Robert Burns Beath (1839-1914), President of the United Firemens’ Insurance Company of Philadelphia, and author of the “History of the Grand Army of the Republic” (1888), was of Scots parentage.  William C. Alexander (1806-74), President of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, was second son of Dr. Archibald Alexander of Princeton.  His son James Waddell Alexander (1839-1915), was also President of the same Company.  John Augustine McCall (1849-1906), President of the New York Life Insurance Company, was of Ulster Scot descent.

Men of Scottish birth or Scottish descent have had a prominent place in the development of the railroads of the United States from their inception to the present day.  It was a Scot, Peter Fleming, Surveyor of the upper part of New York city, who laid out the grades for the first railroad in the state.  John Inslee (or Insley) Blair (1802-99), founder of the Lackawanna Coal and Iron Company (1846), financier and founder of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, was a descendant of Samuel Blair who came from Scotland in 1720.  Blairstown, New Jersey, is named in his honor.  He gave half a million dollars to various Presbyterian institutions.  Samuel Sloan (1817-1907), President of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad (1867-99), was born in Lisburn of Ulster Scot ancestry.  John T. Grant (1813-87), railroad builder in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, was of Scottish origin; and so also was Thomas Alexander Scott (1824-81), Vice-President and President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Assistant Secretary of War (1861-62), and President of the Texas Pacific Railroad.  James McCrea (b. 1836), descended from James McCrea, an Ulster Scot who came to America in 1776, was one of the ablest Presidents of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  John Edgar Thompson, third President, Frank Thompson, sixth Vice-President of the Pennsylvania system, were also of Scottish descent.  Alexander Johnson Cassatt, seventh President, was Scottish on his mother’s side.  Another prominent Scot connected with the Pennsylvania Railroad was Robert Pitcairn, born at Johnstone, near Paisley, in 1836.  Angus Archibald McLeod (b. 1847), re-organizer of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad was also a Scot; and George Devereux Mackay (b. 1854), banker and railroad builders, was descended from John Mackay who came from Caithness in 1760.  John Allan Muir (1852-1904), railroad promoter of California, was of Scottish parentage.

SCOTS AS JOURNALISTS, PUBLISHERS AND TYPEFOUNDERS

The first newspaper printed in North America, The Boston News-Letter for April 24, 1704, was published by a Scot, John Campbell (1653-1728), bookseller and postmaster of Boston.  John Mein and John Fleming, the founders and publishers of The Boston Chronicle (1767) were both born in Scotland.  The paper was printed “on a new and handsome type, a broad faced long primer, from an Edinburgh foundry, and