John Nelson Burns was born in May 1837, in Freetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, son of the owner of the woolen mill where Catherine Kirk worked. John Nelson Burns first wife died in his arms of diphtheria. He waited for some time before marrying again. His second wife Catherine Kirk was born in May 1846 in P.E.I. They were married in May 1868. After they married they travelled around the horn to San Francisco and settled in Sacramento in 1867. John worked for the Southern Pacific Railway, which at the time was being built from the east and from the west. His job was to design rail cars, including sleeping cars, which were new at the time. He loved airplanes and worked on them in his attic. He had a plane that flew around the room driven by a clock spring. The lived through a large earthquake that destroyed their house and most of the town.

They moved to Dayton, Washington in 1873 where they lived for four years. They then moved to Lewiston, Idaho in July of 1877 and then to Potlatch Creek homestead in in 1882, where John built a sawmill and grist mill. This included a dam and a Salmon fish passage. He also had a farm above the mill. He invented a side hill plow. He also planted all kinds of fruit trees. They had cows, pigs, chickens and the like. Then the dam and mill were washed away in a flood when John Nelson Burns was sick in bed with Typhoid Fever. None of his crew were prepared to go out on the dam and remove the floodgates. The mill, bunkhouses etc. were all lost. John lived for two more years, but was never able to work again. He died in Kendrick, Idaho in March 1893 of a brain hemorrhage. Catherine (Kirk) Burns managed to live off the farm, managing to send five of her children to college. One of her sons, Robert, became a photographer. “Katie” was a lively happy woman who played the organ and was known to dance the highland fling in her sixty’s. Catherine remarried Laughlin Metcalfe after John Nelson Burns died in 1893 and she died in December of 1922.