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Continuing onward from New York City, the newly-arrived young Scottish immigrants journeyed away from the Atlantic's big ocean waters to settle inland at a Pennsylvania river town, the same place where JOHN TAYLOR had resided during the previous two years. Pointing somewhat starboard of Polaris, Wilkes-Barre's Main Street lay at a few blocks' distance from an eastward bulge of the Susquehanna River. Through the pulsating heart of this growing industrial city, Market Street proceeded westerly across town after intersecting the principal avenue and then spread beyond Franklin and River Streets to reach the closest point of the river's curving intrusion. On the north side, Union and North Streets ran parallel above Market; the routes of Northampton and South also stretched laterally, below to the south. 
Wilkes-Barre about 1/3 century after John, Mary, and Magnus arrived Nestled in a region of mild summers and harsh, cold, snowy winters of northeastern Pennsylvania, their new American home profiled the main anthracite coal-mining area of the U. S. In this curious lower latitude, daylight of summer was not as long, nor that of winter so brief, as in northern Scotland. For the very first time in their lives, JOHN's wife and his brother Magnus were withdrawn from the more moderate seaside climate of their native land. With not even a splash of palpitating saltwater in sight, tree-populated land stretched off in every direction to the low ranges of mountains defining their Pennsylvania horizons. The young Orcadians were no longer linked to the beloved homeland of their youth, with its oceanview and treeless hills, except by invincible family ties. The Welsh parents of little 8-year-old Elizabeth Edwards, the girl who would marry JOHN's brother Andrew Taylor ten years later, left England aboard ship with their family, undergoing the dreary fatiguing journey to a new home in Pennsylvania. Near an old Pawnee Indian campground several hundred miles farther west, a small hill blended with the surrounding undulations in the midst of a spacious bluestem prairie. Six decades later, Elizabeth, Andrew, JOHN, and MARY -- all these British natives -- would have finally wound up on that same little knoll situated halfway across the American continent. The name Pennsylvania meant "Penn's woods," and the geographic jurisdiction was sometimes called the Quaker State. A century and a half earlier, William Penn had lived for several years in Philadelphia, the city of his own creation; however the life of America's leading Society of Friends member began and ended in England. His colonial woods in America were comprised of oak, maple, ash, elm, sycamore, and pine trees; and these forests were populated with white-tailed deer, black bears, and squirrels. Rabbits, woodchucks, raccoons, beavers, and groundhogs were also plentiful in Pennsylvania. And there were game birds such as passenger pigeons, woodcocks, wild turkeys, ring-necked pheasants, bobwhite quail, Canada geese, and ducks. Wilkes-Barre, Pa., birthplace of George Catlin, was settled on the east bank of the Susquehanna River way back in 1769 and incorporated several years later. During 1851, the famed 55-year-old artist and traveler was preparing for an extensive five-year tour of South America, Central America, and the Far West. There in Luzerne county on Saturday, March 15, 1851, the first pregnancy of Isabella (Robertson) Taylor produced the only son ever to be born into their family. Baby William was given a middle initial of R, representing his mother's family name more likely than the given name of his father, Robert. The very day following ROBERT and Elspeth's first wedding anniversary, JOHN's stepmother delivered a baby daughter on Thursday, April 24, at Orphir. JOHN's new little sister was named Robina. And around this time in western Pennsylvania, near Sligo in Clarion county, Sarah (Ward) Kerns presented her husband, Nicholas, with a new infant. The little girl, their ninth child, was given the name Sallie. |
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