What Ireland has Given the Mountains...


Later this year (on the 6th of November to be exact) in a central Appalachian city with a name that sounds suspiciously like it might be designed to honor one of the early leaders of the Kirk of Scotland, a group of young men from South Bend, Indiana, dressed in green will take the field against the Volunteers of the University of Tennessee. And in a struggle perhaps symbolic of other feuds both past a present, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame with play football with the Big Orange.

Hopefully, the struggle will be a good-natured one. The history of this struggle (between college football teams) has been fairly even: each team has won one game at home and lost one game at home against the other. But my predicition is that the boys in orange will beat the Fighting Irish nearly to death with their own shillelagh this year, and that the Irish will regret having gone beyond the metaphorical Pale.

Ireland has given the mountains of Appalachia a lot. And the region is truly rich in Celtic heritage. But while we will talk about some of the truly Irish people who have contributed to Appalachian history, most of what Ireland has given the region is Orange, not Green.

The First Settlers in the Mountains

In 1611, James Stuart, King of both Scotland and England, began moving colonists from Scotland and northern England to the northeast portion of the Ireland. James, a Presbyterian himself, had been King of England for eight years and Presbyterianism had been the official religion of Scotland since 1560. His goal was to put into Ireland a population of Protestants that could eventually out number the Catholics. By the middle of the 1600s there were over a quarter of a million Scots in Ulster.

An overview of the 17th century in Ireland is beyond the scope of this article. But a few facts of history can be pointed out:

  • The Protestant colonists who moved to Northern Ireland were largely pawns in someone else's struggle. They left Scotland and England primarily to escape extreme poverty.


  • The attempt to colonize the north of Ireland with Protestants resulted in a political division which has lasted almost 400 years now and created great strife.


  • The English government eventually withdrew the favored status the colonists originally had, so that by 1700 life for the Scots of Ulster was no better (perhaps worse) than it had been for their ancestors in Scotland one hundred years earlier.
    The copyright of the article What Ireland has Given the Mountains... in Appalachia is owned by Greg Cruey. Permission to republish What Ireland has Given the Mountains... in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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