Author: BUCHANAN, Colin
Biography:
BUCHANAN, Colin (c. 1765-1840: ancestry.co.uk)
Both William Cushing and the Houghton Library attribute A Walk from the Town of Lanark to the Falls of Clyde (1816) to C. Buchanan and the attribution is supported by evidence from the poem itself. This was Colin Buchanan, probably the son of Colin Buchanan and his wife Janet Gordon who was baptised at Glasgow on 4 Nov. 1765. He established a school in Greenock and published educational works including Writing Made Easy (1797) and The Writing Master and Accountant’s Assistant (1798). On 17 July 1795 he married Eliza Houston in Greenock; the marriage record gives his occupation as writing master. They had numerous children including a son, Robert, who became a teacher and a daughter, Martha, who died, aged twenty-one, in 1829. On 26 May 1837 a group of Greenock citizens presented Buchanan with an award commemorating his contributions to education in the town. Ancestry family trees give his date of death as 13 May 1840 but no record or newspaper notice has been located. Eliza Buchanan died at the age of ninety on 25 Feb. 1862. (ancestry.co.uk 15 May 2025; findmypast.co.uk 15 May 2025; Star (London) 15 Sept. 1829; Liverpool Albion 5 June 1837; Greenock Telegraph 1 Mar. 1862; Testimonials of Mr. Robert Buchanan, Teacher of Writing and Arithmetic, Greenock [1824]; William Cushing, Anonyms: A Dictionary of Revealed Authorship [1889]) SR