The Scotch-Irish Come To Virginia: Transplanting Home to a New Landscape

From Scotland to Ulster to Philadelphia to Lancaster to the Great Vallety of Virginia

Many of the earliest European immigrants to the southern Great Valley of Virginia came from Northern Ireland, first arriving here in the late 1730s and 1740s. Typically descended from Scottish families who had begun colonizing northern Ireland in the 17th century, many of these colonists had lived in Ireland for generations and thought of themselves Irish (Leyburn 1962: 327). Nearly all were devout Presbyterians, a Calvinist form of church organization and doctrine that sprung up during the Protestant Reformation. Their "Great Migration" to the New World began in 1717 (ibid: 157) and was caused by economic and political changes in Northern Ireland, such as the curtailing of the woolen trade and the practice of rack-renting (ibid: 160).

The names "Scotch-Irish," and later "Scots-Irish," were taken up by the descendants of these early Irish immigrants a century later to distinguish themselves from the newly-arriving Catholic Irish who were fleeing the Great Famine (ibid: 331). 

The original settlement of Lexington and most of the best lands in Rockbridge County, VA was organized beginning in 1737 by Benjamin Borden, Senior. In the name of King George the Second, Lieutenant Governor William Gooch gave Borden the right to patent as much as 100,000 acres of land, of which he patented only 92,100 acres on the 6th of November 1739. One of the conditions of his agreement was that he arrange the settlement of one family to the tract per thousand acres that he hoped to patent. As landlord to such a large area, Borden the Elder set a price--typically 3 pounds per hundred acres of land--and the settlers agreed to purchase what they could afford. Early families settled on farms ranging between a hundred and about a thousand acres, and typically nearby to close friends and family members. Often the payment for land and the submission of the deed to the county courthouses took several years, with some not being entered for a decade or more. Borden Senior died just a few years later in 1743 and his eldest son Benjamin Borden, Junior was proved as the heir to his father's estate and with it, these lands. Much confusion and many lawsuits occured in the Chancery Courts of Virginia over innacuracies in the original surveys and dissagreements over the terms agreed to by Borden and his heirs, such that it was nearly a century and a half before the metes and bounds of all the lands within the Borden Tract, as it was known, were finally settled.

Originally part of Orange County, then successively Augusta (1738), Botetourt (1770), and Rockbridge (1777) Counties, the city of Lexington was founded in 1778 as the new county seat of Rockbridge. In a revolutionary fervor, the local political elites named the new town after the site of the famous Revolutionary War battle. During much of this colonial history, the Scotch-Irish settlers to the area engaged in subsistence farming on the agricultural model they had followed for generations in Scotland and Northern Ireland: sowing and reaping wheat, barley, and rye for bread flour and whiskey; raising cattle for beef, dairy products, and leather; and raising sheep for wool, dairy, and lamb or mutton. Of course, all farms also would have had extensive gardens and orchards with hunting and gathering of wild animals and plants as a central part of the seasonal round of food procurement. The lack of adequate infrastructure during the colonial era meant that getting large quantities of produce to the Atlantic market was unfeasible, so most of the trade was local among neighbors in the form of "in kind" bartering and trading on account with little cash exchanging hands. Likewise, most marriages occured between members of the same faith and often within the same close-knit communities and families. In the colonial era most of the settlement of this part of Virginia consisted of an open-country neighborhood system of closely placed farms along the main river valleys and their tributaries, which in this case were the main branch and north branch of the James River. Early settlement clusters were named after families or geographical features such as the Woods Creek Settlement, the Kerrs Creek Settlement, and the Timber Ridge Settlement.

The so-called "Indian Threat" and "Kerr's Creek Massacres" of 1759 and 1763.

Contrary to popular belief, the frontier of the Valley of Virginia was unlike that encountered by the colonists of Jamestown and the coastal plain of Virginia in the early 17th century. Although the men and women who entered the Valley in the 1740s faced an existence fraught with the hardship and dangers of frontier life, by the mid-18th-century the Indigenous Peoples of the Valley had moved west into and beyond the Alleghanies, or contracted their presence east of the Blue Ridge at Bear Mountain, the current home of the Moncan Indian Nation. As a direct result of Anglo-European influence on trade, inter-tribal geopolitics, and especially disease over the prior century, Monacan presence on the land was less widespread or densely occupied. So much so, that the Iroquois Confederacy claimed title to the lands during treaty negotiations at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744 by right of "conquest over the ancient possessors."

The stories of frequent "Indian" harassment of the Scotch-Irish in the Valley need to be contextualized within the broader geopolitical conflicts and land aspirations of the English and French Crowns. This includes their shifting alliances with various indigenous nations leading up to the Seven Years War. In fact, three years prior to the first incursion by Native Americans into the Kerr's Creek area, the Presbytery of Hanover sent a letter of praise to the new Governor of Virginia, John Campbell, the 4th Earl of Loudon, for his "military skill & bravery." Loudon had commanded the Highland anti-Jacobite forces during the 1745 uprising of Prince Charles Edward--Bonnie Prince Charlie. In the text of their appeal, the Presbytery noted the "present alarming situation of this country; which has been so long ravaged, almost with impunity, by a mongrel race of French & Indian savages..." and that they resented, "with a just indignation, y^e perfidious incroachements by y^e French...upon the territories secured to the British Crown...", and the "inhumane barbarities & depradations perpetrated upon our frontiers by them & y^e Indian savages by their instigation" (10 August 1756). Thus, the so-called "Kerr's Creek Massacres" of 1759 and 1763, much discussed in local oral history and legend, became a more significant part of the local shared story becoming specifically tied to Native American agression. While at the same time, the many other examples of death and mayhem occuring up and down the contested boundaries between the English and French claims to territory, especially those perpetrated by European Americans on indigenous peoples' settlements, became locally "forgotten" parts of this brutal period in American history.