Walter Macfarlane
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 I 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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