fields--stirred these Scotch-Irish to fury. They didn't sit
and tweedle their thumbs. Not the Scotch-Irish.

In 1719, just two years after the Antrim Eviction, thirty thousand more
Protestants left Ulster for America. They continued to come for the next
half century, settling in various parts of our land. There was a goodly
settlement in the Virginia Valley of Scotch-Irish. You'd know by their
names--Grigsby, Caruthers, Crawford, and McCuen.

As early as 1728 a sturdy Scot from Ulster, by name Alexander
Breckinridge, was settled in the Shenandoah Valley, though later he was
to be carried with the tide of emigration that led to Kentucky.

Naturally, first come first served--so the settlers who arrived first on
the scene chose for themselves the more accessible and fertile lands,
the valleys and rich limestone belts at the foot of the Blue Ridge and
the Alleghenies. The Proprietors of Pennsylvania, who had settled on
vast tracts, were prevailed upon by the incoming Scotch-Irish to sell
them parts of their lands. The newcomers argued that it was "contrary to
the laws of God and nature that so much land should lie idle when
Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread." But that wasn't
the only reason the Scotch-Irish had. There were other things in the
back of their heads. A burnt child fears the fire. Their unhappy
experience in Ulster had taught them a bitter lesson and one they should
never forget, not even to the third and fourth generation. They would
not be renters! Hadn't they been tricked out of land in Ulster? They
would not rent! They would buy outright. And buy they did from the
Proprietors at a nominal figure. Nor were the Pennsylvanians blind to
the fact that the newcomers were good fighters and that they could act
as a barrier against Indian attacks on the settlement's fringe. There
was still a fly in the ointment for the Scotch-Irish. That was--the
Proprietors' exacting from them an annual payment of a few cents per
acre. It wasn't so much the amount that irked the newcomers as the legal
hold on their land it gave the Proprietors. They objected stoutly and
didn't give up their protest until their perseverance put an end to the
system of "quitrents."

This cautious characteristic persists to this day with the mountaineer
and can be traced back to the persecution of his forbears in Ulster.
Mountaineers in Kentucky refused point-blank to accept fruit trees
offered them gratis by a legislator in 19