Travels in the Colonies in 1773-75

These accounts of Mylne's travels and experiences in America at the dawning of the Revolution, 1773-75, are derived from his graphic correspondence with relatives at home in Britain. A trained architect from Edinburgh, he travelled from Augusta to New York before continuing his career in London.

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In late summer 1773, William Mylne furtively departed Edinburgh, Scotland, for the American colonies, his journey precipitated by misfortune, misery and debt. One of the city's most promising architects and master masons, Mylne had been driven to mental and financial exhaustion following the accidental deaths of five people at one of his construction projects. The core of this volume is an intimate and graphic description of Mylne's travels and experiences in America, told through the surviving correspondence between him and his sister and brother in Great Britain. Mylne travelled first to London and then sailed to Charleston, South Carolina. Using his cabin near Augusta, Georgia, as a home base, he spent the subsequent year touring the southern frontier. Then in 1775, he undertook an overland journey from Augusta via Charleston, New Bern, and Williamsburg to Philadelphia and New York. Mylne arrived in America at a crucial period. Revolutionary sentiment was high and the southern frontier was expanding.
His record of life in the environs of Augusta and his comments on the main towns and buildings of the southern coast are fresh, original and graphic, described with an architect's appraising eye. Mylne's warm accounts of his happily reclusive life are mixed with descriptions of fellow settlers (some of whom, such as James Gordon and Andrew Robertson, would play pivotal loyalist roles in ensuing years), of individuals in the merchant community known as the "gentlemen of Augusta", and of travellers he chanced upon during his ramblings. Mylne's emigration, which ended with his return to London in 1775, was an interlude in a respectable career in architecture, design, building and engineering, vocations his family had followed for three centuries. Mylne's career and his associations in Edinburgh, London, Dublin and continental Europe are sketched in the book's initial and closing chapters. The book contains an annotated index of persons, places and events on both sides of the Atlantic to which the letters and the editor's commentary refer.