McManus 168

David Henry Johnston was born into the family of George Johnston, a linen manufacturer, in East Wemyss, Fife. George and his brother James took the local handloom weaving industry into a mechanised one with their introduction of a power loom factory. The village of East Wemyss was once described as follows; ….it is pleasant to be able to state that through the enterprise of Messrs Johnston, whose steam factory is well employed, the village is what the artist would speak of as “a study in black and white – coals and linen.”^[10] The linen, after it came from the bleach works on the banks of the Leven, was described “as white as the driven snaw.”^[10]

David was employed as a merchant for the company in Dundee throughout the 1860s. The presence of ‘G & J Johnston’ as merchants in Dundee continued to appear in the Dundee Postal Directory up to 1871-72. In the early 1870s David Henry Johnston moved with his wife and first child George Christie back to Fife^[8] where his second son Henry Sibbald was born in 1872. Thereafter, David’s brother Alexander Charles Johnston continued to conduct business as a commission merchant from the Cowgate in Dundee during the 1870s.

David’s father George died in 1874.^[11] At that point, David Henry Johnstone (sometime merchant in Dundee),^[11] together with his younger brother George, had become manufacturers in Sinclairtown, Fife.^[11]

Three years later, David emigrated^[12] with his wife and two sons to the United States in 1877.^[13][5] Having set sail on the ‘Bolivia,’ the family landed at New York on 25 April 1877.^[13] At that point, David was declared in the passenger list as a ‘merchant.’ He was to be followed to Oregon by his brother George five years later.

The family finally settled in Mehema, Oregon where David, far from Wemyss and, far from the linen trade, made a living as a farmer.

Wemyss Fabrics (Holdings) Ltd, the current form of a business started by David’s father and uncle, continues to trade from Dundee in 2018.