John & Magdalene Nairn

NAIRN NISBET ROBERTSON DOUGLASS

Posted By: Connie Swearingen (email)
Date: 9/24/2010 at 21:22:58

History of Woodbury County, Iowa 1984
John and Magdalene (Nisbet) Nairn
By Peggy Troy

John Nairn, an early Sioux City settler who founded ‘Nairn’s Mill’ near Salix in 1970, was born on September 22, 1828, in the small seaside village of Coldingham, Berwickshire, Scotland. He was the eighth of ten children of James Nairn, a builder, and Margaret (Robertson) Nairn. As a child, John Nairn was fond of reading about America and its Indians. He never dreamed, he said later, that both would play a large part in his life. He learned the carpentry trade from his father and intended to stay in his father’s house-and cart-building business in Coldingham.

But a break with his fiancée, Margaret Davidson in the early 1850’s probably began to change the direction of John Nairn’s life. In 1851, he was married to Magdalene Nisbet, a teacher who was born in Coldingham on January 27, 1827, to William Nisbet and Cecilia Douglass. Magdalene, her great-niece Dorothy Buckley later recalled, ‘was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen…Her hair was a mass of short curls, her complexion peaches and cream.’ Margaret Davidson – like Magdalene – was well liked in Coldingham, and life for John Nairn in the town after he left her must have been difficult. He decided to go to America, and arrived in Philadelphia on the fourth of July 1852. Magdalene and the Nairn’s baby daughter, Cecilia, followed a few months later.

Chicago was the next stop for John Nairn. But cholera was widespread there, so he went on to Rock Island, Illinois. Then he and his friend, Alex Hunter, heard of government jobs open for builders on the Dakota ‘Sioux’ Indian reservation in southern Minnesota. John was hired to help build Ft. Ridgely, a fort near New Ulm that was later to help save his life.

By 1855, John Nairn was supervising the building of bridges and a government sawmill at Redwood Falls, Minnesota. In 1857, he became head builder at the Lower Sioux Agency, ten miles to the Southeast. Redwood Falls was the birthplace of the Nairns’ son, James, 1856, and their daughter, Margaret Robertson ‘Maggie’ in 1859.

John Nairn ‘seemed to understand the Indians and had great sympathy with their cause,’ as his great-niece Dorothy Buckley put it later. ‘Mr Nairn. . . had, by his urbane manners and strict attention to their interests, secured the friendship of many of the tribe,’ wrote Charles S Bryant and Abel B Murch in their 1864 book, A History of the Great Massacre of the Sioux Indians. When the massacre began at the Lower Sioux Agency on August 18, 1862, Mr Nairn’s help to the Sioux was not forgotten. Receiving a tip from friendly Indians, John Nairn fled toward Ft. Ridgely with his wife and four children. The older Nairn children (ten-year-old Cecilia and six-year-old James, went in the wagon of the government schoolmaster. The others, two and one-half-year-old Maggie and six-week-old William, rode in their parents’ wagon, with Maggie strapped in a kerchief on a neighbor’s back. Enroute to the fort, John Nairn swam across the Minnesota River to get a boat for ferrying others to safety. After several days of refuge in and defense of Ft. Ridgely, the Nairns and others were safely moved to St. Peter, Minnesota, and St. Paul. When the massacre ended in late September, 1862, an estimated five hundred whites, including John Nairn’s close friend, Alex Hunter, and one hundred and fifty Indians were dead.

Accounts of the massacre written shortly after it happened seldom showed sympathy toward the Sioux. John Nairn, though appalled by the massacre, wrote a 5,000-word account of pre-massacre events that did not ignore the influence of corrupt whites who had cheated and insulted the Sioux for years. That was an unusual position in John Nairn’s day – and perhaps that’s why the document seems not to have been published.

After the massacre, John Nairn was called upon by the government to help relocate Indians at Ft. Thompson, in what is now central South Dakota. (Mr Nairn had been the head builder of this fort. His sketch of it appeared in Harper’s Weekly on October 28, 1865.

The Nairn family moved after the massacre to the Burlington, Iowa, home of John’s sister, Georginia (Nairn) Jeffrey. There the Nairn’s son, James, died on October 8, 1862, at age six and one-half. John Nairn took his family to live in Omaha, Nebraska, about 1865, and they never again lived among the Indians. But more than a quarter of a century later (as Dorothy Buckley recalled in 1979) Indian leaders were still paying social visits to the Nairn home in Woodbury County, Iowa

The move to Woodbury County came in 1868, a few weeks before the birth of the youngest Nairn child, Elizabeth. There John Nairn became a pioneer businessman, builder, lumberman, and civic leader in both Sioux City and the Salix/Sloan area. He was a founder about 1868 in Sioux City of a firm specializing in building and lumber sales – Nairn and Royce. But he was perhaps best known as the owner of Nairn’s Mill, a large sawmill operation on a 1200-acre tract southwest of Salix in Lakeport Township. From 1870 to the late 1800’s, the mill provided large supplies of building materials for local use, fuel for the Sioux City & Pacific Railroad Co., and employment for many Woodbury County residents.

A few years after John Nairn’s death, the last of the wooden tract on which the mill was located was lost when the Missouri River changed course. Dorothy Buckley, who was born the year John Nairn died, 1894, remembered the event this way: ‘One of the awesome sights of my childhood was driving to the river and seeing mighty chunks of land fall into the water as the river changed its channel. It made a thunderous noise, and was really an interesting sight to see. The Nairns’ entire farm was eaten up by the river.’

The Nairns maintained residence in both Sioux City and the Salix area from about 1870 to 1880. Even after 1880, when they lived mainly in Lakeport Township, they were active in the life of Sioux City. Mr Nairn was an elder and superintendent of the Sunday School at First Presbyterian Church of Sioux City, and in 1881 he was a member of the County Board of Supervisors. He bought a good deal of Sioux City real estate.

In the Salix area, John Nairn’s arrival was a ‘great boon’ to the early settlers, said Louis N Duchaine in his book, Salix – History (published ca 1930’s). Mr Nairn was, Duchaine said, a ‘pioneer settler, prominent businessman, and public benefactor who did not fail to leave an impress for the right upon the community’.

Two of John and Magdalene Nairn’s children died as young adults in Sioux City. Cecilia, a teacher at Sioux City’s Westside School, died in 1874 at age 21. (She was ‘a beautiful and brilliant young lady. . . almost too to live,’ and the Sioux City Times of February 28, 1874. The city’s public schools were closed on the day of her funeral.) Cecilia’s brother, William John Nairn, who was just six weeks old when the Nairns fled the Sioux Indian massacre of 1862, died at age eighteen in 1881.

Maggie Nairn, a teacher and bookkeeper who lived most of her life in Woodbury County, died at age sixty-six in 1926. John Nairn died at age sixty-five on his farm near Salix, April 11, 1894. His wife, Magdalene, died at age eighty-two, on July 17, 1909.

All of John and Magdalene Nairn’s descendants are descended from their youngest daughter, Elizabeth, who was married in 1900 to Robert H Countermine, a pharmacist and business in Sioux City and Salix. The Countermine children were: John, 1901-1901, Douglas William, 1903-?, Madalen Elizabeth ‘Mrs Darrell’ Wilkins, 1905-1068, Isabel Margaret ‘Mrs Thomas V’ Swanson, 1908-1978, and Doris Anna, 1910-1910.
Five of John Nairn’s ten siblings followed him to America and settled in the Midwest between 1857 and 1881. One of his sisters, Georgina ‘Mrs James’ Jeffrey, and two of his nephews, John and Peter Byers, moved to the Sloan area. Another sister, Magdalene ‘Mrs John’ Smith, came to Sioux City in 1881. More than 100 descendants of John Nairn’s parents, James and Margaret R Nairn of Coldingham, Scotland, have lived in Woodbury County.