The historian David Hackett Fischer identifies four regions in the early American colonies where there evolved distinct cultural patterns, patterns which he claims persist even today. Not surprisingly, two of the regions where distinctive folkways developed were Massachusetts and Virginia. On the other hand, Pennsylvania became the seed ground for two other cultures, one associated with the Quakers and the other with the Scotch Irish or, as Fischer prefers to call them, the British Borderers.

Led by William Penn, the Quakers settled in the Delaware Valley in the late seventeenth century, and the nickname of Philadelphia (the City of Brotherly Love) reflects the ideals, if not the invariable conduct, of the city's inhabitants. While sharing the same beliefs, the Quakers came from various parts of England, especially from northern and midland regions, as is reflected in many Pennsylvania place names and building traditions.

Eager for the new colony of Pennsylvania to succeed, the Quakers invited immigrants from Ulster, the Scottish Lowlands, and northern England to join, The fact that the newcomers held different religious beliefs (most often Presbyterian) did not bother the Quakers very much-in sharp contrast to the intolerance of the New England Puritans. Not long after the arrival of the first "Irish" (as they were often called), it started to become clear how different the Borderers were. The newcomers quickly showed themselves to be rovers. In contrast to the Quakers and to German pietist groups, the Scotch Irish frequently moved their families from one locale to another, preferring inexpensive log cabins similar to those now in Old Bedford Village (depicted above and at left). Moreover, they set little store by legal niceties such as deeds to property, preferring to claim land through squatters' rights. Most troubling of all the differences between the newcomers and the Quakers was the propensity of the Scotch Irish for settling disputes through violence.

In the Borders region between England and Scotland there was a long tradition of conflict celebrated in ballads, and Borderers who settled in Ireland often found themselves at odds with the Irish-speaking Gaels of Ulster. Not surprisingly, then, the Scotch Irish often came into conflict with their neighbors in Pennsylvania, most frequently with German speakers and with Native Americans. Yet the nonviolent Quakers sometimes viewed the Borderers as a shield and indeed during the French and Indian War (1756- 1763), the Scotch Irish constituted the most formidable local forces supporting Britain against France.

Virtually all of the Borderers spoke English, but some were Ulster Irish who had married with Lowland Scots, and others were English from counties such as Northumberland and Cumberland (the latter being the namesake for various locales in Pennsylvania and in other areas such as the famous Cumberland Gap in the southern Appalachian Mountains). In terms of dialect, the variety which early settlers spoke was most often Scottish: Lowlanders predominated, though they frequently married with other groups, and the vernacular of subsequent generations often assimilated to the more southerly British varieties also transplanted. Eventually the settlements of the wanderers stretched over vast spaces in North America, with Appalachia and the Ozarks remaining areas where the linguistic heritage of the Borderers is especially evident. For example, the Middle English infinitive (e.g., for to see) has survived in those regions, and there are still people who use the Old English form of the pronoun it (hit). Notwithstanding the widespread (though highly exaggerated) claim that people in Appalachia speak the English of Shakespeare, it could also be said that some waifs and strays of the language of Chaucer and Beowulf are to be found deep in the mountains.

Sources for this page:

Wayland Dunaway. The Scotch Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

David Hackett Fischer. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

James Leyburn. The Scotch Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962.