Franklin Joins the Revolution’ by Walter Isaacson in Smithsonian Magazine (2003).
The interactive statuary depicts Abraham Lincoln, a representative Slave, and the concept of Emancipation. However, it also had a practical purpose − to act as a memorial and burial place for certain Scottish soldiers who fought in the American Civil War of 1861−65, “To preserve the Jewel of Liberty in the Framework of Freedom” in Lincoln’s own words, as they appear on the granite plinth upon which his effigy stands.
This plot of land was given by Edinburgh Corporation to Wallace Bruce, the splendidly-named US Consul in Edinburgh, for this purpose, and six of those soldiers are named on the monument, along with the regiments in which they served. On the main side of the monument a version of the Stars and Stripes appears in the form of a shield, with plants on either side, thistles for Scotland on the left, and cotton for the USA on the right. The monument was unveiled in 1893.
This complex monument is the work of three widely-separately makers. The sculptor and architect was George Bissell, who worked at his father’s marble polishing business at Poughkeepsie, New York. He studied sculpture in Europe, and was resident in Paris during the planning and execution of the ‘Emancipation’ statuary. This explains why he used a Parisienne bronze factory, that of E. Gruet junior, to produce the work. The architectural setting was carried out by local man Stewart McGlashan, at his steam polishing granite, marble, and stone works, located at Canonmills Bridge, who ran one of the leading companies in this field in Victorian Edinburgh.
Edinburgh is immensely fortunate in having preserved, to a greater extent than any other street in Europe, the core of the medieval burgh. It is nowhere better seen than here, at the head of the Netherbow. The unique qualities of the Old Town have been appreciated by visitors for generations, and one of the most colourful and perceptive descriptions was penned by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a noted American author of romantic works. He visited Edinburgh in 1856 and again in the following year, though his first impression was far from complimentary:
“In the Old Town of Edinburgh, we saw those immensely tall houses, seven storeys high, where the people live in tiers, all the way from earth to middle air. One thing did not in the least fall short of my expectations − the evil odour, for which Edinburgh has an immemorial renown, nor the dirt of the inhabitants, old and young. The town, to say the truth, when you are in the midst of it, has a very sordid, grimy, shabby, unswept, unwashen aspect, grievously at variance with all poetic and romantic associations.”
However, Nathaniel Hawthorne was soon to view old Edinburgh in a rather more favourable light, writing: “The sun was setting, and gilded the Old Town with its parting rays, making it absolutely the most picturesque scene I have ever beheld. The mass of tall, ancient houses, heaped densely together, looked like a Gothic dream.”
Sources:
Passages from the English Note-books, Volume II by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dwight Moody preached at the laying of the foundation stone in 1883, and less than one year later, he delivered the first evangelical sermon in the new Mission. This was a remarkable achievement of speed; contrast that with the time it took to construct Old St Paul’s, which was begun three years earlier, yet took fully a quarter of a century to complete! The new mission was designed by John Armstrong, and was of sturdy construction, its façade being dominated by four massive columns with flanking pilasters rising through two stories. The building continues to perform a similar function to this day.
Moody’s great co-worker here was Ira Sankey, another American evangelist, who also preached in the Mission, though he was more highly renowned as an organist and vocalist. Coincidentally, his birthplace was in the town of Edinboro in Pennsylvania (and not in Edinburg, in the same state!). These two men were so popular in Britain that they even appeared as a pair on people’s mantle-shelves, in the form of Staffordshire figurines.
This was a place of secret episcopal worship, with a particular American connection. During much of the 17th century, Stewart kings attempted to force episcopacy upon a population committed to Presbyterianism, and the eventual victory of the latter cause in 1690 left Episcopalians in a vulnerable position. Its adherents had to worship in secret, one such place being in a little chapel situated down this close (on the site now occupied by Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church). It still contains the original wooden alter, made to fold up for quick concealment. An American who worshipped secretly in the little chapel was Samuel Seabury, while he was a medical student at Edinburgh University in the 1750s. Later, after returning home, he became the first American episcopal bishop.
A century or so later, this location became the home of the highly popular Carrubber’s Close Mission in 1858. However, the little chapel proved inadequate, so the Mission was sometimes compelled to provide a street-preaching service. One of those who attended was the celebrated American evangelist Dwight Moody, and he was so impressed by what he witnessed that he determined that the Mission should be housed in an appropriate building. “You can’t run a mission on air!” he supposedly declared and set about raising £10,000 to purchase a site a little further down the High Street, there to construct a handsome Mission house, which was to retain the name of its humble predecessor (see next stopping point).
The most important American link in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) occurred while he was visiting France in 1876, for it was there that he met an American art student, Fanny Osborne. When she moved to California two years later, he found himself unbearably unhappy without her, and so he sailed to join her in 1879. He was reunited with Fanny in California, and (despite his tuberculosis) they were married in the following year, spending their three-week honeymoon in the camp of an abandoned silver mine! Later that year, RLS came back to Edinburgh with Fanny, but the climate here was unsuited to his illness, and so, after brief stays in Europe and America, he and his family spent the rest of his life cruising the South Seas, eventually settling in Samoa.
There is no statue to RLS in Edinburgh for two reasons: one is that Stevenson himself said that he did not want one, and the other is that the principal mover in the planning of his memorial in the city of his birth, the Earl of Rosebery (who was Prime Minister at the time), had an intense dislike of statues. It was therefore decided to erect a large plaque instead. The sculptor was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an American working in New York who was a great fan of Stevenson’s writings. The two men had met in 1887 and struck up an instant friendship. It took Saint-Gaudens several years to complete the work, which was eventually installed in 1902, eight years after Stevenson’s death.
