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The Taylor & Johnston Families in
Quebec – Circa 1760-1800
Dr
Henry Taylor, a resident of Quebec City, is shown in family records as
having met his wife, Ann Johnston, on board ship while returning from
London, after taking out a patent for the manufacture of spruce beer.
The patent in question, No. 1022, was in fact for the manufacture of
essence of spruce from which spruce beer could be made, and the record
in the British Library shows that it was granted in August 1772. Since
Henry and Ann’s eldest daughter was twenty when she died in 1786, it is
reasonable to assume that the couple had in fact met when Henry was
returning from a visit to London rather earlier than in 1772, probably
in about 1764 or 1765, possibly when Henry was first making
representations to the Crown for the granting of a patent.
Dr Henry Taylor is described in the patent as a
‘chymist and apothecary’, and as being ‘of the City of Quebec in North
America’. His partner, Thomas Bridge, of Bread Street, London, is
described as a ‘drugg merchant’. Spruce beer, made by the distillation
of a concentrate of saturated spruce twigs, is a traditional drink popular with the
native populations of North America, and the essence, exported by ship
in sealed containers to the port cities on the eastern seaboard of the
continent, would have been expected to find a ready market. From the
above, and from advertisements in the Quebec Gazette which came out
first in 1764, it is clear that Henry Taylor was well established in
business in Quebec City from the early 1760s. He would probably have
settled there soon after the ceding of Canada to Britain under the
Treaty of Paris in 1763, or possibly even before. At the time of
Henry’s death in 1773, his widow, Ann Taylor, was left with a young
family of two boys and three girls, the eldest, Anna Maria, known as
Nancy (7), then John (5), Hetty Martha (3), Henry (1 or possibly 2) and
finally Jane Harris born just 3 months after his death.
Ann Johnston was the fifth child, and third daughter,
of John Johnston, a prominent merchant in
the town of Stromness in Orkney, and of Marjorie Crafts, daughter of an
ensign in Cromwell’s army. Born in 1727, Ann would have been in her mid
to late thirties when she took ship to Canada and married Henry. As a
middle aged spinster, as she would then have been considered, it is
probable that she was travelling to Quebec to keep house for her elder
brother, James, born in Stromness three years before her, in
1724. James is referred to in family records as ‘Captain’ James and
family tradition has it that he commanded the battery that killed
General Richard Montgomery during the American revolutionaries’ abortive
attempt to storm the Quebec defences on 31 December 1775. The death of
Montgomery was an important turning point in the battle, and is well
documented in historical records, although there appears to be no record
of a Captain Johnston among the defending force. It is probable that he
was in a local militia, rather than in any regular army unit, and this
would be consistent with him being resident in the city, and probably in
business, at the time when Ann travelled there in about 1764. As a
prominent member of the English speaking business community that settled
in Quebec City following the conquest, James was active in local politics
and, as foreman of the Grand Jury set up in 1764, would have been
largely responsible for the outspoken ‘presentment’ by that body that so
infuriated the first Governor of the province, General James Murray.
James was probably influenced in establishing his business in Quebec
by his first cousin, Joseph Isbister, recorded as the first Orkneyman to
attain a governorship in the Hudsons Bay Company, and who settled in the
city in 1760 aided by Governor Murray. James was unmarried at the time,
and did not in fact marry until November 1783, when he was 59 years
old. His wife, Margaret Mackneider, is recorded in family records as
being only 17 when she married James. Margaret gave him two surviving
children, John and Ann, the latter known as Nan, born in 1785.
Following James’ death in Quebec in 1800, Margaret is reported in the
family records as having remarried in 1807.
John Johnston and
Marjorie Crafts raised between them a family of eight children in
Stromness, three boys and five girls. The eldest boy, Joshua, born
1720, became head of the family when his father died in 1757, and having
qualified in Edinburgh as a lawyer, became a prominent Stromness
businessman and landowner in Orkney. Some of his correspondence with
his brother, James, in Quebec City, and with his younger brother, John, who
also settled there in the mid 1770s, survives. John, the youngest
of the eight children, born in 1735, appears to have had an interesting
and varied career. In 1763, aged 28, he is writing to his mother from
Charlestown, South Carolina, having just arrived by ship from Havana in
Cuba when actually bound for Pensacola in the Gulf of Mexico with
tradable goods, the captain “being ignorant of the current and having
steered a wrong course”. It would appear that his journey had started
in Quebec “as I had a little insurance made for me when I left Quebec”.
From 1769 to about 1773, John is writing to his brother in Stromness
from an address in London, having established himself as a watchmaker, a
trade which he probably took with him to Quebec. Also around 1769 he
married Janet Laing, a sister of Joshua’s business associate, Robert
Laing of Papdale, but there is no evidence that Janet ever joined her
husband in Quebec. John and Janet had no children, and when John died
in August 1781 in Quebec, at the comparatively young age of 46, his
rather meagre bequest to his wife, then living with her brother in
Shapinsay in Orkney, caused a little friction between Joshua and his
business associate.
Joshua Johnston
married in 1749 Margaret Halcro, daughter of a prominent Orkney
landowner, and produced a large family of his own, of which there were
seven girls and one boy. John, known to the family as Jack, was the
fifth child of this union and was clearly awarded a special status as the
only male heir in the family. His Uncle John, then living in London,
appears to have taken it upon himself to advise his elder brother on the
education of his nephew in subjects suitable to acquire a position in
business, and young John spent some of his formative years at a school
in Enfield, then a rural suburb of London. The family business in
Quebec City, now trading under the name of Johnston and Purss (James Johnston
having acquired a business partner in John Purss), was clearly regarded
as a suitable environment for young John to acquire business
experience. In May 1781, John, then 21, and accompanied by his first
cousin, James Irvine, and by his spinster aunt, Jean, took ship from
Portsmouth to join his two uncles and his Aunt Ann in Quebec. When the
party arrived on 24 August, they were to find that, sadly, his Uncle
John had died only a few days earlier.
 John and his cousin James
Irvine were by no means the only
ones of their generation of the Johnston family to cross the Atlantic to
try their hand in business in Quebec. John’s brother in law, William Halcro, married in 1770 to Joshua’s eldest daughter, Margaret, was
active in foreign travel and, in a letter written in September 1780 from
Stromness, Margaret shows her impatience for news of William’s expected
return from Quebec. In 1783, writing from Quebec City to her father in Stromness, Margaret records that she had arrived in Quebec herself on 15
June to join her husband. In May 1782, another brother in law, John
Urquhart, the husband of Joshua’s second daughter, Marjory, also
travelled to Quebec, and Marjory joined him there a few years later.
One of their two younger sons, James born in 1790, was probably born in
Quebec, and in 1792, the year of birth of the youngest son, Joshua, she
is reported as having to return to Scotland hastily, in some distress as
“her present situation makes it still harder upon her”. John Urquhart
travelled inland at least as far as Niagara from where he reported home
on successful business dealings with Native American traders.
Meanwhile, James Irvine, the son of Joshua’s younger sister Elizabeth,
married in 1763 to Adam Irvine, was despatched to set up trading
establishments for the family business in various North American cities,
including New York, Kingston in Jamaica and later Halifax in Nova
Scotia, but apparently with only limited success.
Preceding John and James by some years were the two
Geddes brothers, David and George, sons of Kath Johnston, Joshua’s
eldest sister, both of whom made their mark in the American colonies.
David emigrated to Canada around 1768 to work with his uncle in Quebec.
On the outbreak of war with the American colonists, he signed up and
served as paymaster in General Burgoyne’s army before being captured in
the surrender at Saratoga (1777). In 1781 he returned to Stromness to
set up in business on his own and was subsequently appointed as resident
agent for the Hudsons Bay Company in that town. George Geddes, a noted
Jacobite, was by 1784 in New York, apparently with the title of Captain,
although this was most probably by virtue of his rank in the American
revolutionary army.
Meanwhile, the family appears to have been prospering
in Quebec City, their prosperity seemingly a product of their pioneering
exploit to manufacture and sell essence of spruce. After Henry Taylor’s
death in June 1773, the production was taken over by the family
business, Johnston & Purss, but transacted nominally under the name of
Henry’s widow, Ann Taylor. However, the subsequent court proceedings
show that the legal structure to allow this was never properly
established.
The education of Ann’s two sons became a necessity
and in July 1782, the elder son, John, at the age of about fourteen, was
sent to boarding school in England, his Uncle James writing that John
should be given “the best school education you can obtain for him in
England (at any expense) preparative to his becoming in time a good man
and compleat distiller”. His younger brother, Henry, followed just a
year later. Henry’s letters home to his mother and sisters, the first
written when he was aged about 11, are touching in their simplicity.
However, in 1786, disaster struck the family back in
Quebec. James Johnston wrote to a friend in July: “This spring has
proved a mortal one, a contagious scarlet fever and sore throat
prevailed for some months and carried off a great many, especially a
number of young people…” Among those to die were Ann Taylor’s two
eldest daughters, Hetty on 3 March, aged nearly seventeen, after an
illness of just four days, and her sister, Nancy, aged twenty, on the
following day, after a rather longer illness. James’ young wife,
Margaret, was also taken ill but recovered. One can imagine the effect
on the remaining Taylor girl, Jane Harris, having lost her father and
her two elder sisters, and with her only remaining siblings both away at
boarding school in England. Later letters hint at erratic and
irrational behaviour by her mother, probably a result of the sudden and
tragic loss of her two daughters.
Jane Harris was known in the family as Jennie and it
is clear that a close relationship between her, her family, and her
cousin John, son of Joshua, developed within a very short period of
John’s arrival in Quebec. Although there are no letters from John
himself surviving from that time, or from Jane, the letters from John’s
cousin and confidant, Crafts MacKay, living in London, are revealing.
Writing to John in May 1783, shortly after having spoken with young John
Taylor at school at Waltham Abbey, Crafts writes: “I find you are a
particular favourite of his, as well as of his mother & sisters. The
eldest I find is a sweet girl. I heartily wish you success”. Later he
says: “I conclude with love to you & best respects to your new intended
arrangement”, which would imply that John had initially taken a fancy to
Nancy who at 17 to his 22 would have been closer to his age. Nancy’s
and Hetty’s deaths three years later would no doubt have prompted John
to take up with his much younger cousin, Jane, thirteen years his
junior. Whatever the circumstances, John and Jane were married on 29
July 1788 under licence issued by Guy, Lord Dorchester, Captain General
and Governor in Chief of the Province of Quebec, and signed by David
Lynd, Registrar. Jane was then just two months short of her fifteenth
birthday. One month later, the two of them left Canada to return to
Orkney, Jane, by family tradition, clutching her dolls.
The family business, still trading mainly in the
export of essence of spruce, appears to have continued operating from
Quebec City under James Johnston’s guidance at least until his death in
1800. Writing in October 1785 to William Brymer, his banker in London,
James reports four shipments of essence in a three month period, valued
at £1191 in total, and asks for cash disbursements to be made to members
of the family living in Britain. However, the business seems to have
tailed off after this, largely as a result of an acrimonious court case
brought by Ann Taylor, assisted by a person unnamed but referred to in
family correspondence as “that vile man”, to recover for Ann the
proceeds of her husbands estate. John Purss writing in December 1800 to
John Johnston back in Stromness, then the head of the family following
the death in 1794 of his father, Joshua, reports the remittance of
money, seemingly his wife’s share of the proceeds of the remnant of his
‘father in law’s estate’, i.e. that of Dr Henry Taylor. The two boys,
John & Henry Taylor, do not appear to have participated actively in the
business, neither of them returning to Quebec after their schooling in
England. John Taylor was apprenticed for a while to a chemist in
Edinburgh but eventually made a successful career for himself serving in
the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Henry was last heard of in
Halifax, Nova Scotia, and may have settled there.
James’ wife, Margaret, became a regular correspondent
with Jane Johnston, now back in Orkney, whom she refers to as ‘Dear
Niece’, both of them having the shared experience of a childhood in
Quebec, Margaret being seven years the elder. In 1887, Margaret
experienced her own tragedy with the loss of a young son, James, from
smallpox, “as promising a boy as ever was born”. In her letters,
Margaret provides some insight into the social life of the small
Scottish community in Quebec City, as well as news of family and friends. In
her letter of August 1800 she reports with great sadness her husband’s
death “on the 8th of last April after a very severe illness of three
months the most of which time he was entirely confined to his bed”.
Apart from a visit to her parents living in Kilmarnock, in Scotland, she
appears to have remained in Quebec with her young family, although the
sale of the family home, ‘a large and commodious stone dwelling house,
being near the Church of Beauport about five miles from Quebec’, was
advertised in the Quebec Gazette in May 1804. Following the death of
James, John Purss continued an intermittent correspondence on behalf of
Johnston and Purss on business and family matters with John in Stromness.
From this, it is possible to glean that James Irvine may have finally
settled in Quebec, possibly with a family, and that Joshua Halcro, a son
of William Halcro, was found a place by him in 1801 with the North West
Company (The Hudson Bay Company) for a six year engagement. There is no
positive report of the death of Ann Taylor but probably she died not
long after her brother, James.
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