[1] He was a gifted poet and nature lover and his moving accounts of rural Mallusk remain particularly poignant today in light of the increasing industrialization of the area.
Their first son, Frank, the Bard's father, married John Adams's daughter Mary Elizabeth on 14 April 1876, her family owned the ‘Crown and Shamrock’ pub on the Antrim Road between Glengormley and Templepatrick.
The Bard was also a keen amateur journalist and cycled to events as a reporter and had many articles and poems published by the East Antrim Times, Belfast Telegraph and Ireland's Saturday Night.
It was his attachment to his birthplace and the Barron family of The Dairy that gave him the inspiration for arguably his finest poem 'A Dream Of The Past', the last verse of which refers to the arrival of the Michelin Factory in the 1960s marking the beginning of the end of rural Mallusk.
The collection's editor, Barry Macaulay, described the poems as "great social history pieces," evocative of a period before intense development of the area.