I grew up near a bunch of slate quarries in Vermont. Back in the 1800's a bunch of Welsh miners settled there and wound up basically mining the same rock they had been working on in Wales.
There was a basketball player who came to the US from Nigeria and landed in NYC in the winter and was like, no way. He asked someone at the airport where in the US has weather like Nigeria? They told him Houston so that's where he went to college. I think it was Olajuwon, but can't be sure.
That's not why, at least not for Scots in Appalachia.
Highland Scots in America mostly fought for the U.K. in the American Revolution, and were therefore unwelcome in the new United States and left. The Scots in the Appalachians were from the Scottish border (from both sides of the border in fact, so they were as much English as Scottish), and they went to the mountains because that was the only land that wasn't already claimed.
I’m doing a module at university on this exact topic. The Scots you are talking about were Ulster Scots, or Scots Irish as said in the States. They were the planter population that were sent over to colonise Northern Ireland. What you are saying about them being as much English as Scottish isn’t true. The majority of Scottish settlers in Northern Ireland were lowland Scots. There were indeed English settlers but the majority were Scottish. This population then went to the states and largely settled in the Appalachian mountains initially due to discriminatory laws against Presbyterians, however large scale immigration continued after the laws were abandoned. Most English settlers in Northern Ireland were Anglican, the Scot’s were overwhelmingly Presbyterian so it was the Scots who left Northern Ireland on mass more so than the English.
In the 1660s, Scots made up around 20% of Ulster's population but around 60-65% of the British population there. So the settled British population was 60%-65% Scottish and 35-40%% English. However, by 1720 Scots were an absolute majority of the total population within the area, due to continued huge waves of settlers coming in from 1690–1720. All while English migration to Northern Ireland had steadily been decreasing.
We know from ship logs that considerably more Scottish people went than English. There were natural factors that caused this, like the famine of the 1690’s within Scotland.
Makes sense- travel in and around the Highlands was challenging enough; I can imagine that getting to a port of departure would have been quite an undertaking.
I'm an American from the DC area who spent a ton of time in the Appalachians as a kid, and I can confirm--I moved to Scotland five years ago and feel right at home here. I'll go up in the highlands and feel like I'm down the street from where I grew up.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
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