William Crawford of Lochwinnoch

William Crawford played a significant part in the history of the Village of Lochwinnoch. He was the owner of the Calder Glen woolen mill which was said to have employed about 150 people at the peak its business activity. William also married into the large and influential Orr family from the Kaim, a few years after the untimely death of his first wife. His descendants lived in Lochwinnoch until the 1950’s. He and his second wife, Agnes Orr are buried in the graveyard at Auld Simon along with their son William and son-in-law James Hepburn.

This collection of information is intended, in part, as a record of a bit of the village history. The secondary purpose of the author, a great-great-grandson of this William Crawford, is to seek assistance of local and international readers with his genealogical research.

Below are links to a variety of documents and photographs, both old and new, that are relevant to local history;

• The ‘Calder Glen Woolen Mill’ documents what is currently known about the business activity conducted at a site at the North end of Calder Street.
• The ‘Descendants of an Unknown Crawford’ is a file from the authors genealogical database which provides some biographical data on some family members. Recent generations have been omitted for reasons of privacy but family relations may contact the author for details.
• Not available yet…. soon… ‘A Story from Memory – Part 1’ is part of an unpublished autobiography by James Thomas Orr Hepburn, grandson of William Crawford. It recounts his life in Scotland from 1875 to 1910.
• ‘The Last William Orr of Kaim’ records what we know about the last Orr owner of the Kaim. He died in 1915, a victim of a German torpedo, and is memorialized by a monument in the Lochwinnoch cemetery.

The Historical Images section of this website contain a number of Lochwinnoch picture postcards donated by the author. They come from an extensive collection that was assembled by the author’s grandmother, Margaret McLean (Smith) Hepburn (1880-1965) between 1904 and 1910. Margaret was born and raised in Scotland but she did not know her husband to be, James Hepburn, until they met in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

In the fall 1905 an amateur photographer, James Heythorne, visited Lochwinnoch and photographed a number of the scenes around the village. James Hepburn, grandson of William Crawford and a friend of James Heythorne, assembled copies of a number of the photographs in a small album. Copies of several of these images may also be found in the Historical Images section.

Reproduced with permission David Williams, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada