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their immigration to Pennsylvania, their occupations, their religious faith, their concern for education, and their contributions to the political life of Pennsylvania and the nation. ... |
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The story will concentrate ... on the eighteenth century, when some 250,000 people made the pilgrimage. As one humorist put it, here is a people 'brewed in Scotland, bottled in Ireland,' and then 'uncorked in America.' They did not come as early as did the Anglicans of Virginia or the Congregationalists of New England. They did arrive in time to help shape the earliest social life, religious faith, and political covenants so important to the history of Pennsylvania and the United States as they moved from the Old to help create the New World.” |
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Scotch-Irish Presence in Pennsylvania, by James H. Smylie, 1990, page 1, published by Pennsylvania Historical Association, Penn. Heritage Society, P.O. Box 11466, Harrisburg, PA |
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Another View of Scots, Ulster Scots, and Emigration from Ireland: |
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“Scottish immigration to Pennsylvania was moderate, though steady, until the Seven Years War ended. Few Scots arrived before 1763 except for indentured servants from the Lowlands; after then, however, the colony began receiving its first substantial influx of Scots, most fleeing the harsh poverty of the Highlands … many traveling in family groups. Emigration accelerated rapidly during the decade prior to independence, virtually ceased during the Revolution, and then resumed in the 1780s as more Highlanders sought to escape heavy rents and poor harvests. Scots were most numerous in the regions that opened up for white habitation in the years after 1765, when the volume of their emigration was heaviest; consequently, almost 60 percent of the Scottish stock lived in either western or central Pennsylvania by 1790. ... Highland emigrants who landed during the quarter century after 1765 probably constituted the largest number of ... non-English speaking foreigners in the state by 1790 ... |
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"In contrast to the Scots, a heavy migration from Ireland had been underway since the early 1700s involving both Ulster Scots and the island's indigenous population. Both groups of Irish tended to migrate during the same periods and move to the same general regions. Despite the religious antipathy between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, their neighbors seem not to have differentiated between them, considering each to be fully Irish (much as the English do today). By 1790, the combined Irish stock equalled more than a fifth of all whites, with Ulster Scots in the majority by a two-thirds margin. |
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Since emigrants from Ireland had been disembarking at Philadelphia in large numbers since 1717, their posterity was rather evenly distributed throughout Pennsylvania. Contrary to popular conceptions, the Irish stock was not unduly concentrated on the frontier; almost half (46 percent) lived either in the Pennsylvania Dutch country or in the long settled, southeastern counties, where they composed 28 percent of Philadelphia's citizens. Even in the state's four most western counties, the Ulster Scots and Irish comprised only 37.5 percent of the local population, a figure just slightly larger than that for persons of English and Welsh background living there, 35.9 percent." |
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“Patterns of Ethnic Settlement in Late Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania”, by Thomas Purvis, published in Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Volume 70 (1987), pages 118-120. |
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And, an Early American View of the Scotch-Irish: |
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Such was the character of the Scotch-Irish on the western frontier that, during the long dark winter at Valley Forge, when things were looking very bad for the Continental Army, George Washington said |
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“If all else fails, I will retreat up the valley of Virginia, plant my flag on the Blue Ridge, rally around the Scotch-Irish of that region and make my last stand for liberty amongst a people who will never submit to British tyranny whilst there is a man left to draw a trigger.” |
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quoted in The Family Tree, Aug.-Sept. 1997, pg. 27B, Ellen Payne Odom Library, Moultrie, Georgia. |
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McAninch Family History NL, VI-1 January, 1998 Copyright Frank McAninch page 1998-05 |