, Archie the Widow (Eigg Mountain Settlement History)

This was an especially large well-defined basement when Lame Angus saw it as a youngster (19 teens/ 20s).  The first occupant at this site was the son of Old John MacIsaac, Archie “the Widow.”  The house was probably abandoned in the late 1800s.^[1]  Kenton later indicated that Archie the widow was a first generation settler who left early, perhaps around 1840 to settle in Fairmont.^[2]  This fits with the state of decay of the foundation and the difficulty in discerning fields from the aerial photographs.  The land was originally granted to a Malcolm MacKinnon (from Grants Index, 1953).

We finally found the house site August 9, 2015.  It was one of those cases where I walked straight to it.  It is very overgrown with almost no rock showing in the cellar walls. It measures 24 X 25 feet and is oriented 41º.  The cellar steps appear to be on the south side facing the stream.  The extent of Archie’s fields is still unclear.

Figure 1 – Cellar Looking North.  It is difficult to get the camera to show what the eyes can see when a cellar is overgrown like this.  The depression becomes just a jumble of logs and foliage.  So I have resorted to using stereo pairs, which if you can freeview, heighten the 3-D effect.  This pair is designed for cross-viewing – that is the image for the left eye is on the right and vice versa.

^[1] Kenton Teasdale, Eigg Mountain, November 4, 2005.

^[2] Kenton Teasdale, 12 August 2015.