Ohio History Journal

THE SCOTCH-IRISH IN CENTRAL OHIO

by WILLIAM L. FISK, JR.

Associate Professor of History, Muskingum College

Historical appraisals of the contributions of various ethnic ele-

ments to the growth of American culture have seldom denied recog-

nition to the Scotch-Irish. "The cutting edge of the frontier," they

rarely hesitated to assume the vanguard of the westward movement

and made it impossible for the writer of history to ignore them,

deplore their unrefined individualism  though he might.   Their

apologists have made much of the participation of that hardy stock

in American politics and have delighted in calling the roll of the

great and near-great of Scotch-Irish extraction, too often including

both second-generation Ulstermen and Americans of cosmopolitan

ancestry who had one remote forebear who sojourned briefly in the

north of Ireland. Likewise Scotch-Irish cultural activities have been

recorded in lists of the colleges and academies they established and

the preaching engagements of pioneer Presbyterian ministers.

Equally interesting and too infrequently explored are the records

of their reaction to the social environment of the new West in the

years which followed the passing of the frontier, the notable ex-

ception being the excellent monograph of the late J. A. Woodburn.¹

The evincement of some peculiar Scotch-Irish characteristics in the

community life of central Ohio may be illustrative of the transfer

of culture into the region from the older settled areas of America

and from abroad.

When the first Scottish Lowlanders participated in James I's

plantation of Ulster and thus created the element later to be desig-

nated as Scotch-Irish, economic factors were prime considerations

in the migration. To sustain him in his adjustment to the frontier

conditions of his Irish environment the Scot brought with him the

tough theology of Calvinism. Perhaps no other religious faith has

ever more nicely integrated man's spiritual and economic interests,

 

1 "The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in Monroe County, Indiana," in Indiana Histor-

ical Society Publications, IV (1910), 437-522.

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112    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

and it might be conjectured that it was the thoroughness of that

synthesis in the mind of the Scot that made it difficult for him to

get along with his easy-going Celtic neighbors in Ireland. In his

decision to emigrate from Ulster both economic and religious dis-

satisfaction were powerful determinants, and when in the eighteenth

century the tide of Scotch-Irish immigration poured into America

by way of Philadelphia and Charleston, and to a lesser extent

through other ports, that same economic drive carried the Scotch-

Irish to the frontier, and with them went the church of John Calvin

and John Knox. One stream of immigrants pushed over the Ap-

palachians while others turned south into the Valley of Virginia,

meeting their kinsmen moving north from the Carolinas and giving

the whole intermontane and transmontane region a Scotch-Irish

flavor. Two centuries later Pittsburgh is still the Scotch-Irish capi-

tal of America, and the folkways of the new immigration have not

quite obliterated the Scotch-Irish characteristics of the upper Ohio

Valley.

From the "Forks of the Ohio" and other points in southwestern

Pennsylvania the Scotch-Irish pioneers dispersed into the western

lands. In this process the counties of eastern Ohio lying along the

main lines of travel from Pennsylvania received a heavy sprinkling

of Scotch-Irish settlers, but in central and western Ohio the Ulster

stock constituted a much smaller proportion of the population. In

these parts of the state, however, there were several scattered locali-

ties where Scottish names were numerous and one or more branches

of Presbyterianism flourished, giving to the immediate area char-

acteristics which were typical of Scotch-Irish society in larger sec-

tions to the eastward. It is possible that these isolated islands of

Scotch-Irish people manifested the traits of that stock more clearly

by contrast with the neighboring settlers than did older communities

where the Ulster breed was in a majority.

One of the localities of Ohio which was settled largely by the

Scotch-Irish was along the northern boundary of Licking County in

Eden and Washington townships and across the county line in Clay

Township of Knox County. It included the villages of Utica and

Martinsburg. About 1803 the first settlers came into the region

around Utica, most of them being immigrants from the north of

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THE SCOTCH-IRISH                      113

Ireland or descendants of immigrants. In 1812 a Major Robertson

laid out the village, which was called Wilmington until 1820.2 In

1806 James Dunlap became the first Covenanter or Reformed Pres-

byterian to settle there, and in 1810 Robert Kirkpatrick of the same

faith joined him. By 1813 there were enough Covenanters to organ-

ize a church. Its first minister, the Reverend Robert Wallace, had

come from Ireland in 1810.3 The early presence of Reformed Pres-

byterians, whose Covenanter ancestors had been Scotland's most de-

termined dissenters in the religious controversies of the seventeenth

century, indicates the strength of Utica's Scottish heritage. Always

a tiny fragment among American denominations, the Covenanter

church has never lost its almost exclusively Scottish and Scotch-Irish

composition. On October 5, 1818, after occasional preaching had

been held for three years, the Presbyterian church was organized

with 37 members. The missionary who crystallized the Presbyterian

element was the Reverend James Cunningham, a graduate of Jeffer-

son College at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, an institution which pro-

vided numerous leaders of western Presbyterianism.⁴ In 1841 the

Associate Reformed Presbyterians, a denomination formed by a

union of Reformed Presbyterians and Associate Presbyterians or

Seceders, another conservative offshoot of the Church of Scotland,

established a congregation at Utica.⁵ It was probably more pre-

ponderantly Scotch-Irish than was the Presbyterian church, which

often in the West contained many New England Congregationalists.

Meanwhile the first Presbyterian church in Clay Township of

Knox County had been established at Martinsburg in 1806. This

township was later called the leading Presbyterian township in the

early history of Ohio.⁶ The early settlers of Clay Township were

largely from Washington and Greene counties in southwestern Penn-

sylvania and Belmont County, Ohio. When the township was or-

ganized in 1825, eleven of the fifteen township officials had unmis-

takably Scottish names, such as McCreary, McLane, Pierson, and

2 N. N. Hill, History of Licking County, Ohio (Newark, Ohio, 1884), 610.

3 W. M. Glasgow, History of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in America

(Baltimore, 1888), 139-141.

4A. M. Chapin, Historical Sermon (Utica, 1900).

5 W. M. Glasgow, Manual of the United Presbyterian Church (Pittsburgh, 1903),

13. In 1858 the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, hereafter referred to as the

A. R. P., and most of the remaining Associate churches united to form the United

Presbyterian denomination.

6 A. B. Williams, Past and Present of Knox County, Ohio (Indianapolis, 1912),

I, 150.

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114    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Lyon[s].⁷ In 1839 an A. R. P. congregation was organized at

Concord schoolhouse south of Martinsburg and shortly thereafter

was moved to the village. Typically Scottish names filled the roster

of this church's membership. Among the nineteen original mem-

bers of the church were the names of Reagh, Robertson, Finney,

Francis, Shields, and Wilson. In the next few years Lyonses, Scotts,

Hendersons, and Campbells were added to the roll.⁸

Within the confines of Eden Township of Licking County there

was no permanent establishment of a Presbyterian church, but as

in so many areas through which the Scotch-Irish passed, the best

documentation of their sojourn is the mute testimony of the earli-

est gravestones in the old cemeteries. Among the burials before

1840 in Eden Township's oldest cemetery, the names of Blair, Mc-

Cartney, and Robertson are prominent, but no Scottish names ap-

pear on the newer stones. Here the old pattern of Scotch-Irish mi-

gration is recorded, the tarrying of the pioneer a few years while

the land was new and until his native individualism and restless-

ness enticed him on into the newer West.

Not only do the records of the Presbyterian churches give in-

formation about the occupation of a locality by Ulstermen, but

they afford an insight into some of the customs of their society as

well, for within these church organizations the Scotch-Irish pioneer

found his religious and social life, his political opinions, and even

his law courts. With his penchant for individualism, both political

and ecclesiastical, he usually felt the need of more than one branch

of Scottish Presbyterianism in the community, and he could more

often than not cite the theological differences which justified in his

mind the continued separation of Associate Reformed Presbyterians

from Associate Presbyterians and both from Reformed Presbyterians,

long after the historical reasons for the cleavage had ceased to exist.

Though all these Calvinistic churches shared a common Scottish

heritage, and all except the main body of Presbyterians insisted

upon the exclusive use of the psalms in public worship without bene-

fit of musical accompaniment, they found it impossible to forget

their separatist traditions. To deviate from a rigid adherence to

 

7 N. N. Hill, Jr., comp., History of Knox County, Ohio (Mt. Vernon, Ohio,

1881), 437.

8 Session Records of the Associate Reformed Congregation of Martinsburgh. All

the minutes of the session have been preserved.

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THE SCOTCH-IRISH                    115

 

one's own variety of Presbyterianism was to invite disciplinary

action by elders of the church session, the governing body of the

local church, in the presbyterian system, upon a charge of "occa-

sional hearing." Should a Covenanter be guilty of attending the

service of a Seceder congregation, it was assumed that he was

tainted with heretical doctrine. In the records of the Martinsburg

A. R. P. Church, there is an account of a session meeting in which

a member of the Utica Covenanter Church presented a minute of

her own session's meeting wherein she had been charged with the

offense of "occasional hearing" of sermons in Martinsburg. She

was readily received into the A. R. P. Church, and although the

clerk of the session was not always careful to record the congrega-

tion from which a new member was received, he noted that fact on

this occasion.⁹ The importance attached to minute theological dif-

ferences among churches adhering to similar forms of presbyterian

government, as illustrated by this incident, is not a little difficult

for a later generation to comprehend.

However, an old-fashioned Presbyterian church session com-

posed of the ruling elders of the congregation was a formidable

agent of conservatism, and in disciplining defection from the estab-

lished code of behavior it could exercise severity worthy of a Gen-

evan theocracy. The session customarily met at the semiannual

communion season to examine candidates for church membership,

grant certificates of "dismission" to members leaving the church,

and consider any other matters of church government. Very often

the chief business was discipline of erring members. The com-

munion season was the most opportune occasion for the administra-

tion of reproof, for it was then that the stern Calvinist preachers

dwelt even more at length than usual upon the awfulness of sin

and the unmerited grace extended to sinners by the Atonement. Both

the days preceding and following the Communion Sabbath were

devoted to church services, and the session met on both. If at its

first meeting the session had reason to question the conduct of any

chuch member, he was "kept back" from participation in the sacra-

ment, which, with a Calvinist disdain for Catholic terminology, the

Presbyterians called a "sealing ordinance." For the orthodox

 

⁹ Ibid.

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116    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Calvinist it was an awesome thing to be deemed unworthy to par-

ticipate in the symbols of the Atonement. If the session's further

deliberation determined the offense against the law of the church to

be serious, suspension from church membership was likely to re-

sult. Excommunication was a powerful weapon of the church ses-

sion, and many a stubborn Scotch-Irishman who would have re-

garded the degree of interference exercised by the session in his

private affairs as tyrannical had it been by the hand of civil au-

thority, found it possible to confess his fault to the elders and

then endure a rebuke from the pulpit at the next morning service

in order to be restored to church privileges.

The great volume of session business dealt with infractions of

the ecclesiastical code of social ethics. For example, before one

communion service of the Martinsburg A. R. P. Church, the session

"heard that Sarah Meharg and her daughter, Mary Anne, were

guilty of tale bearing, and inquired of the above persons whether

guilty or not; their declarations differing widely from reports ses-

sion deemed it advisable to suspend them for the occasion." Ap-

parently the disciplinary measure was inadequate for a few months

later the session clerk recorded that "Sarah Meharg is highly guilty

of contumacy, neglect of the ordinances of preaching and prayer

meeting and also very criminally falsifying if not false swearing.

Resolved that Sarah Meharg be and hereby is suspended from the

privileges of God's house." The daughter had evidently shown

even less zeal to reform. In her case the session passed a series of

sober indictments:

 

1. Resolved that she is guilty of evil speaking, irreverence in the house of

God and contumacy of the court of Christ.

2. That she be and hereby is suspended from the ordinances until she gives

evidence of repentance.

3. That session most affectionately admonish her to be more circumspect in

future and thereby regain her standing in the church.

4. That the above resolutions be published from the pulpit.

 

The exact nature of the conduct which thus invited the wrath

of the session is not stated, but it is exceedingly interesting to note

that the criticisms of the session were made because of that body's

administration of discipline to another member who had attacked

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THE SCOTCH-IRISH                     117

the antislavery sentiment of the congregation.10 The preaching serv-

ice which followed this meeting of the session must have held more

than spiritual interest for those present.

At about the same time the Utica Presbyterian session was

passing a resolution against "attending and joining in balls and

dancing parties." On March 23, 1850, it made a statement of the

church's stand on the issues of slavery, temperance, Sabbath dese-

cration, war, and social recreation, observing that "much that is

called social recreation [is] a sinful conformity to the world and

a dangerous tendency." On one occasion the Martinsburg session

appointed a committee to meet with the young people of the church

concerning "the sin of dancing."¹¹ The effectiveness of these meas-

ures is not indicated by the records.

The badge of loyalty to Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism was

faithful attendance at its services. Therefore, one of the responsi-

bilities of the session was that of seeing to it that church members

attended worship services or offered an acceptable explanation for

their absence. Committees were frequently appointed to "wait upon"

a member to inquire why he had been neglecting the ordinances.

Now and then similar committees were commissioned to admonish

some member about such matters as "enlarging matters somewhat

beyond the fact" or "rash and passionate conduct" before members

of the session. In one instance "a report having come to the ears

of the session that James Lyons had taken some advantage of a man

in trading horses it was resolved that James Beall be appointed to

hold an interview with him concerning said report." Happily for

James Lyons the session was assured of the integrity of his char-

acter, and he was therefore continued in church privileges.12

When the session's investigation and counsel failed to put an

issue at rest, it sometimes became necessary for the ruling elders to

constitute themselves a court and hold a formal hearing. The very

fact that these stubborn Scots would often eschew the services of

the civil courts for those of their own church session is a com-

mentary both upon the vigor of Scottish Presbyterian tradition in

mid-century America and the strength of the religious bond that

 

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid; Second Session Record Book of the Utica Presbyterian Church.

12 Martinsburg A. R. P. Church Session Records.

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118   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

could influence a congregation to choose this good Calvinist method

of settling its disputes. One interesting case which taxed the judicial

sagacity of the Martinsburg session concerned a controversy between

the James Lyons mentioned above and William Baird over the own-

ership of some sheep. Apparently Lyons' sheep had strayed across

a line fence and in with Baird's flock, where their identity could

not be determined. The two men failed to reach an understanding

about the matter, and since both were church members, the session

considered the case within its jurisdiction. Failing to ascertain to

whom the sheep actually belonged, the ruling elders' first proposal

for peaceful settlement was that the disputed property be sold and

the money donated to some cause of benevolence. Pending ac-

ceptance of this disposition of the case the two men were to be

"kept back from the ordinance (communion) until piece [sic] be

restored." For years no further mention of the case appeared, but

at the session meeting preceding the fall communion of 1855 the

elders reviewed the case mentioning again their inability to deter-

mine the ownership of the sheep. Lyons meanwhile had found the

dispensation of ecclesiastical justice too leisurely and had taken

the law into his own hands, for the session censured his conduct

in entering his neighbor's enclosure and "taking the disputed sheep

without permission as calculated to engender strife among the

brethren" and further viewed with disfavor his "insinuations against

this court both in its presents [sic] and before others." Again the

sheep were ordered to be sold, and upon Lyons' refusal he was sus-

pended from the church. Yet after two years outside the pale, his

recalcitrant Scotch-Irish spirit yielded to the Presbyterian yearning

for security within the fold of Calvinism, and he came before the

session offering to abide by its decision and seeking reinstatement

to church privileges.¹³ A theological system which could exact such

submissiveness from a folk of independent temperament is not to

be ignored as a formative force in the history of the Middle West.

The New England tradition was not the only agency which intro-

duced the Puritan strain of iron into the forging of American

culture.

It might appear that apparent preoccupation with the mainte-

 

13 Ibid.

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THE SCOTCH-IRISH                    119

 

nance of a theocratic society would have precluded much interest

among the Scotch-Irish in the affairs of the vibrant young nation

growing up around them and reaching out to the westward, but this

certainly was not the case. The years when the Scottish Presby-

terian influence was pronounced in northern Licking and southern

Knox counties fell during the period when the whole nation was

acutely aware of the magic of the reform movement. "The word

'reform' played much the same part in the life of the thirties and

forties that 'progressive' does today. It was a touchstone which

differentiated people more incisively than did party allegiance."14

The logic of predestinarian theology might have dictated a tolerant

aloofness toward these efforts to make an irredeemably bad world

better, but with a reformer's zeal that took little account of creedal

reservations these trans-Appalachian Puritans entered the lists in

behalf of social reform.

The temperance movement had been gathering momentum, and

the churches had long since abandoned their earlier indulgence

toward liquor. In fact intoxication was now a frequent cause for

church discipline. A citation for intoxication might require a

rather elaborate display of evidence in a formal trial in order to

establish the validity of the charge. Illustrative is the case of one

United Presbyterian at Martinsburg who was arraigned on a charge

of having been intoxicated on the fourth of July in Mt. Vernon.

With legal solemnity, the session swore in witnesses and took testi-

mony. Witnesses reported that the defendant had been seen before

and after his trip to Mt. Vernon and had been sober on both occa-

sions. However, the next witness was not so sure on this count,

Perhaps the accused "had had a dram." Another witness had seen

him in a saloon and had passed by on the street several times, to

confirm his suspicions it might be surmised. The weight of the

evidence supported the charge, and the court ordered the offender

to submit to a public admonition, a decision he declined as "un-

warranted and unjust." He was therefore suspended, and at the

next meeting the session appointed a committee to ask his wife why

she had withdrawn from the ordinances of the church.¹⁵ At Utica

there were similar trials, and twice, in 1843 and 1850, the Presby-

14 Carl Russell Fish, Rise of the Common Man (New York, 1927), 256.

15 Ibid.

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120    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

terian church there passed resolutions on the importance of tem-

perance.16

The interest the Presbyterians accorded the temperance move-

ment was also manifested toward other reforms of the day. Labor

and women's rights were not compelling issues in a rural commu-

nity, but here as elsewhere the rising giant of abolition pushed its

way to the forefront of the reform crusade. The Scotch-Irish were

almost unanimous in their disapprobation of slaveholding, but their

propinquity to neighbors of Virginian extraction both at the nearby

village of Bladensburg and in northeastern Licking County brought

some attendant tensions. On December 3, 1843, the Presbyterian

session at Utica passed strong resolutions against slaveholding

wherein they observed that "the buying, selling, holding, and using

human beings as property is a heinous sin against God, a violation

of the most precious and inalienable rights of man and is contrary

to the whole spirit of the gospel of Christ," and resolved "that we

bear our solemn protest against all attempts of individuals or

ecclesiastical bodies to make the Bible teach the doctrine of the law-

fulness of slavery." Although the elders condemned the Presbyter-

ian denomination for not taking a stronger stand on the subject of

slavery, they reaffirmed their loyalty to its tenets.l7

Across the county line the slavery controversy produced dissen-

sion in the churches. For a short time a Free Presbyterian church

of antislavery seceders from the Old School Presbyterian church

existed in Martinsburg. The cleavage between Scots and Virginians

was evidenced at the time of the Mexican War with its promise of

territorial expansion in the Southwest. On one Sabbath in 1846 the

Reverend Henry Hervey, long-time minister of the Presbyterian

church at Martinsburg, preached on the evils of war with the result

that the Presbyterians of Bladensburg withdrew in a body and es-

tablished their own church.¹⁸ Interestingly enough, this congrega-

tion of dissenters has remained intact to the present day while the

antislavery mother church has long since lost its separate identity.

In the A. R. P. church here one of the frequent session trials

succinctly portrayed the attitude of that congregation on the slavery

 

16 Second Session Record Book of the Utica Presbyterian Church.

17 Ibid.

18 Hill, Knox County, 441.

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THE SCOTCH-IRISH                    121

question. It was the same year, 1846, when William Lyons, an

Ulsterman by birth, was cited by the session for forging names to a

remonstrance. Although the nature of the remonstrance is not clear,

the context of the session minutes implies that it may have been a

protest against some antislavery project supported by the church.

When the elders proposed to hear his defense, he informed them

that if he were to appear before them they would have to meet at his

house. The last straw was his reply, when asked why he had been

neglecting the ordinance of prayer meeting, that there was too much

politics and abolitionism there. This was too much for the session,

which immediately voted his suspension. Although Lyons was voic-

ing a sentiment for which few of his fellow Scotch-Irish Presby-

terians could find any sympathy, his views were not unusual in this

locality of central Ohio where Copperhead leanings were numerous

during the Civil War. Possibly the slavery issue helped to retard

the assimilation of the Scotch-Irish ethnic group by this neighbor-

hood.

The little Presbyterian churches were not the only cultural

monuments left by the Scotch-Irish in their westward trek. The

churches in whose plain but reverent services the Ulsterman found

his spiritual security always held high the ideal of a professionally

educated ministry, and wherever the Scotch-Irish went, they founded

academies and colleges to underwrite the future maintenance of that

ideal. In the youthful West, whose society in the early nineteenth

century was chiefly concerned perforce with affairs economic, the

academic backgrounds of the Scotch-Irish ministry were impressive.

In central Ohio the guiding figure among the Associate Reformed

Presbyterians was J. H. Peacock, a graduate of the Western Univer-

sity of Pittsburgh and Allegheny Theological Seminary. Both James

Cunningham, the first Presbyterian minister at Utica, and Henry

Hervey, who for forty years ministered to the Presbyterian

churches at Utica and Martinsburg, were graduates of Jefferson

College at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.19

Men like these often played a dual role in the Scotch-Irish

settlements of the West. Many times the man who occupied the

pulpit on the Sabbath stood behind the professor's desk in the

19 Ibid.

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122   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

classical school on week days. It was a matter for great civic pride

and maybe a little intellectual snobbery among the residents of Mar-

tinsburg that their village possessed an academy. This institution of

which the Reverend Henry Hervey was president, maintained a clas-

sical curriculum and was designed primarily for the training of fu-

ture candidates for the Presbyterian ministry. It is said that over

thirty students who attended Martinsburg Academy in the years of

its operation from 1838 to 1860 became ministers, and nineteen be-

came ministers' wives.²⁰

Education was a serious business at Martinsburg a century ago.

The program of an "Exhibition" at the Academy on September 4,

1857, is impressive both for the grandiose themes the students under-

took to expound to their audience and the time they took in doing

it. The program included both morning and afternoon sessions

with an hour's intermission. Fifteen original orations on subjects

ranging from "Our Country-The Spirit of Advancement" to "Vir-

tue, Our Guiding Star" were interspersed with six original essays

and several musical interludes, and the whole was climaxed with

an address to students by Mt. Vernon's leading public figure of the

day, Columbus Delano. Although Martinsburg Academy's first

interest was in the preparation of ministers, it appears to have

been remarkably free from much theological deflection of the con-

ventional arts and sciences. Several papers prepared for public

programs at the academy display an awareness of the liberal arts

tradition and the abiding faith of most Americans of that genera-

tion in the progress of the nation even as the Civil War approached.

The Scotch-Irish faith in education also extended to an interest

in informal intellectual pursuits. In 1847 the Utica Covenanters

had a church library of 52 volumes supported by subscription and

open to church members. One difficulty encountered in that project

was the negligence of borrowers in returning books and paying

fines.²¹ The earnestness of the quest for learning and the paucity

of opportunity in rural Ohio was illustrated by the purple-worded

preamble of the constitution of the Phrenocosmian Society, a

literary club founded in the Scotch-Irish section south of Martins-

burg in 1854. "We, the people of Eden township, Licking county,

20 Chapin, loc. cit.

21 Records of the Utica Reformed Presbyterian Church.

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THE SCOTCH-IRISH                    123

 

Ohio," began the preamble, "feeling the importance of some asso-

ciation whereby we might cultivate our minds and improve the

talents which God has bestowed upon us, think it highly necessary

that a society be formed that we may in some measure prepare our-

selves for usefulness in this life and for happiness hereafter. We

also being convinced of the fact that we will be held accountable

by the ruler of the universe for the manner in which we spend

our time and talents, feel it our duty to organize a society." The

Scottish names of Finney, Kirkpatrick, Lyons, and Wilson appeared

in the list of charter members.²² The literary society was a com-

monplace in the nineteenth century, but the sobriety and sense of

responsibility set forth in this preamble were Calvinist in spirit.

The care with which the minute book was kept and the Victorian

solemnity of the questions discussed at the society's meetings demon-

strated an atmosphere of whole-souled seriousness. Propositions

for debate ranged from "Resolved that a man will acquire more

knowledge reading than traveling" to "Resolved that the Negroes

have more right to complain to the Americans than the Indians."

The ominous "Resolved that the present signs of the times do indi-

cate the downfall of this republic" was a timely topic in 1856. An

awareness of other burning issues of the day was exhibited in dis-

cussions of the prohibition of immigration and the expediency of

the annexation of Cuba.

This then was a community of some spiritual and intellectual

vigor. In economic matters the traditional thrift and canny bus-

iness sense of the Scot appears to have been a variable quantity

among these people, but socially they betrayed their distant kinship

with the Celt. Though a blend of ethnic strains before he came

to the American melting pot, the immigrant from the north of Ire-

land was a Gael in his clannish devotion to his family and his

people. Children and grandchildren of Scotch-Irish immigrants

have remarked upon the line which their ancestors drew between

themselves and their neighbors who had come from Virginia.

The maintenance of peculiar cultural patterns by isolated

ethnic elements is an engaging sidelight in the growth of American

 

22 The records of the Martinsburg Academy have been destroyed. Some papers

pertaining to the school are in the possession of the writer.

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124   OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

culture, but the account of the process by which the distinctive

heritage of these groups was fused into the greater American amal-

gam is of at least equal historical interest. Therefore, an analysis

of the forces which induced the disintegration of the Scotch-Irish

community in central Ohio may be in order. In the first place it is

proposed that the small size and isolation of this Scotch-Irish group

had something to do with its assimilation. It was natural that

areas to the eastward more thickly settled by the Ulster stock

would retain Scotch-Irish characteristics longer than little islands of

that people few of whose neighbors had any roots in the north of

Ireland. Secondly, the Utica-Martinsburg locality is almost on the

edge of the prairies, and good land only a few miles to the west

offered a powerful economic inducement to migrate. In the upper

Ohio Valley one farm was about as good as another, and the uni-

versal lure of the West was not accentuated by the nearby visual

evidence of the superiority of good, level land. It is not intended

to ignore the numbers of Scotch-Irish from the older parts of the

country who did go west, but in regions where the majority of the

people were Scotch-Irish, migration did not alter the composition

of the population.

The rapid assimilation of the Scotch-Irish in this region was

inevitable, but it was not accomplished without resistance. The

Scotch-Irish were prone to seek out their own kinsmen in other

areas as evidenced by the visiting and moving between Martinsburg

people and the Scotch-Irish community of Mt. Perry, some forty

miles to the south. Often when church members went west, they

attempted to find new homes among people professing their own

variety of Presbyterianism. Nevertheless, the forces of Americani-

zation were irresistible. As members left central Ohio, the Scotch-

Irish churches had difficulty in filling up their rolls. By 1870

dwindling membership compelled the United Presbyterian church

at Martinsburg to unite with the Presbyterians, and in the present

century that congregation has formed a Federated church with

the ubiquitous Methodists in order to survive, a merger no Scotch-

Irish Calvinist could have brought himself to contemplate a cen-

tury ago. At Utica the United Presbyterian church gave up the

unequal struggle in the 1920's, and now only the Presbyterian

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THE SCOTCH-IRISH                    125

church of Utica, which like most other churches of its denomina-

tion in the West included a complement of Congregationalists, and

the little Covenanter congregation continue the Presbyterian system

in the region. Only in the latter are many Scotch-Irish names

and the traditional forms of Scotch-Irish worship to be seen.

The Scotch-Irish influence on central Ohio is now a matter of

history. The quiet work of the years whereby the Scotch-Irish

character of this community was modified until it was impercept-

ibly incorporated into the prevailing pattern of the Middle West

was representative of the efficiency of the process by which a thou-

sand other communities of originally homogeneous ethnic origins

were assimilated into American culture. Without intending it or

knowing it, the Scotch-Irish, whether they moved on into the beckon-

ing West or continued on in the hills of central Ohio, gradually

lost the characteristics that had made them a separate people. Ex-

cept among the Covenanters the dignified old Scottish psalm tunes,

souvenirs of a proud past of independent religious thinking, are

heard no longer. Session trials are a quaint bit of antiquarian lore,

and yet Calvinist discipline, despite its tendency toward bigotry

and intolerance, is not to be ignored as a formative force in the

molding of American character. Though the descendants of the

Scotch-Irish settlers of central Ohio may have outlived the Calvinist

theology of their ancestors, they have not lost their pride of line-

age that has made them slow to forget their roots in the north of

Ireland and that has given them the assured conviction that theirs

is a goodly heritage.

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