Old Photograph Jordanhill College Glasgow Scotland

Old photograph of Jordanhill College, Glasgow, Scotland. In 1546 Lawrence Crawford of Kilbirnie founded a chaplainry at Drumry, and to sustain it endowed it with the freehold ownership of land at Jordanhill. His sixth son Thomas Crawford was a soldier who lead the 1571 capture of Dumbarton Castle, who had previously acquired the lands at Jordanhill from the chaplain of Drumry in 1562. There he built a house, possibly on or close to the foundations of an original hunting lodge. In the 1700s, one of his descendants also called Lawrence Crawford extended and refurbished the old house. In 1750 the Crawford family sold the estate to Tobacco Lords Alexander Houston, whose family was also forced to sell the estate in 1800 after his business got in to trouble, to James Smith of merchants Smith & Leitch. The third son of a Tobacco Lord from Craigend, James's two elder brothers having travelled to Virginia and North Carolina in the 1760s had noted the growing civil uprising warning of the forth coming American War of Independence, and had resultantly refocused their family's merchant business on trade with the West Indies. By the early 1800s, and after the death of their father, all three sons could afford to retire. A keen leisure sailor, in 1827 Smith bought the Baths Hotel at Helensburgh. With seven children, after two of his daughters caught tuberculosis, the family relocated temporarily to Portugal and rented out the house for five years. After the death of both daughters, the family returned to the estate in 1846, but in 1847 Mrs. Smith died of pneumonia. Comfortable but with less of a fortune, Smith devoted his remaining twenty years to church works and supporting his children in their endeavours. After the death of his father in 1866, his son Archibald Smith inherited the by now neglected Jordanhill estate. Following the death of Archibald Colin Hamilton Smith in Australia on 5 June 1971, the sixth generation of the family who died without issue, the Smith family papers dealing with the Jordanhill Estate were donated to the Glasgow City Archives at the Mitchell Library. Many of the Smith family are buried in the graveyard surrounding Renfrew Parish Church. In 1913 Glasgow Corporation agreed a deal to buy the estate from the Smith family, and build both a teacher training college and the associated Jordanhill School on the site. However, after the outbreak of World War I, developments for the teacher training college were put on hold, as the former manor house was taken over as a temporary military hospital. After the cessation of hostilities, a new building was planned to provide teacher training. With the new school completed in 1920 and the college in 1921.



All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

View the most recent Tour Scotland photographs.