Alexander Walker

Walker published his Castle Newe collection in 1866, while employed as a garderenr for Sir Charles Forbes at Castle Newe. Walker was evidently a man of some technical training and ingenuity, for he is known to have invented land leveling and surveying instruments while in Scotland, which he prepared for the Great Exhibition of 1851. His talent brought him to the attention of Sir Charles Forbes of Castle Newe, who subsequently gave him employment as a gardener at the residence and also acted as a patron of Walker's art. Walker was evidently the leader of a local musical group, The Castle Newe Band, and published one collection of music, in 1866 (often referred to as The Castle Newe Collection). He composed at least one tune ("Dr. Profeit's Strathspey") in conjuction with J. Scott Skinner ('The Strathspey King').

In 1870 Walker emmigrated to America, where it was said that he joined his brother. It was believed that he dropped from sight (most of the little information known about Walker has been quoted from Emmerson's Ranting Pipe and Trembling String, 1971), however, Walker re-established himself in Massachusetts, where he apparently had been preceded by other members of his family (who may have advised him to wait until after the Civil War). This passage is from Arthur Latham Perry's Origins in Williamstown (1894, p. 28), referring to the town of Williamstown, northwest Massachusetts:

...the Berlin road goes past pretty good farms on either hand, and
the last one (the old toll-gate farm) became noted for its productiveness
under the ownership of Alexander Walker and the industry of his family,
canny people from Aberdeenshire: the parents married there August 7, 1856.
Mr. Walker could handle the fiddle-bow and the surveyor's instruments with
about equal facility; but as the lines fell to him in this country in prosy
times and non-piping localities, the Scotch reels and strathspeys, of which
he was a master and even a successful composer and publisher, slumbered for
the most part on the bridge of his fiddles, of which he invented and perhaps
patented a prized improvement. Nevertheless, his residence at the head of the
gorge, where the Fosters had lived for three generations, threw a sort of halo
of music and good cheer up and down the valley, and proved to many persons a
kind of subtle attraction not only for the Pass, but Mount Hopkins beyond it.

1905 has been given as the date of his death. }}