NEILSON, JAMES (1817-1911)

NEILSON, JAMES, engineer, steamboat builder, and inventor; b. Glasgow, Scotland, 16 Apr 1817 (bap. 20 Apr 1817), s/o William Neilson and Marion Ferguson; m. 1841, Margaret Morgan; d. Belmont, Mass., 12 Dec 1911.

The son of a plowman who moved to Glasgow from Hamilton, Scotland, James Neilson stated that his family's surname had been in the books of the Duke of Hamilton for 500 years. He had an unconventional education, attending school between the ages of five and seven, and then going to work in the factories of Glasgow until he was fifteen. Afterwards, he apprenticed as an engineer and machinist.

Neilson was married in Glasgow in 1841. Six years later he left Scotland with his wife and children and sailed for Nova Scotia. He worked for a year for the Halifax & Dartmouth Steamboat Co., after which he joined the Cunard shipping firm as a marine engineer. He was the chief engineer on the packet steamer Rose, which went into service in 1849 between Pictou and Prince Edward Island. On 4 October 1851 this vessel was out in the 'Yankee Gale', in which more than seventy fishing schooners and other small craft, mostly from New England, were wrecked off the coast of the Island, and 160 lives lost. His control of the Rose in the storm was credited with saving the lives of the thirty-two men on board, but the experience caused him to abandon the sea. Soon afterwards he settled in Chatham as foreman of the Miramichi Foundry, which was acquired in the fall of 1852 by William J. Fraser.

Neilson remained with the foundry for twenty-five years, during which time he accumulated many firsts. He built the first marine boiler and the first land boiler to be constructed on the Miramichi. For Alexander Goodfellow, in 1855, he built the first steam mill for which all the machinery was of local construction. In 1866 he invented a special steering apparatus for the barque Confederate Star, which was constructed by Patrick Carroll for Cassidy, Tozer & Co. In 1870 he built, with his own labor and for his own use, the tugboat LADDIE, which was the first such vessel for which all of the parts, including the engine and boiler, were of local manufacture. He later built and owned the steamers Wee Laddie and Jubilee.

After he lost his left eye in an accident about 1877 Neilson left the foundry and began to work independently. Tugboating was a major activity in this period, but he also took construction and other contracts. In 1881 he had the contract for placing, raising, and keeping in repair the Miramichi buoys. In 1883-84 he built several large boilers for steam mills at Bathurst and elsewhere on the North Shore.

Neilson was in Watertown, Mass., in 1893 when his invention of a rotary engine was announced. In his later years he wintered in New England and spent his summers in Chatham as a guest of the Canada House hotel. In 1897 he built a steam tug for J. W. & J. Anderson of Burnt Church. In 1904, when he was eighty-seven, he designed and built a new steamer for himself at the Ruddock yard which he named the James Neilson. He engaged Daniel Desmond to work on the hull, but he built the engine with his own hands. In 1906 he took the contract to erect a seventy-two-foot smokestack for the Miller Tanning Extract Co. at Millerton. He carried out the job with three assistants. It was not until the summer of 1908 that he found it necessary to retire.

Neilson and his wife, Margaret Morgan, were affiliated with St Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Chatham. His wife died in 1869, forty-two years prior to his own death. They had nine children, of whom a son and four daughters survived him. Their son, James F. Neilson, made his home in New Westminster, B.C. Their daughter Ellen Neilson was the wife of John J. Harrington, the Bathurst lawyer who was a son of John Harrington of Chatham.