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Introduction

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage . . .
—Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

Individually and as groups, we imagine Technicolor pasts that may develop an authenticity of their own and fulfill various needs by doing so. Most of us value gaining or inheriting some conception of "the past," but rarely acknowledge the creative aspects of our recall, or openly consider how our ordering of the past orders our social relations in the present. Heritage and ethnic celebrations are exercises in remembering that remind people to consciously stand together as a group apart. The traditions and perspectives of the past that we select and celebrate as heritage are those that have a moral, instructive, emotional, or intellectual appeal and those we therefore find good to remember.

The Cyclic Popularity of a Scottish-American Identity
Visions of ethnicity and heritage are fluid, appearing more or less important in relation to their temporal and social frames. Contemporary celebrations of Scottish-American heritage have revitalized an ethnic identity that, seemingly forgotten by many contemporary Americans, has nonetheless been prominent in public consciousness for most of American history. A Scottish, especially Highland Scottish, identity carried many negative connotations in early Anglo-America. Political, cultural, linguistic, and social differences distinguished Highlanders from Lowlanders and from Ulster Scots well beyond the American Revolution. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, these discrete groups became more concerned with distancing themselves from Irish immigrants fleeing the famines than from each other. The popular romantic portrayals of Scotland and Scottish identity by Sir Walter Scott assisted a conceptual blending of these three groups in America, in contradistinction to the new immigrants who, for the first time in American history, came predominantly from Catholic and Jewish communities in southern and eastern Europe.

Across the nation in the period immediately preceding the Civil War, and in the North and West prior to World War I, the foundation of Scottish Highland Games and the introduction of new Scottish social fraternities experienced widespread popularity. However, the overwhelming and regionally unifying experience of the Civil War largely eclipsed such celebrations in the South, as the World Wars and Great Depression would generally do for the nation. Patriotism born of war and America's initial years as an emerging superpower temporarily obscured distinctively Scottish identities. The value placed on conformity in response to immigration, war, and economic despair created the absurd misconception of "white America." Regional and ethnic distinctions reemerged shortly after World War II as many Americans experienced renewed interest in "the old countries"; as second- and third-generation immigrants began reasserting identities that distinguished them from "the white norm"; and as the nation began to explore the extension of civil rights to all Americans.

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic surge of interest in Americans' cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland. Beginning with a handful of new heritage societies in the late 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of national Scottish-American clan and heritage societies had grown to the hundreds by the mid-1990s and accompanied an explosion of the Scottish Highland Games scene. Celebration of a Scottish-American identity is quite distinct from other post-World War II, European ethnic revivals among, for example, Italian, Greek, Polish, or Scandinavian Americans. This is especially true in the South, where memory of Scottish ancestral tradition has merged with that of the southern experience, and particularly so in North Carolina, where the earliest and largest groups of Scots settled. Church and sporadic other commemorations in North Carolina nourished a lasting consciousness of Scottish roots. The celebration of Scottish heritage and identity in North Carolina is unique even among Scottish ethnic revivals. The Scottish heritage revival in North Carolina is not a second- or third-generation revival, but the revival of an identity and of a community from over two hundred years ago.

More Scots settled in North Carolina during the Colonial period than in any other state.[1] Many Lowland Scots and Scots-Irish traveled to North Carolina, as they did to other states, down the great wagon road from Pennsylvania. What makes Scottish immigration to North Carolina unique is the direct, large-scale immigration of Scottish Highlanders beginning in the 1730s; their localized settlement in the Cape Fear Valley; and the persistence of a Scottish identity in the area to the present. The memory of this Argyll Colony makes the state a symbolic homeland for many in today's Scottish-American community.