North Country at Work: How the Scottish came to Hammond

Scots Come to Hammond

Jun 12, 2018 — Drive around Hammond - a small town on the St. Lawrence River in northwestern St. Lawrence County - and you might notice a one of the beautifully built, old stone houses scattered around town, most of which are nearly 200 years old.
Donna Demick, the Hammond Museum Director, has been researching them for years, and says at one point there were over forty stone homes plus a large stone commercial block at Hammond Corners, all built by one particular group of people: Scottish settlers.  

They built with stone not because it was particularly easy or convenient (wood was the natural and wide-spread choice all over the North Country, being cheap, fast, and killing two birds with one stone by clearing forest for farmland), but because it's what they knew - Hammond's stone houses look an awful lot like traditional Scottish crofter's cottages, the kind built by poor tenant farmers a few hundred years back.

Hammond saw a huge influx of those poor farmers starting in 1818, when the first Scottish settlers arrived and bought land from a Mr. Parish, a land speculator who bought 29,000 acres along the St. Lawrence River in 1814. He was looking to sell it off in parcels and start clearing the land for farming and logging, and sent land agents to Montreal to entice newly arrived immigrants south to the Hammond and Rossie areas........

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