In Search of an American Hero

I've past the signs previously but today I visited the John Paul Jones museum at his birthplace near Dumfries in southwest Scotland.

Jones was a naval captain who fled to (then) British Virginia after killing a crewman. When the War of Independence began he commanded a ship in the Continental Navy and has been called "the father of the US Navy".

During the war he operating out of France and audaciously attacked British ships & ports. He was taking a risk, the British considered him a traitor and pirate and he would have been harshly punished if captured.

His cottage is on an estate where his father was a gardener

Period interior

The sea is visible from the cottage

In the gardens

This baptism font was donated to the local church by US seamen stationed in Britain during WW2

After the Revolutionary War Jones became an admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy

I previously joked that he was also the bassist in Led Zeppelin and there is a connection.

Manager Andrew Loog Oldham suggest to John Richard Baldwin (as he then was) that John Paul Jones would make a good stage name after he saw a poster for a film with Robert Stack as the titular hero.

Jones died and was buried in Paris in 1792. In 1905 his body was exhumed and reburied at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.  


On the way home.

I can't resist riding across a ford

Atom Heart Mother? - Younger readers see here

The old lighthouse at Southerness

Loch Urr