The January (#26) issue of the FoJMB Newsletter is now available online. Please see the Current Newsletter page for full details.
If you missed it in the news.
Notice of Annual General Meeting
Wednesday 23rd October 2013 at 6.45pm for 7.00pm
John Muir’s Birthplace Museum, High Street, Dunbar
Agenda
(i) Report on year’s activities
(ii) Filling any vacancies on Council*
(iii) Other competent business*
Non-members will be warmly welcomed
Following the AGM there will be an illustrated talk by
John Thomas, trustee of the John Muir Trust and Chairman of the John Muir Birthplace Trust about his
Trip to Alaska
* Please note that nominations for Council accompanied with the nominee’s agreement in writing and items for consideration under other competent business should be lodged with the Secretary, c/o John Muir’s Birthplace Museum, 126 High Street, Dunbar, EH42 1JJ by Monday 21st October 2013. The existing members of Council would be very grateful if other Friends would consider serving on Council as 2014 is shaping up to be a very exciting year and the more of us there are the more we can do. Plans are also afoot for celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Friends in 2014.
The October (#25) issue of the FoJMB Newsletter is now available online. Please see the Current Newsletter page for full details.
HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY to THE JOHN MUIR BIRTHPLACE.
Opened 23rd August 2003.
Now approaching 120,000 visitors
Comment in visitors book yesterday from a lady from Holland. ‘What a wonderful museum. I didn’t know of John Muir but I do now. An inspiration to us all’. And a couple from Maryland. The lady told us that her husband proposed to her on Glacier Point.
The June (#24) issue of the FoJMB Newsletter is now available online. Please see the Current Newsletter page for full details.
Had a nice buffet lunch in the Council Chamber at Dunbar Town House on Wednesday meeting with Allison Chin, President of the Sierra Club. Also enjoying the lunch were John Hutchison, President of JMT, John Thomas, JMT trustee and chairman of JMBT, Stephen Bunyan, Chairman of Dunbar Community Council, Will Collin and Jo Moulin. I was supposed to walk Allison around John Muir’s Dunbar but my ankle was playing up. Will did the needful.
Allison was fulsome in her praise for the birthplace and said she would spread the word on her return to the USA
My thanks to Will Collin who put together the extracts from ‘My Boyhood and Youth’ that we have enjoyed over the past weeks. Will gave 40 extracts although only 38 were required. The additional two are shown below.
I did not vary more than five minutes from one o’clock all winter, nor did I feel any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the subject as to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious; it was a grand triumph of will-power over cold and common comfort and work-weariness in abruptly cutting down my ten hours’ allowance of sleep to five. I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could have dreamed of or hoped for. I was far more than happy. Like Tam O Shanter I was glorious, “O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious.”
I received my first lesson in botany from a student by the name of Griswold, who is now County Judge of the County of Waukesha, Wisconsin… This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm. Like everybody else I was always fond of flowers, attracted by their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos. I wandered away at every opportunity, making long excursions round the lakes, gathering specimens and keeping them fresh in a bucket in my room to study at night after my regular class tasks were learned; for my eyes never closed on the plant glory I had seen.
