The Dwelling House of James Shearer
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THE DWELLING HOUSE OF JAMES SHEARER The Story of the Tam O'Shanter Inn ssil qLL.'t? ,t,'tr Written ond illustrated by JOSEPH D. SHEARER I A SOUVENIR OF THE I TAM O'STTANIER MUSEUM ( AyR- scorLAND THE DWETLING HOUSE OF JAMES SHEARER The Story of the Tam O'Shanter Inn Written and illustrated by JOSEPH D. SHEARER THE BUILDING SEOUENCE ON THE PROPERTY BETWEEN 1597 AND 1849 The Shapes of the Houses Before '1748 Are Only Conjecture. No Description Exists 1597 Otd House on South Part"ot Site 1647 and 1695 New House Old House Emptv 1695 Old House Collapsed Between 1695 and 1748 Area Cleared Between 1748 and 1753 Rebuilt by James Shearer 1849 South Part ot Tenement Demolished and Made One Large Tenement and Rebuilt The Early History The two storey building now known as the Tam O'Shanter Museum has stood on the east side of the High Street in the Townhead of Ayr for nearly two and a half centuries and is the only example left in Ayr of the dwelling house of an ordinary eighteenth century family. The earliest surviving docu- ment which mentions the property on which it stands is a Title Deed of 1597 when there was a house, already old, on the south part of the site. During the sixteenth century the house and yard had been owned by Adam Bizzert, a weaver and then by David Blair, a cooper. The area where the present museum stands was vacant and it remained thus until sometime after 1647. The old house was at that time without a tenant, perhaps uninhabitable, and the owners William and Gabriel Cunningham built another house on the vacant site and let it to Alexander Graham, a weaver. By 1695 the original house had fallen down, like many others in Ayr which was then in a state of economic depression and the whole property was purchased from Gabriel Cunningham's son by James Wilson, a merchant of Ayr who owned land and houses all over the town. Thirty years later the property passed to James Wilson's son Joseph Wilson of Barnmure, former Provost of Ayr. Sometime during the first half of the eighteenth century the original house had been demolished for by 1748 there was only one house standing, the other according to a Title Deed of that year "now taken down and only the area remaining." Whether the remaining house, built between 164'7 and 1695, was the present one is doubtful. The present building covers more than half the width of the plot and this would scarcely leave enough room for the original house on the south part of the site plus access to the plot. It is more likely that it was a one storey two-roomed cottage for in February of 1748 Elizabeth Wilson, the only surviving child and heir of Joseph Wilson, with her husband Alexander Farquhar of Gilmilnscroft, sold the property to James Shearer for nine pounds ten shillings sterling. The price was low even for those days and further suggests that the remaining house was small and perhaps rundown. In the year 1748 James Shearer was tyenty-five years old and betrothed to nineteen-year old Anne Goudie, daughter of Robert Goudie the flesher and his wife Agnes McNaught and niece of Patrick McNaught of Barns. They were to be married in Ayr Auld Kirk later that year and it is probable that during the summer and autumn before his marriage James started work on rebuilding the house or at least making it habitable. .It is certain that by April of 1753 the house had been enlarged to make one large tenement of two stories covering the whole width of the plot with the southmost part projecting by one room's width on to the street and a close giving access to the stables and ground at the back of the house. This part had three rooms upstairs, all with fireplaces, a small apartment and shop downstairs and was let to tenants. The northmost building he retained as his dwelling house. It was to be the home of James and Anne, their children and their grandchildren for the next ninety years and for more than a century after that was to become famous as the Tam O'Shanter Inn. There had been Shearers in Ayr two hundred years before James's day, probably the same family since they bear the hereditary names of William, John and Elizabeth. But there is a gap in the records in covenanting times and it cannot be certain. James's grandfather William, born in the early 1660's, was one of those who withdrew from the Kirk when Charles the Second tried to impose Episcopalian forms of worship on the Church of Scotland and it was not until 1690 with the re-introduction of Presbyterianism by William of Orange that the Shearers began to record their marriages and the births of their children. In the 1690's they followed three trades, landlabourer, tailor and wright. Landlabourers were not, as their name might suggest, farm workers but townsmen who owned and cultivated their own plots of ground, hiring themselves out with their horses, ploughs and other implements to work the land of merchants and tradesmen. In Ayr "The Landlabourers of the Tounheid" were almost a separate community living in that part of the town above the old Wallace Tower in High Street and the Cow Vennell, the modern Alloway Street. William Shearer had a house in the Vennell and besides working his land acted as one of the town's carriers, a hazardous occupation in the days when there were virtually no roads in Scotland and goods had to be carried in small quantities by packhorse. In 1700 he was commissioned to carry the town's tax money to Edinburgh and the Magistrates and Councillors made a point of having it entered in the Council Minutes that the Provost was not to be held responsible "in case the foresaid money shall meet with any disappointment, unscariadge, neglect or be taken by the way, that the same shall not be binding upon or militate against the said Provost he having done the same as ane deed of trust for the good of the toun and at their desire". William Shearer had three sons survivingby 1714, John, James and Archibald and in that year all four were included in a list of the four hundred and forty six inhabitants of military age in the burgh, that is between sixteen and sixty. George the First had come to the throne and there was fear of a Jacobite rising in support of the exiled Stuarts. But Ayr had bitter memories of Charles II and his brother James VII and wanted no more of the Stuarts. On the 27th July 1715 "there was a general rendezvous of the fencible men within this burgh upon the news of ane intended descent upon Brittain by the Pretender". The Old Pretender did land and the Duke of Argyll, Commander-in-Chief of the Government Forces in Scotland and desperately short of men, appealed to the burghs for troops to march against the Highland Jacobites. Twenty-five year old John Shearer enlisted with other young men in the town's company of soldiers and all were admitted burgesses as an inducement. They marched north in late September of 1715 to join Argyll's army but they do not seem to have fought at Sheriffmuir. Within a few months John was back home and married to Mary Beattie. His brothers, twenty-one year old James and nineteen year old Archie, had stayed at home and James, a land- labourer like his father, married eighteen year old Agnes Kerr in April of 1716. They had four children during the next twelve years but both James and Agnes were dead before they were forty and of their children only James born in 1722 survived. He was brought up by his grandparents in the Cow Vennell and nothing is known of his early life until 1744 when at the age of twenty-one he was summoned before the Kirk Session with two other young men James Hume and John Simpson on a charge of rape brought by Margaret Smith. She accused all three of dragging her into a stable in the Carrick Vennell one night in March and raping her. They denied it, all producing witnesses who swore on oath that the accused had been elsewhere in their company at the time of the alleged assault. Someone was lying and the case dragged on for a year but was never resolved and the accused were never brought to trial. In the year James Shearer built his house Ayr had changed little since medieval days. In 1747 there were still open wells in the High Street and the in- habitants of the Townhead sent a petition to the Council complaining that the only well in their part of the town was almost ruinous, the ledges loose and partly fallen into the well. It was uncovered, almost level with the street which rendered it dangerous at night and was frequently stopped up with rubbish and dirt thrown into it by boys. The inhabitants "were obliged often to drink and make use of unwholesome water without knowing the same, which certainly cannot but be pernicious to their health through the dead dogs and catts being thrown into it in the night time." Their petition was successful and by the time James Shearer's house was built the well was covered and a pump fitted.