A novel idea: Naming Hermiston
In the early 1900s, J. F. McNaught , the community’s first postmaster, named the town Hermiston at the suggestion of his wife Jennie, after Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston. The city was incorporated July 10, 1907.
There’s a direct and fascinating connection between the city of Hermiston and the novel.
There are actually two Scottish Hermistons worth knowing about:
The better-known one is a hamlet formerly in the county of Midlothian, now part of Edinburgh, located north of Heriot-Watt University’s Riccarton Campus. It has medieval roots — in 1316 land in the area was granted to Sir William Douglas of Kincavil, Lord of Hermiston, confirmed by King David II in 1340. A castle existed there in the 16th century, was redeveloped into a mansion in the 17th century, and ultimately replaced in the 19th century.
A second, smaller Hermiston is a farm of about 300 acres situated on the Ale Water in the Teviot Hills in the Scottish Borders, near Lilliesleaf. Records of the name trace back to 1202. The name itself appears to derive from “Lang Herdsman” — a place where shepherds gathered.
The Connection to Stevenson’s Novel
Hermiston is notable as the setting of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Weir of Hermiston, and the city of Hermiston, Oregon in turn takes its name from the book. So the chain runs: Scottish hamlet → Stevenson novel → Oregon city.
Weir of Hermiston is an unfinished novel cut short by Stevenson’s sudden death in 1894 from a cerebral hemorrhage. It tells the story of Archibald “Archie” Weir, a young man estranged from his coarse and cruel judge father, who is banished to live as the local laird on a family property in the vicinity of the Borders hamlet Hermiston.
The novel’s villain-patriarch, Adam Weir, is modeled after the historical Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield (1722–1799), a notorious 18th-century Scottish judge renowned for his coarse manners and unyielding enforcement of the law.
The fictional Hermiston estate is inspired by remote areas in the Borders known for heather-covered hills and rural isolation — shifting the action from urban Edinburgh to the wild countryside to emphasize themes of exile and introspection.
Many literary critics consider it Stevenson’s finest work. The surviving portion consists of only nine chapters, yet it is full of vivid descriptions of Scottish landscape, life, and language — remarkable given that Stevenson was writing it while living under the torrid sun of Samoa. He died the morning he was last working on it.
