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MONROE COUNTY WEST VIRGINIA - BIOS: BURNSIDE, John
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Submitted to the West Virginia Biographies Project by:
SSpradling@aol.com
September 18, 1999
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This information may be freely copied and distributed to any genealogy site
or genalogical organization.
A History of Monroe County West Virginia, Oren F. Morton, 1916, p. 318
BURNSIDE
John Burnside came from the north of Ireland in his boyhood and found
employment in a store at Fincastle. It was here that Oliver Beirne met him
casually, and being very favorably impressed, the young man entered the
Beirne store as a clerk. After a few years he hcame a partner. Finding this
business field too narrow for the powers of which he felt himself capable, he
and Andrew Beirne, Jr., established at New Orleans the large dry goods house
of Beirne and Burnside. Andrew Beirne was succeeded as partner by his brother
Oliver. Burnside had an ambition to become the greatest sugar planter in the
world, and a few years before the war he paid one million dollars cash for
the Preston plantation in Louisiana. To this he added nine other estates, so
that if he did not quite realize his ambition, he became the largest sugar
planter in the United States, his holdings being valued at $6,000,000 and
producing 7500 hogs-heads yearly of sugar and about 14,000 barrels of
molasses. He was unmarried and at his death at White Sulphur in 1881, he left
his estate to Oliver Beirne. Though a man of remarkable business
qualifications, John Burnside seemed to be without human sympathy or public
spirit It was said of him that he professed to be a British subject and used
this claim to avoid confiscation of his goods during the regime of General
Butler. Yet he took out naturalization papers in 1830. He was morose and
reserved, and it was one of his peculiarities that he would tell his age and
place of birth to no one.
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