| Activity | The Garden family seems to have acquired the lands of Troup in Banffshire in the mid-17th century. They were concerned not only with their estates but also with the fishing industry, and Alexander Garden of Troup founded Gardenstown in Banffshire in 1720 as a fishing port. Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone of Troup (1721-1793), developed Laurencekirk in Kincardineshire from the 1760s and in 1779 had it raised a burgh of barony to be a small manufacturing town. Like several other family members he chose the law as his profession, and was called to the Scottish Bar in 1744. In 1764 he was appointed as a judge of the Court of Session, and in 1776 became a lord of justiciary. He owned considerable property in the newly-fashionable Edinburgh suburb of Morningside and bought Morningside House in 1789: in the same year he had a wellhouse built by Alexander Nasmyth for St. Bernard’s Well by the Water of Leith. He was regarded as somewhat eccentric, and died unmarried in 1793. He was succeeded in the lands of Troup by his brother Peter Garden, who (on marrying the heiress of the Campbells of Glenlyon) assumed the additional surname Campbell. Thereafter there were a number of short-lived heads of the family, and in the late nineteenth century there were several legal disputes between the Gardens and Garden Campbells for the estate. The Gardens were owners again by the turn of the twentieth century, at which point Troup House was rebuilt and renovated and another Francis Garden was claiming treasury grants for its upkeep. Gardens continued to own the estate of Troup well into the twentieth century. |