Evan Fraser of Balconie
Captain
Evan B. Fraser of Balconie was an early
nineteenth century landowner who founded the modern town of
Evanton. The Reverend
Thomas Munro, minister of Kiltearn, writing in the
1840s lists him among five landowners in the parish of
Kiltearn at the time, and tells us that "all of them, except Captain Fraser, [are] non-resident in the parish".
[Rev. Thomas Munro, "Kiltearn, County of Ross and Cromarty (1834-45)" in the Statistical Account of 1834-45, vol.14, p.313.] He is to be distinguished from another
Easter Ross landowner of the period, Evan Fraser of
Inchcoulter. He founded Evanton in
1810, naming it after himself. The new village was a convenient way of absorbing the numbers of people in the parish who were being evicted to make way for sheep, a process which was part of the historical phenomenon known as the
Highland Clearances. By the 1840s, the process meant that Evanton had a population of 500 people, more than a quarter of the population of the parish, which was 1800.
[ibid. p. 322]
* Uncles, Christopher J.,
Easter Ross and the Black Isle, (Ochiltree, 1998)
* Munro, Rev. Thomas, "Kiltearn, County of Ross and Cromarty (1834-45)" in the
Statistical Account of 1834-45, vol.14, pp. 313-32
