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Andrew Innes

According to Joseph Train, Andrew Innes was born at Muthill Perthshire in 1757; records show he died at Crocketford in 1846. However, the following appears in The Wigtownshire Pages, a local history website.

INNES, Andrew - D18/1/1846 - At Crocketford, on the 19th inst., in the 75th year of his age, Andrew Innes, the last of the Buchanites.

 If Train was correct in the year of Innes’ birth this would make him eighty-eight or eighty-nine years of age when he died.

According to Train “he was of parents belonging to the Cottar Class; and after receiving the education common to his class in those days, was bred to the profession of a carpenter, and he has at times, in his later years, been heard to allude, with apparent complacency, to that having also been the profession of the Lord!”

According to John Cameron “he was a Mason to trade, and religious zealot from his youth” He first met Elspeth Buchan in Glasgow in March 1783. He had gone there to attend a Sacrament in connection with the Relief Church. He describes the meeting in his own words, “On Saturday morning, while I was dressing in the closet, I heard a female voice in the kitchen conversing with the mistress and the subject was King Hezekiah, she continued until the bells were nearly done ringing.

After church they all returned to the lodgings at Dovehill and had dinner together, and after the meal she invited Andrew to her lodgings in the upper flat of an old wooden house in Saltmarket which were very poorly furnished. As soon as he arrived she rose and took him to Glasgow Green where “she laid open to my view how the Kings and Priests of Israel became a curse to the people, and how David by his adultery with Bathsheba occasioned the death of so many people; with other parts of scriptures which I knew to be so simple and easy to comprehend, that I wondered I had never seen them in the same light.”

From that Saturday afternoon’s walk on Glasgow Green until the day of his death his body and soul were at the absolute service of Mrs Buchan. Andrew returned home to Muthill to tell friends and family of this wonderful woman, and of her powers of explaining the scriptures, and of the new light she had received from heaven. Not long after his return to Muthill Mrs Gibson invited him to Irvine where Mrs Buchan had now established her Society, and he at once decided to go despite his mother, friends and neighbours urging him not to.

About forty people were now members of the Society including several very respectable families. Mr White, his wife and children were enrolled along with Patrick Hunter (who felt very lucky in getting his wife to see eye to eye on the matter) Mrs Gibson and her husband a master builder; there was also a Mrs Muir who kept a drapers shop. The rest were mainly young people of both sexes including several members of the Gardner family including Katie and Jean.