The Scots in Carolina - North Carolina

Contemporary Review, Oct, 1993 by R.D. Kernohan

Among the surprises in meeting contemporary Presbyterian congregations deep in the Mountains -- apart from the determination of some of Schopenhauers, Vermicellis, and Kosciuszkos to produce at least one Scottish ancestor -- is the generous sprinkling of immigrant Yankees and a larger one of low-country Southerners who have moved up from Charleston or Atlanta, some to work, many to retire. For Appalachia today, despite continuing pockets of poverty and the startling contrasts where trailers, shacks, and handsome houses sit on adjoining lots, has a fair number of very prosperous people. Some own or run the profusion of modern small-scale industries. Others are half-year residents who divide their year between the mountains and Florida. There are even some refugees-in-retirement who have moved back northward after seeing enough of Florida to last them for the rest of the lives they had meant to end there.

But Appalachia -- the mountain region with no defined frontiers but cultural affinities that link parts of up to ten States -- is an appropriate setting for a celebration of the wider Scots contribution to the United States, and especially to the South. Many Scots and Scotch-Irish moved westward through the Cumberland Gap but a fair number stopped off on the way. Cape Fear Highlanders and Lowland Scots from the Carolina seaboard also drifted into the Piedmont and the mountains beyond. Horace Kephart, who recorded in 1913 the folk-ways and speech of the Great Smoky Mountains when the region was both remote and despised, found only a handful of Lowland Scots words and usages in the mountain dialect, rich in echoes of the English speech of the colonial era, but he claimed that the clear mountain pronunciation of 'r' was a Scots inheritance. He also devoted much of his book to whisky, tracing not only a self-evident Scots and Scot-Irish connection in using the Old World's methods to distil New World grain but in the American mountaineer's attitude to having it taxed. There are also less inebriating Scots influences, some agin via the Scot-Irish, in the fiddle-music, the folk-song and perhaps the dances of the mountain people.

Yet there are fewer Scottish names that might be expected to be found in the accounts by Kephart and others of the old Appalachia, and a fair proportion of the McNeills, McQuaids, McClungs, McKnights, McFalls, Grahams, Buchanans, and so forth who turn up, as well as the Lowland names like Crawford, Burnett, and Boyd, may have come by the Ulster route. Other Scots names are indistinguishable from old-stock American Anglo-Saxon ones, especially after Scotticisms in spelling have disappeared and Wylie has become Wiley. In few cases -- as in the great Southern name of Calhoun -- simplified spelling conceals nothing, though I wish I had had the time to check whether Mingus Mill near the end of the Blue Ridge Parkway started off as Menzies, which Scots pronounce the same way.

Had I lingered in the 'Celtic' shop in the reviving downtown Asheville -- right side Scottish, left side Irish -- they would surely have simplified or over-simplified matters for me. I should have phoned up the undubitably Scotch-Irish Carnahans listed in the local phone-book to ask which way to turn. As far as I could see, such commercial Celts do their best to fit most of the common names of the English-speaking world among the clans of Scotland and the tribes of Ireland. And that perhaps indicates one of the complexities for a very large proportion of Americans who want to affirm or discover their roots. Some of them have so many, and they have become so tangled in the course of new growth in America. That has been going on a long time, even in Appalachia with its claim to be the most ethically homogeneous region of the United States. There are French names which may be Huguenot. There are Irish names of early settlers which is modern Belfast or Glasgow might be accounted 'Catholic' rather than Ulster-Scots. There are signs that very different kinds of Germans were lumped together as 'Pennsylvania Dutch'. Very different peoples, and elements of quite different cultures, have been mixed.