Sir Alexander Don (d. 1815) was the son of Sir Alexander Don of Newton Don, 4th Baronet, and Mary Murray. He married Lady Henrietta Cunningham, daughter of Major-General William Cunningham, 13th Earl of Glencairn and Elizabeth Maguire in 1778 and had three children. He succeeded as 5th Baronet of Newton Don in 1776. In 1778, he gained the rank of Captain in the Southern Fencibles regiment, and in 1795, he was appointed Colonel in the newly formed Berwickshire Corps of Fencible Cavalry and served in Ireland.

The Don family had held the estate at Newton Don since the seventeenth century. Roy’s Military Survey of 1747-55 shows a house at the centre of an avenue or approach, with enclosed fields either side. Don inherited the estate in 1776 and made extensive changes to the pleasure grounds on the estate, clearing away the village and transforming the grounds around the house with ponds, avenues and woodland plantations. In 1790, the Adam office made designs for the decoration of a dining room at Newton Don, including a ceiling design, but it is not clear if these designs were ever executed. The existing house was replaced by a new mansion house to designs by Robert Smirke in 1817-20, after Don’s son inherited the estate in 1815.

Literature: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, pp. 24, 86; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, p. 181; M. Charles (ed.), Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, (2003), p. 1165; K. Cruft, et. al. (eds.), The Buildings of Scotland: Borders, 2006, pp. 593-4; Historic Environment Scotland, ‘NEWTON DON’ Listing Description, 2011, online [accessed 1 December 2023]

Louisa Catt, 2023