Old Photograph East Donnington Street Darvel Scotland

Old photograph of houses, people and a horse and cart on East Donnington Street in Darvel, a small town situated ten miles East of Kilmarnock in East, Ayrshire, Scotland. Darvel is situated on the A71 road that runs from Irvine on the west coast to Edinburgh on the east. The town is nine miles east of Kilmarnock and is the most easterly of the Valley Towns, the others being Galston and Newmilns. The land on which Darvel was built was owned by Earls of Loudoun and it was John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun who began the modern town in 1754 as an income for the estate. By 1780, the population had increased to over 400. In 1876, the art of lace making was introduced to the town and many mills were built to keep up with the demand. Sir Alexander Fleming, was born on 6 August 1881, at Lochfield farm near Darvel. He was a Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and botanist. His best known discoveries are the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the world's first antibiotic substance benzylpenicillin, Penicillin G, from the mould Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. He wrote many articles on bacteriology, immunology, and chemotherapy. On 24 December 1915, Fleming married a trained nurse, Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, County Mayo, Ireland. Their only child, Robert Fleming, became a general medical practitioner. After his first wife's death in 1949, Fleming married Dr. Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, a Greek colleague at St. Mary's, on 9 April 1953; she died in 1986. From 1921 until his death in 1955, Fleming owned a country home in Barton Mills, Suffolk, England. Of interest to folks with ancestry, genealogy or Scottish Family Roots in Scotland who may wish to visit one day.



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