The True Image: Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry

THE TRUE IMAGE

THE RICHARD HAMPTON JENRETTE SERIES IN

ARCHITECTURE AND THE DECORATIVE ARTS

THE TRUE IMAGE

Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry

DANIEL W. PATTERSON

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2012 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Set in Arnhem and Optima

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Patterson, Daniel W. (Daniel Watkins)

The true image : gravestone art and the culture of Scotch Irish settlers in the

Pennsylvania and Carolina backcountry / Daniel W. Patterson. — 1 [edition].

pages cm —

(The Richard Hampton Jenrette series in architecture and the decorative arts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3567-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Sepulchral slabs—North Carolina. 2. Sepulchral slabs—South Carolina. 3. Sepulchral slabs—Pennsylvania. 4. Scots-Irish—North Carolina— Social life and customs. 5. Scots-Irish—South Carolina—Social life and customs. 6. Scots-Irish—Pennsylvania—Social life and customs. I. Title.

NB1856.P4P38 2012

736′.509756—dc23 2012002039

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

To—for a multitude of the best reasons—my wife Beverly

and all the children, great and small,

who around the table go

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE

The Immigrant Craftsmen in Pennsylvania

TWO

The Stonecutters’ World in the Carolinas

THREE

The Bigham Workshop and Nearby Scotch Irish Stonecutters

FOUR

Reading Scotch Irish Emblems

FIVE

Seeing Scotch Irish Inscriptions

SIX

The Scotch Irish in the Light of Legends

SEVEN

Reflections on the Stonecutters’ World

EIGHT

The Scotch Irish in Slave Economy and Landgrab

EPILOGUE

NOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX OF NAMES

INDEX OF FIRST LINES AND MOTTOES

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Readers may not grasp how much emotion the author of a book invests in the short section titled Acknowledgments. The writer knows how impossible it would have been to explore any topic without the help of libraries and their staffs. I myself piled up major indebtedness as I worked through the rich, well-organized manuscript holdings in the North Carolina State Archives and as I prowled the entire range of resources of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There I used books in the North Carolina Collection and the general collection of Davis Library, the Microform Collection, the online electronic editions of early publications, and the manuscripts in the Southern Historical Collection. And I called frequently upon the services of the Interlibrary Loan staff.

But many other institutions also gave help. They are too many to list, but I must name in particular the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, the Special Collections of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Library, and in South Carolina the Special Collections of the Winthrop College Library. In Pennsylvania too I received help from the State Archives, the Pennsylvania Historical Society Library, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the historical societies of Lancaster, York, Adams, and Cumberland Counties as well. Courthouses in those counties and the courthouses of York and Chester counties in South Carolina made available to me materials that had never reached a home in a library. My endnotes document my indebtedness to scholars and others here and abroad, living and dead, whose writings I found in all these places and upon whose records and research and insights I draw.

The staffs of the scores of churches that I visited to carry out field photography were welcoming. They gave permission, loaned keys to locked burial grounds, and told me how to find old abandoned graveyards in the region. Many gave me materials about the history of the church, or helped me contact church members able to answer questions I had asked. Others like Glenn Zepp at Great Conewago Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania wrote me to share their own considerable knowledge of the church’s history. The pastor of Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Mecklenburg even took on the task of locating an important early stone that had been removed from its spot in the churchyard in 1915, found it, and negotiated its return.

A number of times I discovered—or was discovered by—people who proved to have spent years gathering data about their own communities. To bring an interest in what interested them was to win a friend of inexhaustible generosity. In the South I had occasion to meet many local historians and corresponded with them only a few times about specific topics. In my text or endnotes they will find that I have not forgotten or hidden their help. Others I visited and corresponded with for years. I’m glad that I am able at last to acknowledge in print the generosity and rigorous research of Linda Blackwelder in Mecklenburg and Janet Morrison in Cabarrus County. And I regret that Nancy Crockett of the Waxhaw community in South Carolina is no longer here to see any return on her extraordinary helpfulness.

Some persons in Pennsylvania, like Charles H. Glatfelter, Arthur Weaner, and Gary Collison, I never met but corresponded with, always to my profit. Two others—the late Aileen P. Sechler and her niece Judith Pyle, both of Gettysburg—I met at a conference in 1979 at Newport. The three of us made presentations about gravestones and instantly recognized that by sheer chance we had reunited the two halves of the history of a previously unstudied workshop. I provided them the name Bigham; they guided me to Adams County sites where they had found markers. Others since then have built unawares on our discoveries, and I am happy to be able now to give Aileen and Judith the credit due them.

By 1996 I had scouted sufficiently with camera and note pad in central Pennsylvania and the Carolinas to feel I had a fairly good acquaintance with the output of the early Scotch Irish stonecutters in the two regions. I had a growing sense that I needed to read about and personally see what kind of work these carvers might have known in Northern Ireland. So in that year my wife and I spent four weeks there exploring. The time was far too short, but it gave us some familiarity with its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monuments and enabled us to make contact with many of the institutions and people most actively studying these works. We got help at the Ulster-American Folk Park in Omagh and from Brian Trainor and Shane McAteer at the Ulster Historical Foundation. At the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum we used research collections, and Philip S. Robinson proved a most informed guide. He pointed us in many good directions, both in the library holdings and in the surrounding communities. Happily, Dr. Trainor had also put us in contact with Finbar McCormick of The Queen’s University of Belfast, who shared a number of his informative studies of stones in Counties Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Tyrone. For a decade and a half I have benefited from his knowledge, insights, and generosity. We also met and enjoyed conversation with Robert Hunter of the University of Ulster in Coleraine, who later published material from his own research in County Tyrone.

I am grateful also to other persons in Ulster who have given help since our departure. A most knowledgeable and obliging correspondent has been William Roulston of the Ulster Historical Foundation, who wrote a thesis on seventeenth-century memorials in west Ulster, portions of which are included on the foundation’s illustrated History from Headstones website. I should also acknowledge correspondence with Rosalind Davies and the usefulness of her County Down website. And research carried out for me by Elsie F. Berner of Downpatrick about early Bigham families in that area. And also a chance meeting in Ballynahinch with Sam Sterling of The Queen’s University of Belfast, which evolved into a tour of the old Magheradrool Church ruins and good crack with our delightful guide. My wife and I subsequently spent a shorter time in Scotland, but long enough to be indebted also there, particularly to Helen McArthur in Dumfries and Betty Willsher, whom we visited in Aberdeen.

Too many of those who gave help will not know the outcome of their efforts because my research took so many years. The lighting required for photographing gravestones narrowed the time when I could carry out the work. I had to shoot them within an hour of noon if strong shadows were to make the words and images visible. In the Carolinas I could work only after the weather had turned warm enough (mid-March) and before the warm-weather humidity diffused the light and blurred the shadows on white-sky days (after May). My teaching schedule fought with these laws of nature and always won. Other research projects also interfered. For all these impediments, however, I am now thankful. They delayed me long enough to become a beneficiary of the internet.

I had in the early years been able to make contact with a few people named Bigham—Judge Franklin R. Bigham of Gettysburg, Bill Bigham and others from Mecklenburg County, and the most indefatigable, Esther Brewster Bigham, who had traveled the country side to side researching courthouse documents and interviewing people. Suddenly, however, I found I could Google the Bigham Family Genealogy Forum and discover likely descendants of eighteenth-century Bighams. To reach one would lead to a web of contacts. Some proved to be dedicated and rigorous searchers. It is impossible to overstate how valuable this discovery was. The internet enabled me and my wife to visit Peggy Artley in Tennessee, who took us to the hillside grove where I photographed the last stone made by a Bigham carver. My two most constant Bigham research companions have been Frances McFarland of Oklahoma and Earl Pike of Texas, who proved to be descendants of the two most gifted Bigham stonecutters. They had amassed and shared with each other and with me enormous files of documents. They had deeds, wills, marriage bonds, and other court records, books, newspaper accounts, and manuscripts and oral traditions from family members. Sometimes we struggled together to work out relationships. Sometimes they filled in blanks in my knowledge. Sometimes they read what I had written and corrected my slips and misunderstandings. Although I have never met either one in person, they have become genuine and valued friends. I hope they find my account worth all the effort they have put into it.

And they are not the only descendants of early stonecutters the internet let me find and learn from. Other key people were Anita Biffle of Georgia, who shared what she knows about her ancestor William McKinley, and Tarney Smith of Missouri, a rich and reliable source of information about Samuel Watson and his entire family. Philip A. Kelsey of Kansas shared both data about his family and his great-grandfather’s privately printed memoir. This fascinating book not only illuminated Hugh Kelsey’s gravestone imagery but provoked me to reorient my entire book. In short, without what I learned from descendants of the Scotch Irish stonecutters, you would be holding a very different book—a lightweight version.

My fieldwork for the book was aided by grants from the Faculty Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and funds that accompanied my Kenan Professorship. I began the writing while a Fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, both of them stimulating reprieves from ordinary obligations. Gail Goers skillfully helped me prepare my photographs for publication. Two scholars who patiently reviewed the ponderous manuscript for the University of North Carolina Press also made substantial contributions to the book itself. I respected their criticisms, incorporated most, and know the book is the better for them. David Perry, editor-in-chief, won my gratitude for his support of the manuscript. Mary Caviness proved a meticulous and supportive editor, and other members of the Press staff have proved their talents and dedication.

But I must save my deepest gratitude for my wife Beverly. We share so many of our intellectual interests that she got swept up many times into the fieldwork, and many times into discussing an issue, and many times into giving a swatch of writing a careful reading. I recognize as I look at sections like the Epilogue the great value of her criticism. Most of all she has quelled for an extraordinarily long time her impatience for the completion of the book. She tells me that I need not stint in writing of this indebtedness to her. But I tell her that no amount of thanks from me could possibly be enough.

THE TRUE IMAGE

The true image divides into shade and light.

—Ezra Pound, Kakitsubata

INTRODUCTION

A traveler in New England sooner or later happens upon its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century grave markers—slabs of blue-black slate or red sandstone or white marble—rooted in uneven rows near a large white meetinghouse fronting a town common. Winged faces in varying degrees of grimness gaze blindly from many of the stones. In good weather someone will be squatting before one in a scattering of paper and crayons, intent and oblivious, to make a rubbing. At a shop down the street the traveler finds some of the pamphlets and books that have flooded from the presses since the 1920s: among others, Harriet Forbes’s pioneering study that documented major styles and identified some of their carvers; countless subsequent books and articles like those of Vincent Luti and James Slater establishing the lives and output of individual stonecutters and families or those in a specific region; an ample volume by Allan Ludwig showing the rich iconography on these stones carved by supposedly iconoclastic Calvinists; Peter Benes’s study of a set of stones reflecting the religious turmoil of the Awakening in the 1740s; David Watters’s effort to relate the dominant image on the stones—a winged face—to the specific doctrine of the resurrected seeing God with bodily eyes; or John Brooke’s dissertation grounding iconography and epitaph in the contesting values of yeoman and gentry, orthodox and dissenter in a corner of Massachusetts during a period of upheaval.¹ The early grave markers of New England are a long-explored traditional craft, and some of the studies of it were seminal in emerging fields like American studies and historical archaeology and contributed fresh insights to older fields like religious studies and folklore.²

In the 1960s, I—a southerner—was one of those traveling across New England, and I too noticed the stones. They caused me to wonder whether stonemasons down home had left any such handiwork. I had lived a third of a century in the North Carolina countryside without awareness of any stone carving of similar age and interest. When I looked for books comparable to those about the gravestones of New England, I found none. At that time the only significant publications about southern markers appeared to be a soft-cover booklet in which Klaus Wust gave an account of Laurence Krone, a very able craftsman active between 1816 and 1830 in the German and Scotch Irish communities of Wythe County, Virginia, and an essay by Bradford Rauschenberg about a different but striking stonecutting tradition of German immigrants in Davidson County, North Carolina.³ Was the scholarship so slim because there were few stones to write about? In the early 1970s I began in leisure time to prowl the countryside and learned the answer.

My first discovery was that colonial grave markers are hard to find in North Carolina. Probably many of them were of wood and long ago rotted away. Some evidence supports the conjecture. Specimens in wood from the early twentieth century were still standing in such places as the yard of Old Bluff Presbyterian Church in Harnett County (Fig. I.1). In nineteenth-century newspapers a merchant now and then announced the sale of wooden markers.⁴ The executor of an eighteenth-century estate in Mecklenburg County recorded a payment for a Head Board and foot Board Lettered.⁵ Lean circumstances and the low cost of wooden markers—or the ease of making them—must have led many families to choose this impermanent material.

As in New England, most early North Carolina gravestones are in churchyards. Episcopalian sites seemed a promising place to look for them. This state church catered to affluent colonial families. Some of these churches in the eastern part of the state date from the eighteenth century, and they do in fact yield gravestones from the period, but not ones of southern workmanship. Wandering through the churchyards in the 1970s, I recognized early tidewater stones as products of northern workshops. This insight has since been amply borne out by Diana W. Comb’s Early Gravestone Art in Georgia and South Carolina and by Ruth Little’s Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers.

FIGURE I.1. Lucinda McPhail (ca. 1920) markers, Old Bluff Presbyterian Church, Harnett Co., N.C. Maker unknown.

The reason why these stones were not made locally was easy to see. The sandy soil of the coastal region of North and South Carolina and Georgia did not offer suitable stone for the craftsman. Early gravestones surviving in churchyards there seem typically to have been engraved by itinerants who brought blanks already prepared in northern workshops and added inscriptions at the time and place of sale. The same is also true of stones at Presbyterian churches in the sandy plains of these states. The 1786 Thomas Duene stone at Cross Creek Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville, for example, is recognizably a product of the Manning workshop tradition in Connecticut (Fig. I.2).

FIGURE I.2. Thomas Duene (1786) headstone, Cross Creek Cemetery, Fayetteville, N.C. Attributed to the Manning workshop in Connecticut.

But in the up-country, which had workable stone in abundance, other circumstances also undercut local stone carving. Substantial European settlement began there around 1750. Initially, of course, conditions in the Piedmont were very primitive, but by 1800 the region began, like New England, to be noticeably influenced by national popular culture. By the time this happened in New England the idiosyncratic styles of local stonecutters had had a century and a half to develop, spread, and evolve. In North Carolina a rich tradition of local craftsmanship was foreshortened to little more than fifty years.

FIGURE I.3. M. J. E. Woodward (undated) headstone, Eno Friends Cemetery, Orange County, N.C. Maker unknown.

Quaker and Moravian graveyards in the Piedmont proved to have early dated markers, but these denominations fostered an aesthetic of plainness (Fig. I.3). Their egalitarian faiths may command respect, but the interest of the stones themselves is chiefly conceptual. They offer little information and even less to the eye. At early Baptist or Methodist churches the markers that appear oldest are usually lumps of unshaped field stone, and the first dated markers generally come from the second third of the nineteenth century. A denominational aesthetic may underlie these markers too, although poverty generally constricted the families’ choices.

Another circumstance affecting stone carving in the Piedmont was that trained stonemasons were rare among the early settlers. Some markers in the Piedmont region are clearly the work of amateurs who made only a gravestone or two. Their decent wish to memorialize a family member is evident, and so is their lack of tools and knowledge about how to quarry a proper stone and shape and engrave it. One marker in the graveyard of Little River Presbyterian Church in Orange County, North Carolina, makes this painfully clear. A genealogist recording its inscription—Margret Brown Dyed 1788 Aged 2—saw that the small stone was loose in its earthen socket, and gave a tug. The marker came up from its hole, disclosing a face and more lettering upside down on the lower end (Fig. I.4). The carver had begun on that end, found he had too little room for the full name and the wings customary for this image of the soul, grew dissatisfied or received reproach, and inverted the stone. On the new top he chiseled only the terse inscription.

At Buffalo Presbyterian Church in Greensboro in the 1790s another person set up two markers for women of the Dixson family. He had found slabs of slate with broad, smooth faces but made no effort to shape their irregular sides. On each stone he scratched a verse in ragged script. One for Martha Dixson, dated 1791, is a variant of the traditional Reader, stop as you pass by. The other stone, undated, for Marget Dixson (Fig. I.5) bears lines that seem to be of his own making:

In Love we L[ived]

In Love she Died

Life was required But

God Denied.

This verse is a revealing statement and a moving cry from the heart, but the monument shows not a trace of art. Such stones—or even more primitive markers, mere lumps of fieldstone—dot cemeteries scattered across the Piedmont of the two Carolinas at the sites of the earliest Presbyterian churches, ones founded between the 1750s and the 1790s by the first generation of Scotch Irish settlers.

FIGURE I.4. Margret Brown (1788) headstone, Little River Presbyterian Church, Orange County, N.C. Maker unknown.

FIGURE I.5. Marget Dixson (ca. 1790) headstone, Buffalo Presbyterian Church, Greensboro, N.C. Maker unknown.

In a few cases a carver shows an artistic flair but one not enriched by training or tradition. The prime example is an unidentified craftsman in Lancaster County, South Carolina. In the northwest corner of the graveyard at Waxhaw Presbyterian Church are eight of his stones, most of them for members of the Barnet family.⁶ A single marker from his hand stands in Stone Cemetery, once a churchyard nearby in Chester County (Fig. I.6). All his gravestones date from between 1774 and 1784. Two features of these stones are striking: that the maker commonly cut the names and years in relief, using thick, angular letters and numerals, and that he did little to shape the stones themselves. Apparently pleased by the forms of granite boulders he found, he took care mainly to have a flat surface for the inscription. Consequently, no two of his stones share the same silhouette or proportions. His unconventionality shows to best advantage in a portrait stone he cut for William Simpson, although it exhibits a taste more grateful, perhaps, to a twenty-first-century eye than to that of the neoclassical age.

FIGURE I.6. William Simpson (1777) headstone, Stone Cemetery, Lancaster County, S.C. Maker unknown.

In a few places in the Piedmont, however, one sees eighteenth-century gravestones of a somewhat higher level of sophistication. These seem to be the work of carvers with a greater natural gift or prior exposure to stone, tools, graphic designs, and styles of lettering. In Statesville, some eighty miles to the north of Stone Cemetery, the burial grounds of what was called in earlier times the Fourth Creek Presbyterian Church (now the First Presbyterian Church) hold a few stones like the Lilis Love marker (Fig. I.7), the work of another unidentified local carver. His thick, deeply engraved stones have stylized floral designs, with distinctive lettering, and his small footstones are nearly as decorated as the headstones. One stone—made for Prudence Hall (1785)—has relief lettering. Although dates on these markers span the years from 1762 to 1785, the stones themselves are only seven in number. This carver, like all the others I have described, could scarcely have depended upon the craft for his livelihood.

What is true of those who carved the stones in early Presbyterian churchyards is true also of the up-country craftsmen whose work survives in the other richest locations in the Piedmont, the cemeteries of early Lutheran and German Reformed congregations. The output of these people too—active mostly in the first four decades of the nineteenth century—was typically small and limited to a single graveyard or to several within one county. The makers show no knowledge of what stonecutters were doing elsewhere in the region or no interest in it. The work surviving at the site of a former Lutheran Church in Randolph County (now Richland Gospel Church) differs utterly from the much more ambitious and copious German work forty-five miles to the west at many sites in Davidson County, which itself differs completely from the much more ambitious work of Laurence Krone a hundred miles to the northwest just over the state line in Wythe County, Virginia. The unidentified German carver or carvers in Randolph County employed cream-colored soapstone and most often created small markers decorated with a fylfot or crown (Fig. I.8). The group of German stonecutters in Davidson County, by contrast, used slate or more commonly moderate-sized slabs of gray-blue soapstone, exploiting the softness of the latter to make delicate engravings or conversely to replicate, Brad Rauschenberg argues, the outlines and moldings from the cabinet work they also practiced. Their most distinctive soapstone markers are pierced (Fig. I.9). Their visual motifs are generally the fylfot, treated so as to suggest a radiant rising sun, and the tree of life. Laurence Krone, for his work at St. John’s Lutheran Church, the Scotch Irish McGavock Family Cemetery just over the Virginia line, and other sites in Wythe County, chose sandstone and made large and imposing headstones and footstones. On their rear faces he most commonly carved a large heart, flowering with roses, rising from a mound (Fig. I.10). The work in each of these three German localities is absolutely distinct.

FIGURE I.7. Lilis Love (1782) headstone, Fourth Creek Presbyterian Church, Statesville, N.C. Maker unknown.

FIGURE I.8. Jacob Ritesmon (1811) headstone, Richlands Gospel Church, Randolph County, N.C. Maker unknown.

FIGURE I.9. George Nifong (1797) headstone, Bethany Reformed and Lutheran Church Cemetery, Davidson County, N.C. Maker unknown.

Such stones are so few and unrelated that they offer little for interpretation. I had nearly sated the curiosity that sent me on this desultory scouting when I happened upon an astonishing exception to these scattered, small-scale, short-lived amateur stonecutting operations. At Thyatira Presbyterian Church outside of Salisbury, I came upon more elaborate and skillful stone carvings. I was able to track them to a workshop farther to the west, on the far side of Mecklenburg County, where it operated from shortly after 1760 until nearly 1830. The work was centered in a Scotch Irish family named Bigham and had at least eight members. Far from being clustered in a single site, the stones—nearly 950 of them—cut by men in the Bigham circle are scattered across eleven counties of the two Carolinas in at least forty early Presbyterian churchyards and family burial grounds (Fig. I.11). And this tradition proved to have an even longer history, stretching back to the 1730s in Pennsylvania. A hundred more stones from Bigham hands survive there in nine sites from Lancaster westward across five counties. One late stone stands in Tennessee.

FIGURE I.10. Typical rear faces of gravestones cut by Laurence Krone. McGavock Family Cemetery, Fort Chiswell, Va.

The total known output from the Bigham workshop tradition, then, is over a thousand stones. These gravestones comprise much of the earliest identifiable art of Scotch Irish settlers in the backcountry of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Their tradition, like that of New England, grew from ones in the British Isles, but it is distinctive. Rains, freezes and thaws, flaws in the slabs of stone, falling trees, teenage vandals, lawn mowers, commercial development, and probably also air pollution are slowly destroying the markers, but the photographs in this book will provide, I hope, a longer-lasting record of some of them and bring the obscure craftsmen a measure of recognition (Figs i.12 and i.13).⁷

But in this workshop I glimpsed a larger opportunity. It broke open a fresh path into a confused issue: the character, experience, and role of Scotch Irish immigrants in the Carolinas during the crucial century between their first arrival and the entry of some like Andrew Jackson and James Knox Polk as major actors upon the national stage. Fixed as the stones are on the landscape, dated, named, and bearing texts and pictures, they form a rich and cohesive body of little-known material through which to explore these people. The grave markers stand principally in a county dominated politically, economically, and culturally by the Scotch Irish, but ties of background, religion, and kinship extend from Mecklenburg northeast into North Carolina counties with more mixed populations and southwest into South Carolina, a very different political jurisdiction. These two extensions as well as the Pennsylvania record add instructive perspectives on this core Scotch Irish settlement.

FIGURE I.11. Archibald Cousart (1791) headstone, Waxhaw Presbyterian Church, Lancaster County, S.C. Attributed to Samuel Bigham Jr., S.C.

FIGURE I.12. Remnants of the headstone for Margaret Giffen (1757) and another Giffen (1760) at Great Conewago Presbyterian Church, Hunterstown, Pa. Attributed to William Bigham Sr. Photographed in June 1980 shortly after a lawn mower shattered it.

To trace the history of the workshop itself and the lives of its individual carvers proved more difficult than I expected. By the 1970s only one of their descendants retained any oral tradition of their work as stonemasons. Moreover, these men—however engaged and strenuous their lives once were—left us only shards of information. Most surviving contemporaneous records of them are legal documents that do not bear upon their occupation: a marriage bond, deeds for land bought or sold, a pension application for soldiering in the Revolution, an entry about jury duty or a lawsuit in minutes of the court, a line in a tax list or census, a purchase at a local estate sale. But these, together with the gravestones, do place the men in particular decades and localities and in the social worlds that challenged or supported them.

FIGURE I.13. Fragments of the Maj. James Harris (1811) headstone, Rocky Spring Meeting House (first cemetery of the present Philadelphia Presbyterian Church), Mint Hill, N.C. Attributed to Hugh Bigham. A soapstone marker photographed in 1996. A decade later members of the church cleared this abandoned cemetery, reset the fallen stones, and, as well as they could, mended the broken ones.

In an odd way their own lives are like the lines the carvers engraved in the face of a stone: barely seen but made visible by the shadows the surrounding surface casts into the voids. I use these shadows to attempt silhouettes of the Bigham men. Chapter 1 draws them in Pennsylvania, where they pressed their way into the tangled, untidy frontier as the storm clouds of the Seven Years’ War were gathering over the colonies. Their early stones are scattered across several counties, but the Bighams surface by name chiefly in one calamity, and even then we learn more about neighbors whom they knew than about the Bighams. Chapter 2 follows the men into the raw Carolina frontier, where fuller historical resources let me sketch the Scotch Irish Presbyterian community and touch it here and there with strokes of color: the landscape and buildings, the food and dress, the gatherings for work and play, for worship, marriage, burial, and community business. Various Bigham men walk in and out as incidental actors in this world. Chapter 3 lays out the evidence of the work of seven individual craftsmen, summarizes the lives of five identifiable by name, and surveys the activities and evolution of their workshop tradition. The Bigham men probably built four stone houses in Mecklenburg County during the 1770s as well as other stone works. I focus, however, on the gravestones, which are provably their handiwork. To clarify their achievement I measure it against that of eight other Scotch Irish stonecutters active across the region.

Their artistry aside, the stones in fact turn our attention away from the stonecutters and toward the Scotch Irish community itself. The men were putting their skills in the service of patrons whose choices and instructions helped to shape the work. The stones record the outlook of this wider community, for the gravestones offer both a gallery of public art and an anthology of verse valued by these Scotch Irish people. Chapter 4 looks for meanings in the iconography displayed in this art. Here I compare the images with those on similar monuments in Scotland, Ulster, and New England to discover what is shared or distinctive in the emblems created for these Scotch Irish immigrants. Symbols of mortality prove rare in this tradition, but it is rich in religious, ethnic, occupational, heraldic, patriotic, Masonic, and personal motifs and designs. Chapter 5 explores the inscriptions, again comparing ones on these Scotch Irish stones with others elsewhere. Earlier studies of gravestone inscriptions are thin. One reason has been a lack of interest in anything but the quaint epitaph. But another cause has been the difficulty of identifying the sources of borrowings. Internet searches now make possible some surprising discoveries about the reading of these Scotch Irish. Because the inscriptions are numerous, we can also see the Scotch Irish ways of constructing and using epitaphs and—more surprising—a range of conflicting attitudes within the communities.

Both image and word served religious and social codes that turned loss into helpful lessons, but across time at several turning points the images and inscriptions change, reflecting both conflicts within the community and shifting values. Verse epitaphs first appear during the Revolutionary War, and new images also enter the repertory then. Religious controversies erupting in the 1790s led patrons to choose epitaphs from contrasting sources. The Great Revival struck the communities in 1802 and strongly affected both the themes and the tone of inscriptions. Demographic, economic, and cultural shifts further change them from laconic understatement to prideful assertion and moist sentiment. All of these manifestations raise a question: Who in the community got a frank memorial or even had what Armando Petrucci calls the right to a written death recorded on stone?⁸

The gravestones sometimes give brief, discreet glimpses of the dead but must once have done more, prompting the people who walked through the churchyards to recall stories. Early local historians—particularly the Reverend William Henry Foote—drew on this tradition, repeatedly opening an account of a congregation by describing its grave markers and telling about persons they commemorate. In Chapter 6 I follow his lead, taking readers past a few of the stones and pausing to tell anecdotes and legends recorded early by local Presbyterians. These sometimes illuminate the words or images on the stones, but I use them to focus on individuals taking roles in crises within the community and to help the reader see them and their long-vanished world. I close the tour with a commentary that places these stories in the broader landscape of Scotch Irish narrative in the Carolinas, another unexplored and revealing topic. Here I have the aid in particular of three books by the Reverend Eli Washington Caruthers, a contemporaneous field collector active in these communities. He not only tried to leave a record of the experience of the Scotch Irish community during the Revolutionary War but applied lessons he gathered from it to a looming crisis of his own day that the Scotch Irish settlers had helped to create.

Chapter 7 returns to the early southern backcountry society, which many have painted in either a golden Arcadian haze or vivid, heroic colors. In Chapter 2 I sketch a static picture, and in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, increasingly introduce tumultuous elements. In Chapter 7 I start an effort to force through the surface more systematically and find what roiled these lives. It explores the fractious communities glimpsed in minutes of church sessions and the law courts. These documents demonstrate such things as the fragility of the communities and their great attention to public reputation and the use of words. The chapter finds neighborhood and church conflicts and larger, more serious interactions with Indians, invading British armies, and local Tories. It shows struggles with smallpox epidemics, taxes, and inflation during the American Revolution and a growing stratification within the communities. Chapter 8 continues this effort, focusing upon two key issues: the relation of these Scotch Irish to slave holding and to land speculation. These created serious divisions that get little notice in assessments of the Scotch Irish. The chapter uses the two issues to illuminate the decline of the Bigham workshop and to highlight the contrasting character of the output of an amateur stonecutter, Hugh Kelsey of Chester County, South Carolina, who represents a different Presbyterian background. In closing, it shows the after-effects of the two developments upon several stonecutter families across subsequent generations, measuring their histories against those of Scotch Irish notables from the region such as General William Richardson Davie and the Polk family. In an epilogue I recapitulate points made in earlier chapters but also introduce fresh material and the case of Andrew Jackson to underscore the rapidity of the transformation of the Scotch Irish during and after the 1780s.

As far as possible I build the book with data not only from unexplored material artifacts but also from early local records, many of them also previously little known or never probed for these purposes. I am also indebted to descendants of many carvers, to numerous local historians, and to the rich body of academic studies about southern backcountry culture of the late colonial and early national periods. The scholarship illuminated many issues in these two chapters: the contrasting Regulator movements in North and South Carolina, the cultures of frontier violence and formal warfare, the history and stances of several branches of the Presbyterian Church, the multiple impulses evident in the Revival of 1802, the Scotch Irish participation in the Tennessee landgrab, and the roles of various Presbyterian bodies and individuals in adopting or opposing slavery. My own findings at times correct or supplement or at least raise questions about earlier interpretations.

In an essay published in 1969, E. Estyn Evans wittily divided much of the writing about the American Scotch Irish into two camps. In one are descendants applauding this bold and hardy race for its massive contributions to leadership in American life. In the other are writers stressing the depravity of a stock which they see mainly as backwoodsmen who have, in Arnold Toynbee’s words, succumbed to the barbarising severity of their Appalachian environment and become no better than barbarians. Evans discounted the vaunted ‘racial’ attributes, whether favorable or derogatory. He saw the Scotch Irish as simply having lived the life of the frontier in conditions that generally make for independence, masculine dominance, lawlessness, superstition, improvisation and inventiveness.⁹ A recent book like Richard MacMaster’s Scotch-Irish Merchants in Colonial America suggests that Evans too accepted an overgeneralization. Most of the businessmen that MacMaster discusses settled not on the chaotic frontier but in seaboard cities and must have had very different backgrounds, qualities, and activities.

But Evans’s short essay tossed into the mix several fresh approaches. Drawing on his own study of Irish folkways and of the cultural residue of early societies on the Atlantic rim, he proposed that the major lasting contribution of the Scotch Irish was their broad imprint on the American landscape and way of life. He argued that they pioneered a settlement pattern typified by the single homestead and the unincorporated hamlet and by land use dominated by a corn-and-livestock economy.¹⁰ Evans was influenced by the fieldwork of geographer Fred Kniffen and folklorist Henry Glassie and their interpretation of early log structures. The floor plan of the rectangular log cabin described by Glassie in his Types of the Southern Mountain Cabin has, Evans and Glassie pointed out, a direct antecedent in the traditional small Ulster farmhouse.¹¹ This grounded approach influenced me. It offers relief from stereotypes swept into the earlier scholarship.

Glassie’s essay, in particular, also offers one tool for shattering a major source of misunderstanding: the belief that Scotch Irish and Appalachian cultures are synonymous. As Toynbee’s words suggest, this position is widely assumed. David Hackett Fischer mistakenly uses Appalachian data to support a good many of his representations of Scotch Irish culture-ways in Albion’s Seed. But Glassie described two floor plans common in traditional Appalachian houses. The rectangular form brought from Ulster was one. The other was a square-cabin floor plan from England. He also pointed out other features of the houses and their typical outbuildings and fencing that show important influences from German settlers. A key message these homesteads and other folklife research deliver is that the Scotch Irish were only one of several peoples of European stock who pushed into Appalachia and that all the immigrants coping with this terrain were changed by it and by interaction with each other and with native Americans they encountered.

Log houses embody other truths too, but each category of material culture—and indeed every other kind of historical source as well—offers its own blend of potential insights and blinders. The gravestones, however, because of their number, their location in space, time, family, church, and community, and their artistic and verbal components, do speak about a wider range of issues than many other artifacts. We shall see that they warn us away from the kind of inferences drawn in a book like Fischer’s Albion’s Seed.

At first approach, his study seems the most systematic presentation of Scotch Irish culture. His goal was to contrast four British regional folkways brought to colonial America. He set them side by side, breaking his coverage of each into a comprehensive series of roughly parallel, labeled sections. For the Borderers (his Scotch Irish and other similar people in the north of Britain) he first hung nine backdrops with names like The Flight from North Britain, Social Origins: Poverty and Pride, and The Colonial Mood: Anxiety and Insecurity in the Back Settlements. In front of these he installed twenty-five Backcountry tableaux: Marriage Ways, Child-naming Ways, Death Ways, Literacy, Sport Ways, Wealth Ways, Rank Ways, Power Ways, Time Ways, and so on. The strength or weakness of each individual section would seem to depend upon the degree to which he bases it upon sources actually relevant to the Scotch Irish, a much greater problem than the unwary reader may suppose.¹² But the approach itself is built upon a single-minded search for continuities: traits that marked the Scotch Irish. For readers this creates a mistaken impression of cultural uniformity and stasis.

In The Problem of Persistence, Michael Montgomery cautioned against easy, general statements about these people, their character, the motives for emigration, or their culture. The Scotch Irish departing from Ulster, he pointed out, were already mixed in at least two senses. They were of different national origins (English, Irish, Scottish, French Huguenot, Dutch, etc.) and these backgrounds influenced one another in Ulster over a period of several generations before the people emigrated to North America. And this is only part of their complexity. Across the period when they were leaving, Ulster itself was changing. The people, moreover, came from various localities within Ulster and had contesting Presbyterian orientations and differing occupational, educational, and social backgrounds. They entered British colonies—and regions within colonies—that themselves differed from one another and were also in constant change. In North Carolina we shall see that the Scotch Irish settled sometimes clustered thickly together, as in Mecklenburg County, where they might retain a good deal of any shared heritage. We shall also see them in parts of Orange County, where they might settle among Baptists and Congregationalists from New England, Quakers from New England, England, and Ireland, and Lutherans from Switzerland, Alsace, and the Rhineland, join their churches, and begin in the second generation to intermarry with these people from other places. The historical scene was no more tidy than ours. Terry Jordan-Bychkov in fact argues that any notion of European ethnicity surviving into the quaternary Middle Tennessee hearth of the Upland South is nonsense—that the mixing of all the groups into a single, distinct new population and culture is exactly what Middle Tennessee was all about.¹³

Confronting such issues in their circumstances and heritage led Patrick Griffin to call the immigrants from Ulster the People with No Name and to choose the phrase for the title of a book about them. Perhaps they might better be thought of as a people with too many names—one of many peoples so afflicted. In writings from the seventeenth century, some outsiders were already calling the immigrants by three names: Scotch Irish (usually as a pejorative term), Scotch, and Irish.¹⁴ The reader will soon see that those who came to the Carolinas most often called themselves Irish but that they enjoyed speaking humorously in what they called broad Scotch. Their religious institutions and practices and favored books were mostly Scottish. Increasingly they came to call themselves Scotch Irish and eventually may have used the phrase to differentiate themselves from Roman Catholic immigrants from Ireland, although the incentive to do that was greater in the northern states when nineteenth-century immigrants poured in from Ireland. In the twentieth century I have known families in North Carolina who called themselves Scotch Irish but had no memory of ever having contested with the Roman Catholic Irish; instead they annually on St. Patrick’s day glowed with pride in things Irish. For them orange was simply the color of a globed fruit, and politically mute.

In recent decades, the term Scotch Irish has been challenged in many publications by Scots Irish, a phrase with fresh political vibrations. At first I wrote this manuscript using, from old habit, the words Scotch Irish. Then meeting the newer term and wishing to be careful of the sensitivities of others and to launch the book into the mainstream, I went through what I had written and replaced my wording with the newer one. But new terms continue to appear. Griffin himself most commonly uses Ulster migrants. Kevin Kenny, author of Peaceable Kingdom Lost, a study of the notorious Paxton Boys, seems to prefer Ulster Presbyterians. But one can point to imprecision in all of these wordings. In the end, prodded by a thoughtful argument that Scots Irish currently overemphasizes ethnicity rather than the mixed identity found in the culture, I have reverted to long-accustomed usage. But I use the phrase Scotch Irish without intending it to bristle. Its complex history underscores the role of change in the lives of these people.

Change itself is the focus of useful and relevant writings by two scholars, Henry Glassie and James Deetz. Trying to read the minds of early Virginia settlers from the houses they built, what Glassie saw was less the particular ethnic heritage than deep alterations in outlook that were sweeping across much of Europe and the European colonies. Houses helped him locate an important point in the evolution of the Western mind, the juncture at which the face-to-face community dies.¹⁵ Deetz, stimulated by Glassie’s structuralist theories, in 1988 published his speculative essay Material Culture and Worldview about parallel messages he deduced from other artifacts, including gravestones in New England. He pointed out that toward the end of the eighteenth century, stonecutters shifted from gray slate and tan or red sandstone to white marble, a whitening also seen in ceramic tableware and paint choices for houses. He noted that stonecutters also turned from dressing only the front of their markers to smoothing both faces and that the texts they engraved shifted from first-person warnings from the dead to third-person tributes to them. He tried to link these phenomena to Glassie’s insights. While interesting, his generalizations, like those of Fischer, seem to me sometimes to fly too high above muddy actuality. Data I have found in New England and particularly in the South contradict them at least in part. Nevertheless, his analysis bears on the stones I discuss.

One recent historian who took a focused and intensive look—Patrick Griffin—studied communities close to where the Bighams first settled. His book The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 has a sweeping title, but Griffin deliberately confined his chapters on the American Scotch Irish to settlers in northern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a section called its Upper End. Church session records surviving from the Upper End opened windows through which Griffin could look to see what issues engaged these specific congregations. He was able to identify and interpret the motivations of individual partisans in contesting groups. For the Scotch Irish men and women in this region, he wrote, identity resembled less an ideology, vision, or static set of traits than a dynamic process through which individuals struggled to come to terms with and acted upon the world around them. It was a process in which these people continually remade themselves.¹⁶

Chestnut Level, the Presbyterian church community where the Bighams first worked, lies only thirty miles to the south, in Lancaster County’s Lower End. Griffin is careful to point out differences between the people and issues in the Upper End and those in the Lower, from which comparable session records do not survive. Nevertheless, both his analysis and his approach feed my understanding of the lives of the stonecutters there and their later experiences in what were then York and Cumberland Counties, where I am more overtly aided by ethnohistorian James Merrell’s brilliant Into the American Woods.

I am better able, however, to follow Griffin’s course when I work with the North Carolina records. They show how these Scotch Irish stonecutters and their patrons struggled to come to terms with and acted upon a world with yet other sets of circumstances. I try to explore them in the light of both the craftsmen’s handiwork and the contemporaneous and later writings from and about their community. What the material most shows is a multiplicity of social and religious currents sweeping through their region and lives.¹⁷ I trace these across the landscapes and years and illustrate them with image and inscription and story—anecdote, legend, life story, workshop story, family story, community story—which lift the men and their kin and associates and patrons into view. I try to avoid climbing to such an altitude for a view of the entire landscape that individual people become too small for the reader to see and in some measure get to know. Many walk in and out of several chapters.

The central focus of my investigation, then, became the Scotch Irish immigrants who entered certain regions of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. My data begin with the arrival of the Bigham family and other specific Scotch Irish people on our colonial shores. I would gladly have used the innovative book Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan, in which Kerby A. Miller and three colleagues reprint caches of correspondence sent from immigrants to their kin in Ireland. They recovered a surprising amount of information about the writers, both in Ireland and in their new homeland, and deploy the material to show the complexity of this migration across the decades between 1675 and 1815. Unfortunately for me, only three of the immigrants included in their hefty volume came into the Piedmont of the Carolinas and not one of them figured in my data.

With the exception of a few prominent ministers like William Richardson, Alexander Craighead, and William Martin, and certain prominent citizens like the Alexanders, we know little about the earlier lives of these people who settled in the Carolinas. Among the lonely exceptions are Hugh Torrence of Mecklenburg (who immigrated, probably as an indentured servant, with a letter dated August 20, 1763, from his minister in Five Mile Town in the Parish of Clogher and County Tyrone, commending him as an unmarried person and descended from honest and reputable parents who from infancy lived in ye bounds of the Protestant Dissenting Congregation of this place and always behaved himself orderly) and Ralph Gorrell of Guilford County (who at his death left to a son who had returned to Ireland a tract of land there that Gorrell called the Crannock freehold named Lurgy Brack Drown Hazel and Corouch Lea in the County of Donegall on the waters of Louck Swolly.)¹⁸ The Reverend William Martin of Ballymony, County Antrim, in 1772 led five boatloads of settlers from his congregations to southern Chester County, South Carolina. In few other cases could I document exactly where in Ulster one of the Scotch Irish men came from, much less the date of his arrival or his ancestry, education, or Presbyterian orientation, or whether he had been a landowner, tenant, subtenant, or cottier. The background of the women, even their family names, is especially difficult to retrieve. Information not written down within the first three generations in America has generally gone lost. Thomas Boston Kelsey’s Our Family Record, a previously unnoticed but important Scotch Irish document that tells about nearly ninety relatives and their families in America, opens with his immigrant grandfather already in South Carolina. Even this genealogically inclined farmer/carpenter-author was apparently unaware that his great-grandfather had led the Kelsey family over from Ulster and lay buried in Chester County.

In some directions my subject limited the book. If the gravestones lead to little information about the background of specific people in Ulster, they also have less and less to say about them in the Carolinas during the decades after 1805. They say nothing about events as important as the War of 1812. But a desire to understand the implications of the stones did push me to follow the key families among both carvers and patrons through their third and sometimes fourth generations as they moved away from the Carolinas to Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, and beyond. This meant recording consequences of choices people made. Parts of the picture are troubling. I have wanted it, however, to be as honest as I could make it, even if, as Ezra Pound wrote, the true image divides into shade and light. Because it has dark sides as well as bright, I should state in closing that among the minor players in the late chapters are a scattering of my own Scotch Irish forebears wearing a variety of surnames. I never expected, when I first began to ask simple questions about the Scotch Irish gravestones, to find the monuments marking so many spots where issues lie buried that still rise and roam the wider society as our own Unquiet Dead.

ONE

THE IMMIGRANT CRAFTSMEN IN PENNSYLVANIA

People from Ulster poured into England’s American colonies between 1717 and the Revolutionary War—a quarter of a million of them, James Leyburn estimated in 1952. A half century later Patrick Griffin more cautiously guessed more than 100,000 but still called this the largest single movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America during the eighteenth century.¹ In 1765 one of these immigrants, a stonecutter, laid a large rectangular slate marker over the grave of a John Bell at Great Conewago Presbyterian Church, six miles northeast of present-day Gettysburg (Fig. 1.3). Bell’s estate file identifies the workman, recording a cash payment for Tombstone to William Bigham.²

The name alone leads to little information about this man. A Scotch Irish immigrant, coming from another land within the British Empire, was not an alien legally required, as Germans were, to register in Philadelphia. He never set down for the colonial authorities—or posterity—his name and age, those of his family members, his place of origin, or occupation. In surviving Pennsylvania documents this William Bigham shows up only as a resident signing two road petitions from York County in the early 1750s. A Samuel Bigham also signed one of these petitions. Between the two men there was a long and close association best explained by the supposition that they were brothers. Documents show their names linked across the next fifty years. More can be discovered about Samuel’s later years in Pennsylvania, but gravestones give us our only glimpse into the earlier lives of either of these two men.

Happily, the John Bell stone establishes the characteristics of its maker’s handiwork. On this and many of the other sixty-three stones from this hand surviving in Pennsylvania, William Bigham used heraldic forms and elements.³ He exploited the fine grain of slate to incise delicate details of such motifs as the dove, the thistle, and the fist grasping a dagger. He filled vacant spaces with bold, swirling mantling. For John Bell’s inscription at the top of the stone, Bigham used only capital letters, but to set off a second inscription beneath it, he mixed lowercase letters with capitals. He distinguished a few words with an italic initial letter. A number of his letters are idiosyncratic: a capital A with a crossbar bent downward or an italic M with a flourish at the top of the left stem. The most telling detail is his use of one peculiar punctuation mark: a dot over a diamond following the words aged __ years. This is in effect a Bigham signature mark. It is incised upon fifty-three of the sixty-three Bigham stones surviving in Pennsylvania (Fig. 1.4).⁴

FIGURE 1.1. Locations associated with the Bigham stonecutters in the Pennsylvania backcountry, 1738–59.

The stone, moreover, was executed with a high degree of skill and care. Nick Benson—a distinguished twentieth-century craftsman who continues the tradition of hand-cutting slate monuments at the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island—points out the amount of ornament on the stone: the nice bead molding that runs around the entire stone, the head shape given to the ledger stone, creating two sets of shoulders—a flat shoulder at the top and then into an arching shoulder and then a flat on top of that—and the intricate work up above there in the ornamental carving, in the coat of arms and also in all of the mantling around it, around the shield. It’s very floral and it looks like it’s very finely cut too. He says of the hand clutching a dagger or a sword, That’s beautifully carved. That’s quite nice. He also sees the carver as having given attention to removing evidence of the chisel, which is time-consuming work: What you have to do is you have to strike the chisel with a much softer blow, and several times, in order to refine that cut, so that you don’t get as much evidence of the chisel. None of these people would go in and sand. . . . It was all left to the chisel, as far as I know. I can’t guess at how much time this ornament would take. I don’t know—a couple of weeks.⁵

FIGURE 1.2. Great Conewago Presbyterian Church, Hunterstown, Pa.