Archives West Finding Aid

John Adair was born in White Hall, Kentucky in 1808, the youngest of eleven children of General John Adair (Senior) and Anna Palmer Adair. When the younger John Adair was a young boy, his father served as Governor of Kentucky. He married Ann C. Dickinson in 1834 and the couple would have thirteen children over the next twenty-two years. Later, John Adair decided to free all of his slaves and move his family to Indiana. They suffered the loss of three of their children while in Indiana and left the state in 1848. In that year President Polk appointed John to the post of Customs Collector in the Port of Astoria, Oregon. The family sailed from New Orleans in December of 1848 on a lengthy journey to Oregon that took them, via Panama, to San Francisco. From San Francisco they sailed to the mouth of the Columbia River. The family moved into a permanent home in 1849 and Adair retained his post through the administrations of Polk, Taylor, Pierce and Buchanan. He died in April of 1888. Mary Ann Adair died in May 1893. The information in this typescript was collected primarily through the efforts of Laura P. Barker, the twelfth child of John and Mary Ann Adair.