Walter MacFarlane & Co.
The Saracen Foundry was the better-known name for the Possilpark, Glasgow–based foundry company W MacFarlane & Co. Ltd, founded and owned by Walter MacFarlane. MacFarlane's was the most important manufacturer of ornamental ironwork in Scotland.
Walter Macfarlane was born in Torrance of Campsie, near Glasgow in 1817. He worked for the jeweller William Russell, before serving an apprenticeship with blacksmith James Buchanan. He then spent a decade working for Moses, McCulloch & Co's Cumberland Foundry in Stockwell Street.
With his own main home at 22 Park Circus, Glasgow, Macfarlane became a prominent figure in local politics, becoming the President of the Glasgow Liberal Association and a City Councillor. He died in 1885, and is buried in Glasgow Necropolis cemetery.
MacFarlane, with partners Thomas Russell and James Marshall, incorporated W MacFarlane & Co. Ltd in 1850. They set up a foundry works in Saracen Lane, behind the Saracen Head Inn, in the Gallowgate. In 1862 the business relocated briefly to Washington Street.
But the business kept growing, and MacFarlane need a vast area of land on which to build both a foundry and a village-styled infrastructure on which to house his workforce. He agreed a deal with the son of Colonel Alexander Campbell of Possil to buy 100 acres (0.40 km2) of his Possil estate in the mid-1860s, including the main estate house where Sir Archibald Alison, 1st Baronet the Sheriff of Lanarkshire resided, on which to build his new foundry works.
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