From Rostrevor to Raphoe: An Overview of Ulster Place-Names in Pennsylvania, 1700-1820 By Peter Gilmore Tens of thousands of immigrants from the north of Ireland arrived at Delaware River ports in the eighteenth century. The most recent estimate is that between 100,000 and 250,000 persons left Ireland for North America 1700-1775. Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History 1607-2007 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2008), 123. Upon arrival many traveled west in search of available farm land, and in so doing dominated initial European settlement in much of Pennsylvania. Geographer John Florin writes that, “it seems apparent that after 1730 the only areas of initial settlement in the state where the Scotch-Irish were not present in a percentage larger than was theirs for the state as a whole (about thirty per cent) was in those areas settled by either Connecticut Yankees or by Virginians and Marylanders.” (The advance of frontier settlement in Pennsylvania [University Park, 1977], 21.) Robert D. Mitchell, also a geographer, proposed the proliferation of Presbyterian churches as an indicator of Scotch-Irish westward expansion. While in some states “there is no doubt that certain churches were Scots-founded and dominated,” he wrote, the “rapid spread” of Presbyterianism in the Pennsylvania and Virginia backcountry following major waves of immigration from Ulster indicates an Irish source. Based on the location of Presbyterian congregations in western Pennsylvania by the close of the eighteenth century, Mitchell suggested further that the region surrounding Pittsburgh should be considered one of four major areas of Scotch-Irish settlement. (Robert Mitchell, “The Presbyterian Church as an Indicator of Westward Expansion in the 18th Century America,” The Professional Geographer, Vol. 18 [1966 ], 293-294, 295-296.) Their westward movement can be traced through names derived in Ireland’s northernmost province, Ulster. More so than in any other of Britain’s American colonies, Pennsylvania’s farms, communities and political jurisdictions received a remarkable profusion of northern-Irish place-names. From east to west, the names of seven of Ulster’s nine counties appear and reappear as political jurisdictions within the Colony (and later the Commonwealth) of Pennsylvania. Place-names derived from eight Ulster counties are recorded as toponyms in court documents and folklore. The use of place-names of Ulster origin represents a continuum in time and space, spanning the eighteenth century, the ocean and the breadth of Pennsylvania along its southern tier. Cavan appears to be the only Ulster county unrepresented. The place-names derived from the northern province of Ulster far out-number those from elsewhere in Ireland (Dublin, most notably) or those of Scottish origin (such as Ayr). See Appendix II, “Negative Examples: Pennsylvania Place-Names Not Tied Directly to Irish Migration.” Migrants who crossed the Atlantic, traveling along the margins of empire, faced many challenges once situated within the North American frontier zone. Among other tasks required by the exigencies of removal: reorganizing their world symbolically. Identifying specific elements in their new environment—hills, streams, rock formations, particular fields—led to choices no less deliberate than decisions about which tree to fell or which acre to plow. Naming a land-holding “Scriggan” or “Drumreagh” for the townland on which kith and kin still lived and toiled may have helped assuage emotional pain and psychic trauma occasioned by migration. Irish-born migrants understood and made sense of their new surroundings by re-imaging their former Irish environments. Although the majority of these migrants were Presbyterians of Scottish origin, theirs was a worldview shaped by their immediate Irish past. The contents of Irish nomenclature—county, barony, parish and townland—became the basis of official Pennsylvanian divisions—counties, townships, boroughs and villages. Ulster toponyms became legally recorded designations of land grants and informal descriptors of natural features. The act of naming became an integral part of the overall process of adaptation, of the dynamics of settlement and adjustment which created a sense of being Pennsylvanian and American while holding on to the familiar and far-away. A few features stand out when one considers Pennsylvania’s Ulster place-names in their entirety. See Appendix I, “Ulster Place-Names in Pennsylvania, 1700-1830.” The overwhelming majority of these names are the result of eighteenth-century migration and especially colonial-era migration. Consequently, Coleraine appears more frequently than Belfast, and Rathmelton more often still: Belfast had yet to realize its commercial and industrial potential while the Donegal village of Rathmelton then thrived as an integral part of transatlantic trade. Nini Rodgers, “Ramelton in the Caribbean: Presbyterians and the plantation complex, 1730 -1857,” paper presented to XVII Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, Omagh, County Tyrone, 25 June 2008. “Derry” is repeated more often as a Pennsylvania place-name than any other Ulster toponym, all the more so when “Londonderry” (a less frequently occurring variant) is added to the count. The preponderance of this name may be due in part to that city’s famous (1689) siege and its already mythic significance in the Protestant psyche—after all, Pennsylvania townships received their names from that of the ship, the Mountjoy, which broke the siege. Derry’s significant commercial role as a home port in transatlantic shipping doubtlessly affected settlers’ choices as well. Many migrants would have left Ulster by way of Derry and Lough Foyle. This profusion of the names “Derry” and “Londonderry” leads to another impression formed by the data. Based on the geographic distribution of the place-names in Ireland, a significant number of the colonial-era migrants appear to have originated in the province’s cultural borderlands in the southern and western margins of Ulster. In particular, names from northwestern Ulster (Counties Derry, Donegal and Tyrone) are disproportionately represented among the place-names used in Pennsylvania. Names from Armagh and Monaghan (including those names themselves) outnumber references to County Antrim, where Presbyterians enjoyed considerable majorities in many parishes. We should not expect each instance of an Ulster place-name—and particularly those surviving on modern maps—to correlate exactly to the presence of pioneers from the same-named locale in the north of Ireland. Provincial authorities applied Ulster nomenclature to newly created townships in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, 1725-1775, labeling spaces on maps often before significant numbers of settlers occupied the actual places. This led to the somewhat ironic result that Ulster place-names occasionally preceded an influx of Ulster migrants. Political subdivision perpetuated some of the earliest used names, as in the case of an inaugural township in Cumberland County. That county’s “Tyrone” became the source-name of townships in new counties created from the geographically extensive original. Nor should we ignore the possibility that in the second half of the eighteenth century especially westbound migrants originating in Pennsylvania’s Scotch-Irish enclaves named their frontier communities in memory of the home township east of the mountains—just as their parents’ generation had preferred the names of homes in Ireland. Estyn Evans suggested that migrants from the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania reapplied “Cumberland” in traveling through the Cumberland Gap between 1775 and 1800 and settling in the Cumberland Valley of Tennessee. (“The Scotch-Irish: Their Cultural Adaptation” in E.R.R. Green, ed., Essays in Scotch-Irish History [Belfast, 1991], 75.) Similarly, York, Lancaster and Chester Counties in South Carolina’s piedmont, home to Scotch-Irish families who had followed the Great Wagon Road south from Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, appear to have been named for the migrants’ counties of origin in the northern colony. That said, migrants throughout the century clearly gave their new homes comfortably familiar names. In addition to the names of townships, towns and villages are the less visible names of land grants and farms. These are often derived from Ulster townlands and parishes as well as counties. Western Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century displayed a variant, supplying farms with names that celebrated the island-nation itself or reflected patriotic slogans and motifs. Earlier in the century, English, Dutch and German neighbors referred to the ethnically cohesive communities as “Irishtowns.” Consonant with the late eighteenth-century self-identification of Protestants as the “Irish Nation,” migrant Presbyterians constituted themselves as the Irish Nation-in-Exile with self-conscious naming symbolism. As suggested above, the principal geographic units in eighteenth century Pennsylvania—particularly in the backcountry frequently dominated by settlers of Irish origin—were counties and townships. Counties, regarded by many contemporaries as “the most important unit of government,” covered considerable geographic areas in the eighteenth century. The organization of counties and townships reflected either an increasing density of settlement or the assumption of sustained population growth to follow. The legislative action creating counties frequently followed the demand of residents for a physically less remote seat of government. The successive creation of counties maps population flows: for example, Lancaster, site of significant Ulster settlement in the second quarter of the century and the colony’s fourth county, was erected out of Chester County in 1729; York (1749) and Cumberland (1750) were created out of Lancaster; Cumberland gave rise to Bedford (1771), which also yielded new counties to the west. Officials of new counties had the job of setting up the apparatus of local governance: courts, county-wide officers and townships. Kenneth W. Keller, Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism (Philadelphia, 1982) 3; Abraham Howry Espenshade, Pennsylvania place names (State College, 1925), 41-42; Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck. The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1995), 432-433. What follows is less a comprehensive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject than a guide to what Ulster place-names in Pennsylvania have been recovered so far. In other words, these are names gathered with relative ease. The work completed so far suggests that more place-names, long abandoned and forgotten, remain to be located, dusted off, and studied for what they can tell us of past migration flows and their attendant hopes and tragedies. The discussion of place-names below is ordered by geography and the chronology of migration. Although this study necessarily references the history of Ulster migration across Pennsylvania it should not be regarded as any more than a rough outline of that history. 1. Between the Delaware and the Susquehanna: The Oldest Settlements When emigrants from the north of Ireland began arriving in William Penn’s colony in sizeable numbers in the early eighteenth century, they found the land closest to Philadelphia already taken by English families. They moved into Chester County, then Pennsylvania’s only significant territorial division west of Philadelphia. Settlements of people from Ulster began in western Chester County as early as 1710, along Octoraro Creek and at Faggs Manor and New London. Octoraro Creek, which flows southwest into the Susquehanna River in Maryland, became the western boundary of Chester County when Lancaster was established in May 1729. The Faggs Manor settlement in Chester County became the basis for the political jurisdiction with what is likely the oldest Irish place-name in Pennsylvania: Londonderry Township. A nineteenth-century history of Chester County observed that “the early settlers were from Ireland, and the name is derived from Londonderry, in Ireland.” Wayland F. Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill, 1944), 51; J. Smith Futhey and Gilbert Cope, History of Chester County (Philadelphia, 1881), 182. Chester was among the three counties established by William Penn in 1682. Ulster migrants also settled west of Octoraro Creek, spreading out across the unorganized frontier of what would become Lancaster, Dauphin and Lebanon Counties. Today, Lancaster County is often associated in the public imagination—and in tourist brochures—with the descendants of German-speaking Pietists who also migrated in the eighteenth century: this is “Pennsylvania Dutch” country. But early arrivals from Ireland are recalled in the names of five Lancaster County townships: Colerain, Donegal, Drumore, Mount Joy and Rapho. As noted above, Lancaster, the fourth county created in Pennsylvania, was the first to be organized in the eighteenth century. (Espenshade, 41-42.) Amidst the rolling hills on the broad Susquehanna’s eastern shores, Ulster families may have begun settling in what became Drumore in southern Lancaster County as early as 1700. Organized as one of the county’s original townships in 1729, Drumore took its name from the town and parish of Dromore on the Lagan River in County Down. Between 1765 and 1800 the Lancaster County township’s account book had on its headings both “Dromore” and “Drommore;” the present spelling became formalized after 1800. Drumore’s Presbyterian congregation appears to have met for some years prior to 1730. John Thomson, an Irish-born minister who arrived as a probationer in 1715, served the Drumore congregation. In 1727 he became the first presbyter to propose that America’s Presbyterian ministers be required to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Espenshade, 246; Franklin Ellis and Samuel Evans, History of Lancaster County (Philadelphia, 1883), 789, 790, 794; Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name (Princeton, 2001), 117. The “Break of Dromore” was a noted (and lamented) battle in 1689; perhaps even less gloriously, Dromore was described in the late eighteenth century as “a miserable nest of dirty mud cabins.” (Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster [Belfast, 1992], 153, 200-201.) The formal organization of a township “followed the original settlement of an area by an average of perhaps ten years.” (Florin, 8.) In a pattern found repeatedly across Pennsylvania in eighteenth-century communities with Irish place-names, Drumore surnames displayed a preponderance of those recognizably Ulster Scots together with those of probable native Irish origin. Drumore taxpayers in 1756 and 1759 included individuals named Boyd, Caldwell, Carson, Dixon, Dunlop, Johnston, Patterson, Porter, Ramsey and Steele. Town records also listed Patrick O’Harrah and “Light foot obrine;” among the township’s freemen were found James Gallahore, Torrence Fitchpatrick and Hugh Galahor. Dunaway, 52-53; Ellis and Evans, 790-792. Migrants from Ulster settled along Chickies Creek in northwestern Lancaster County in the mid-1710s. They built homes amidst a dense forest, in what was in every sense a frontier. Located near Indian villages, some settlers availed themselves of the opportunity to become traders as well as farmers. So many Scotch-Irish rushed into the region that in 1722 West Conestoga Township was formally renamed Donegal. The township, taking in all the territory west and northwest of Pequea Creek, encompassed most of the western half of present Lancaster County. Ellis and Evans, 757. Clearly some (and possibly most) of the settlers had come from West Ulster, continuing a movement of Presbyterians from that region that had begun more than a generation earlier. George and John Stewart emigrated from County Donegal in 1717, John and James Galbraith in 1718, Patrick Campbell and James Cunningham in 1720. David McClure came from Raphoe, County Donegal; Samuel Smith from Ballymagory, County Tyrone. Whatever their point of origin in Ireland, the Scotch-Irish by the 1720s comprised the vast majority of the European population in this frontier region. The eastern shores of the Susquehanna had become “an Irish haven,” attracting a stream of new arrivals. Fitzgerald and Lambkin, 111; Ellis and Evans, 759; H.M.J. Klein, History of Lancaster County (New York, 1924), 296; Dunaway, 53; Griffin, 106. The Donegal settlers organized what is now the Donegal Springs Presbyterian Church in Mount Joy Township by 1720. Donegal men would be active participants in the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, pledging their lives under the branches of an old oak dubbed the Witness Tree on the grounds of the Donegal Presbyterian Church. The Donegal settlement lent its name and became the basis of the first Pennsylvania presbytery west of Philadelphia. The Synod of Philadelphia created the Donegal Presbytery in response to the Scotch-Irish presence which had led to the organization of fifteen or more congregations during barely two decades. Dunaway, 52; Anne Hollingsworth Wharton, In Old Pennsylvania Towns (Philadelphia, 1920), 96; Alfred Nevin, Churches of the Valley (Philadelphia, 1852), 21; Griffin, 116. A growing migrant population led to a proliferation of Ulster place-names. Provincial Secretary, James Logan (an Ulster-born Quaker) attempted to direct the continuing flow of Irish migrants toward the “lower end” of the frontier, the settlements in the Susquehanna Valley closer to the disputed border with Maryland. The “lower end” settlements included those within Drumore and Colerain Township, organized in 1738. The latter township is situated in southeastern Lancaster County between Drumore and Chester County. Colerain was “settled principally by the Irish;” some of the earliest settlers—Allisons and Andersons—were living in what became Colerain as early as 1716. By 1751, township tax collector Charles McCalester reported that Colerain’s taxable inhabitants included Clarks, Cunninghams, Gilmores, Hendersons, McClellands, McCulloughs, McKneelys and Pattersons. Griffin, 105-106; Ellis and Evans, 729, 735. Many migrants in the 1720s and 1730s, however, persisted in a steady movement to the “upper end” Donegal settlement—often occupying the land without purchase or rent, deed or lease. Inhabitants of the northeastern section of Donegal Township began clamoring for their own jurisdiction; Lancaster County officials responded in 1741 by creating a new township named for the town, barony, parish and diocese of Raphoe in eastern County Donegal. Located between the Big Chickies and Little Chickies Creeks, Rapho (to use the modern Pennsylvania spelling) boasted rich, desirable farmland and represented the third largest township in Lancaster County. Another township derived from the Donegal settlement took its name from the English merchant ship which broke the boom across the River Foyle and lifted the siege of Derry in 1689. Mount Joy Township was organized in 1759; European incomers who settled in the 1730s included Cunninghams, Moorheads, Lytles and Scotts. Griffin, 105-106; Ellis and Evans, 1024-1025; Mount Joy Centennial Souvenir History, 22-23; Klein, 296. The Irish spelling “Raphoe” persisted until at least 1833. (Thomas F. Gordon, A Gazetteer of the State of Pennsylvania [Philadelphia, 1832].) Espenshade asserted that Mount Joy Township received its name from “the title of General Sir William Stewart, who owned large estates in County Donegal, who was raised to the peerage of Ireland in 1683 as Baron Stewart and Viscount Mountjoy, and who later deserted the cause of James II for that of William III… (337).” The “upper end” of Scotch-Irish settlement continued to push north along the eastern shores of the Susquehanna. John Allison departed Derry in the 1720s to settle in the Pennsylvania wilderness given the unflattering title “the barrens of Derry”—a misleading name, given the rich potential of the lands north of the Donegal settlement drained by Swatara Creek. Patrick Hayes and his three brothers came from County Donegal in 1728. They and many others—Campbells, Carrs, Clarkes, Johnstons, McGrees, McNairs, Walkers and Wilsons—settled in the frontier region initially known as Peshtank. The settlement became organized as Derry Township in 1729, becoming a constituent element of a new county, Dauphin, in 1759. Londonderry Township followed in 1768. (These original townships were quite expansive in size; present-day townships of North and South Londonderry in Lebanon County were originally part of Dauphin’s extensive Londonderry Township.) The early settlers built their farms along running water supplied by hillside springs. Derry’s Presbyterians conducted their first services along a spring-fed stream (where it flowed into Spring Creek) in April 1724. Five years later they built a log and clapboard church building. Dunaway, 53; William Henry Egle, Adolphus S. Dudley, Harry I. Huber and Rebecca H. Schively, Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. (Chambersburg, 1896), 85, 114; G.G. Stoctay, Dauphin County: Elements Toward a 20th Century Pictoral History (Harrisburg, 1971), 235; William Henry Egle, History of the Counties of Dauphin and Lebanon (?, 1883), 25-27, 216, 218, 420, 409, 409. In the mountain ridges that traverse northern Dauphin and Lebanon Counties, some Ulster migrants found similarities to scenes possibly observed from emigrant ships leaving Lough Foyle. The name Magilligan’s Rocks was applied to a portion of Second Mountain. A rock on a nearby ridge became The King’s Stool because of its perceived similarity to a same-named formation among Magilligan’s Rocks near Lough Foyle. These rocky ridges are likely included within the areas unsuited for agriculture which geographer John Florin identifies with “the first sizable enclaves of unsettled land [which began] to appear on the map” in the 1720s. A section of the border between Lancaster and Lebanon Counties remained unpopulated by 1730 and likewise is depicted as empty on a map published in 1954. Florin observes that “a part of the same northeastern boundary [of Lancaster County] is classified on a soil map of Pennsylvania as rough and stoney [sic].” He finds this suggestive of the “high degree of reliability of local history material” used in mapping the movement of the frontier. Henry W. Shoemaker, Place Names and Altitudes of Pennsylvania Mountains, 11-12; Florin 51-52, Fig. 13. Such “local history” material is crucial to this study. 2. Crossing the Susquehanna: York and Adams Counties No settlements could be made legally west of the Susquehanna River under the Land Purchase of 1718 without arrangements with the Native Americans occupying the lands. Nonetheless, “a few hardy Scotch-Irish… crossed the Susquehanna and ‘squatted’ on Indian lands west of the river… Colonial officials complained that these illegal settlers had not even offered to buy the land from the Penns”! Concerned by movement into contested lands from Maryland, however, provincial authorities reached an understanding with Indians that in 1722 allowed for a cross-river settlement. Ulster migrants began crossing the Susquehanna in the 1720s, with ever-heavier numbers in the 1730s, to stake out claims, legally and otherwise. Families coming from Chester County settled in the “Red Lands” in the hilly country which became northwestern York County; they called their new community “Monaghan.” Early settlers along Yellow Breeches Creek included McMullins, Dares, Baileys, Parks and Elliots. Formally organized in 1745 (four years before the erection of York from Lancaster), Monaghan encompassed modern Carroll, Franklin and Monaghan Townships. Sometime before 1752 a log house near Yellow Breeches Creek in what is now Dillsburg, Carroll Township, began serving as Monaghan Presbyterian Church. Dunaway, 56-57; Florin, 50; James W. Schaffer in John Gibson, ed., History of York County, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1886), 646; Nevin, 270-272. Pennsylvania derived from a seventeenth-century land grant to William Penn; the Penn family continued to exert ownership over much of the colony in the eighteenth century. Most Scotch-Irish settlers moved into the (future) county’s southeast, a region known as the “York Barrens” apparently as a result of the Indians’ practice of regulating brush growth through fires. A nineteenth-century antiquarian surmised that Fawn Township took its name from the deer plentiful in the York Barrens; however, John Gibson admitted that if so, this would be an unusual reason for a name. The more likely explanation would be Fahan, a parish on the Inishowen peninsula of County Donegal close to Derry (and with a pronunciation often similar to “Fawn”). Fawn, Chanceford (and present-day Lower Chanceford) and Peach Bottom Townships represented the principal Ulster settlements in southeastern York County. Among the first buildings in Chanceford was a crudely built inn on the York and Peach Bottom Road. A traveler, commenting on the absence of the customary sign, offered the innkeeper his shoe. The proposal accepted, the tavern became known as Brogue, as did the village that developed around it. Gibson, 757; Alan Crozier, “The Scotch-Irish Influence on American English.” American Speech 59 (1984), 314, 323; B.F. Porter in Gibson, 734. Brogue, meaning shoe, is derived from Irish and Scots Gaelic and is regarded as Hiberno-English. Migrants from Ireland have been identified the first people of European origins to locate along Marsh and Conewago Creeks in the western reaches of York County, organized as modern Adams County in 1800. A parcel once owned by Cornelius Campbell and known as the Armagh Tract lay near the headwaters of Conewago Creek in Pleasant (later Buchanan) Valley in what became Franklin Township. Quakers from Friends’ meetings in Moyallan, County Down, and Lurgan, County Armagh, among others, settled further east along the Conewago. They called their community “Monallon,” formalized as Menallen Township. (Possbily recalling the township’s origins are toponyms presently found within its borders: Quaker Valley and Quaker Run, the latter a stream.) As in Ireland, the Pennsylvanian version of Moyallan lies relatively close to Hamiltonsbawn and Warringstown. Dunaway, 58; I. Daniel Rupp, The History and Topography of Dauphin, Cumberland, Franklin, Bedford, Adams and Perry Counties (Lancaster, 1846), 540; Samuel P. Bates, History of Cumberland and Adams Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1886), 256-257, 307; Historical Sketch of Moyallon Meeting, quoted in “More on Menallen,” Adams County Historical Society Newsletter, Vol. 17, No. 3 (March 1990). The Gazetteer of Pennsylvania (1832) rendered the name “Manallen.” See below for Hamiltonsbawn. Warringstown, Co. Down, may be the source for Warrington, a York County township immediately south of Monaghan. To the east and south of Menallen, also along Conewago Creek, Ulster pioneers made settlements they called Tyrone and Straban, the basis of present-day townships so-named. Just south of Straban, Ulster folk congregated at the hamlet called Managhan, on lands purchased by the Hamilton family from the Penns in what is now Mount Pleasant Township. A hamlet called Irishtown grew up across the South Branch of the Conewago from Mount Pleasant Township. “Hugh and Andrew Lynch erected a house, then James McBarron, followed by the Coligans, McClains, McBrides, Coltons, Marshalls, Pattersons and others.” To the south of Mount Pleasant, Mount Joy Township may have taken its name from the Lancaster County jurisdiction, the famous merchant ship, or the castle and hamlet in County Tyrone of that name, or the County Donegal estates of the Viscount Mountjoy. The first men to purchase land here were William Smith (1739), Robert Linn and Robert McKenny (1740), and Adam Linn, Gabriel McAllister and William McKenny (1741). Bates, 307, 315, 324; Patrick McKay, A Dictionary of Ulster Place-Names (Belfast, 1999), 111; Espenshade, 337; Bates, 313-315. The Gazetteer of Pennsylvania (1832) gave the spelling as “Strabane.” The spelling “Straban” reflects the Irish pronunciation. Marsh Creek settler Samuel Gettys in the 1770s opened a tavern at a muddy crossroads in Straban Township. After the Revolutionary War, his son James purchased a portion of that parcel. James Gettys, together with the Irish-born Covenanter minister, Alexander Dobbin, later laid out the village of Gettysburg on that land. Nearly a century nearby fields would be the scene of the American Civil War’s bloodiest and most celebrated battle. Born in Derry in 1742, Rev. Dobbin(s) was ordained by the Reformed Presbytery of Ireland as a missionary to America in 1772. He was a founding member of the Reformed Presbytery of North America, pastor to the Rock Creek congregation at Gettysburg, in 1782 a founder of the Associate Reformed Church, and founder and principal of the Gettysburg Academy, regarded as the first classical school west of the Susquehanna. A nineteenth-century Pennsylvanian historian located the origins of the earliest settlers in northwestern Ireland—and suggested that “They spoke bad Irish and as bad English.” Samuel P. Bates wrote, “Between 1735-6 and 1741 a number of Irish peasantry from the hills of Tyrone, Derry, Cavan and Sligo Counties, came hither to stay.” Numbered among those settling along Marsh Creek in the late 1730s: Campbells, Darbys, and Eddys; William and Matthew Black; Henry McDonah, James McMichell, John McWhorter and Hugh Swainey. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, several of these surnames have historic associations with northwestern Ireland. Bates, 241; Rupp, 541. Bates indicated no source for his information on language; the present writer has found no independent evidence of Irish-speaking among eighteenth-century immigrants to Pennsylvania. For information on the surnames, see Robert Bell, The Book of Ulster Surnames (Belfast, 1988). Those settling along McDowell’s Run and Little Marsh Creek called their community Hamiltonban, after Hamiltonsbawn, a townland and village in County Armagh. Families here in 1789 included those of the name Ferguson, Finlay, McAllister, McCarley, McGinley, Knox, Orr and Porter. Hamiltonsban Township today encompasses the southwestern corner of Adams County, including the slopes of South Mountain. A mountain ridge that stretches from Maryland north into Pennsylvania, South Mountain sets off the Cumberland Valley and physically separates Adams and Franklin Counties. Bates, 256-257. Pennsylvania experienced a dramatic expansion of settlement in the 1730s, fueled by “the large number of immigrants landing at Philadelphia beginning in the late 1720’s and continuing through the 1730’s.” Immigrants from Ulster figured prominently among this influx, particularly in the years 1725-1729. As James Logan, provincial secretary, notably observed in 1729, “It looks as if Ireland is to send all its inhabitants hither, for last week not less than six ships arrived, and every day, two or three arrive also.” Florin, 52; James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962), 170-171. 3. The Cumberland Valley: ‘Seed-plot and Nursery of Their Race” The broad, fertile and crescent-shaped Cumberland Valley arches from the Potomac River (on the Virginia-Maryland border) northeast to the Susquehanna River, flanked on the west by Kittatinny Mountain, on the north by Blue and Little Mountains and to the east by Piney, Rocky and South Mountains. What Pennsylvanians call South Mountain is a northern extension of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. In southern Pennsylvania the Blue Ridge splits into two, creating “a hollowed-out center” with relatively fertile terrain accessible to agriculture. The valley’s diagonal swath meant that “nearly all” settlers gained access from the Susquehanna and moved southwest, rather than by crossing the mountain ridge east-to-west. The valley would be a major route during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Florin, 55-56. The allure of the Cumberland Valley proved irresistible to the newly emigrated and first-generation Pennsylvanians alike. The bold and desperate moved beyond the frontier to make illegal settlements in 1730-31; the first settler for whom there is documentation was apparently Andrew Ralston of Big Spring. A steady flow of migrants developed after 1733; once the Province allowed the unrestricted sale of lands along the Conodoguinet and Conocoheague Creeks in 1736, the region quickly experienced a great influx of the land-hungry from Lancaster County and directly from Ireland and Scotland, “nearly all of whom were Presbyterians.” “This valley,” wrote Wayland F. Dunaway, became the headquarters of the Scotch-Irish not only in Pennsylvania but in America as well. It was the seed-plot and nursery of their race, the original reservoir, which, after having been filled to overflowing, sent forth a constant stream of emigrants to the northward and especially to the South and West. Of the 5,000 people located in the valley by 1751, all but fifty families are said to have been Scotch-Irish or Scots. The valley comprises the modern counties of Franklin and Cumberland. Only in Lancaster County is there as great a profusion of surviving Ulster place-names readily observable from modern maps. Conway Phelps Wing, History of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1879), 22; George O. Seilhamer, “Old Mother Cumberland,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1900, 22; Nevin, 22; Dunaway, 59. Writing less than a century later, the author of A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania proposed “The population of [Cumberland] co. is composed chiefly of the Germans and the Irish, who were the first settlers.” (Part 2, 127.) The Conodoguinet and Conocoheague Creeks are the principal streams in Cumberland and Franklin Counties. Young men from Scotch-Irish settlements such as Donegal in Lancaster County were among the first to cross the Susquehanna—moving beyond the recognized frontier—and occupy land in the valley. Also on the move: emigrants who had first sought out friends and family east of the river. Four brothers named Chambers who had emigrated from County Antrim in the 1720s in 1730 became among the very first to move beyond the river-frontier. (Benjamin Chambers, a millwright, became the founder of Chambersburg, the Franklin County seat.) Many hundreds of their compatriots soon followed them. Wing, 22-23. Lisburn is the oldest village in Lower Allen Township in eastern Cumberland County. Located in a loop of Yellow Breeches Creek in the township’s southern corner, the land was conveyed by the heirs of William Penn to Alexander Frazer in 1739. (Lisburn is a town in County Antrim.) “New Lisburn,” “Lisborn” and “Lisbon” are among the renderings of the name found in deeds and other documents dating back to 1765. Early settlers reportedly recreated the annual country fairs known in Ireland for hiring of labor and sales of livestock and produce. Bates, 299; J.C. Nesbit in Wing, 200; Mrs. Gilbert E. Swope in George P. Donehoo, ed., A History of the Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1930), 489. Among the village’s more illustrious—or infamous—early residents was James Galbraith, known alternately as Indian trader and Indian fighter. The emigrant from County Donegal originally settled in Lancaster County, established a ferry across the Susquehanna and purchased land in Lisburn around 1761. Others residing in Lisburn and environs circa 1760 were Abernathys, Andersons, Armstrongs, Atkinsons, Beattys, Boyds, Brysons, Chambers, Clarks, Crocketts, Cuffs, Cunninghams, Dunlaps, Elliotts, Frees, Gibsons, Hannahs, Lairds, Martins, McCormicks, McCues, McCurdys, McGees, McMains, McNails, Quiqleys, Rankins, Sandses, Semples, Steels, Stewarts, Whitesides and Wilsons. Bates, 300; Swope in Donehoo, 491. A man named Mitchell opened the first tavern in present-day West Pennsborough Township, Cumberland County in 1786; soon it became universally known as “The Irish House,” a place where whiskey was reportedly consumed in prodigious quantities. Scotch-Irish settlers brought the name Magilligan’s Rocks west across the Susquehanna; applying it to a rock formation in Cumberland County perceived as similar to the Ulster original. Peter Ritner in Wing, 268; Shoemaker, 12. In the rugged northwestern corner of what became Franklin County, pioneers of Irish origin built homes where the Path, Amberson and Horse Valleys occupy the narrow space between the Tuscorora and Kittatinny mountain ridges. In 1750 the original European settlers were driven out and their cabins burnt—but not by Native Americans. When Indians objected to the occupation of their lands by a growing number of pioneers, provincial authorities acted “to expel the interlopers.” Officials, among them Cumberland County magistrates Benjamin Chambers, William Maxwell and William Allison, oversaw the evictions. (The place-name Burnt Cabins recalls those events; the village is in Dublin Township, Fulton County, close by the border with Huntingdon and Franklin Counties.) Among those suffered fines imposed by the magistrate’s court—as well as burnt homes—were Moses Moore, Alexander McCartie, Felix Doyle and Samuel Ramage. Once the land had been purchased from the Indians by the province in 1758 most of these pioneers returned. Donehoo, 415; Espenshade, 301. Their settlement was called Fannett after a northern peninsula in County Donegal; Fanad Head may have been some migrants’ last sight of Ireland. William McIntire, Alexander Walker and Francis Elliott settled along the Tuscarora Path (from which Path Valley received its name) in what became known as Fannettsburg. Early settlers along the West Branch of the Conococheague Creek in the southern reaches of Fannett Township (organized as Metal Township in 1795) included Archibald Elliott, Francis McConnell, John and Thomas Clark, Patrick Davidson, Hugh and James McCurdy, James Mackey and Robert McGuire. Espenshade, 309; Donehoo, 415, 417. A Presbyterian congregation in Co. Donegal known as “Fannet” was organized in 1654. (Alexander G. Lecky, In the Days of the Laggan Presbytery [Belfast, 1908], 142.) Rev. Charles Beatty, a Presbyterian minister appointed by the Synod of New York and Pennsylvania in 1766 to preach to frontier inhabitants, traveled through Fannett. He lodged with Francis Elliott. Beatty recorded the following in his diary for 25 August: This Path-Valley is twenty-three miles in length, and in general about three miles in breadth. In one township, called Fanet, there are about seventy families, who are desirous of the gospel, and willing to support it, according to their abilities, being very unanimous. They have fixed upon a place, about eight or nine miles from the head of the valley, where they propose to build a house for worship. Donehoo, 24, 211. Donegal names also feature prominently in northern Franklin County. County officials established Letterkenny as a township in 1762 out of Lurgan’s expansive territory. (Letterkenny is a townland and town in County Donegal.) Surveys and land warrants document settlement in Letterkenny as early as 1736. Among those locating in Letterkenny prior to 1754 were settlers named Allison, Barnhill, Boyd, Culbertson, Henderson, Irwin, McKean, Mitchell, Rogers and Stewart. As a result of this early occupation and exposed position, Letterkenny’s pioneers were hard-hit during the French and Indian War. Those not victims of massacres and destruction of their cabins fled to more settled areas, abandoning their hardscrabble holdings. Donehoo, 423, 424, 423. The Rocky Spring Presbyterian Church served as the center of the Letterkenny settlement from its organization in 1738 by the Presbytery of Donegal. The congregation took its name from a nearby spring and stream. Not surprisingly, congregation’s first minister was also the first settled Presbyterian minister west of the Susquehanna. Also unsurprisingly, this first minister had Donegal connections. Rev. Thomas Craighead was the son of Rev. Robert Craighead, first minister of the Donoughmore congregation in County Donegal. Both father and son were members of the Laggan Presbytery. Thomas Craighead was ordained and installed in 1698 as minister to the Presbyterians of Donegal town, Mountcharles, Ballintra and southeastern Donegal generally. Craighead and his immediate family emigrated in the mid-1710s together with his brother-in-law Rev. William Holmes, a Donegal native ordained and installed by the Laggan Presbytery as minister to the Strabane congregation in 1692. Craighead settled first in Massachusetts, moving to Lancaster County in 1733. He died in 1739, while in the Rocky Spring pulpit. Donehoo, 423; Lecky, 17; Bolton, Scotch Irish pioneers in Ulster and America (Boston, 1910), 79-82, 87-89; James Terry White, The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1898), 130; Seilhamer, 26-27. To the south, hundreds of pioneer families settled along the Conococheague Creek and its tributaries; these streams drain the lower the Cumberland Valley as the Conococheague meanders south to the Potomac. The “Conococheague Settlement” and “East Conococheague Settlement” became the homes of settlers among whom numbered Allisons, Craigs, Davidsons, McClellans, Poes and Watsons. William Allison acquired a large tract of land in the Conococheague Settlement and built a fort for the community’s protection (and to safeguard his investment). Fort Allison became a nucleus of settlement, as did a blacksmith’s shop located at the intersection of the King’s Highway and a pioneer trail. The community’s first church, “the old red meeting house,” was built circa 1737 and located at Moss Springs. The first pastor to this Presbyterian congregation, Rev. Samuel Cavin, ministered to both sides of the Conococheague Creek, as did the steely John Steel in the mid-1750s. Wharton, 132-133; Donehoo, 263, 415; Nevin, 162-163. In response to the considerable influx of settlers, Lancaster County officials created Hopewell Township in 1735. Six years later, the Court of Quarter Sessions ordered the frontier township divided into two; the western half became Antrim. Named for the Irish county from which many of its inhabitants originated, the new township comprised much of what is now Franklin County. Early settlers in Antrim included James Johnston, John and James McLanahan and James Roddy, as well as Laughlins, McIlvaines, McKeehans, McKinneys, Nesbits, Peebles, Pollocks, Scroggses and Trimbles. Seilhamer, 23; Lenore Embick Fowler in Donehoo, 547; Donehoo, 264; Wing, 30; Donehoo 414. Antrim was subdivided in 1743 to create an additional township, Lurgan. (Lurgan is a townland and town in County Armagh.) A principally Irish pioneer settlement in the Cumberland Valley, Lurgan developed along the level land watered by Conodoguinet Creek at the heart of the Cumberland Valley, astride the main route that brought settlers deeper into the Cumberland Valley. When assigned as the name of a township in Lancaster County (which then took in all of the western-most reaches of the province), Lurgan encompassed much of modern Franklin County. Among the earliest settlers in Lurgan was the Irish-born Thomas Pomeroy and his wife; the Pomeroys had a son, also Thomas, in 1733, purportedly the first white child born in Franklin County. Fort McAllister was built in Lurgan Township during the French and Indian War. Donehoo, 425. Pomeroy, born in Ireland, was of “Huguenot extraction.” (Seilhamer, 41) As a frontier settlement during the French and Indian War of the 1750s, Antrim experienced the ravages of that conflict. According to tradition, Indians attacked the crude log schoolhouse where Enoch Brown listened to his scholars’ morning recitations. The school was set ablaze and all there tomahawked to death except young Archie McCullough, who escaped with the horrific tale. On another occasion, Rev. John Steel was delivering a sermon when word reached Fort Allison that the Walker family had been massacred at Rankin’s mill only a mile away. The appropriately surnamed minister abruptly halted his teaching, took down his musket from the wall and led the men to battle. Donehoo, 264; Dunaway, 214. In 1782, Col. John Allison laid out a new town within the boundaries of Antrim Township with the assistance of a schoolmaster, James Crawford; he named it Greencastle for his emigrant father’s birthplace in County Donegal. An Englishman who visited Greencastle some three years later described it a “poor mean little town” and expressed his relief in having left quickly. Greencastle then consisted of about twenty houses and the “old red meeting house.” The majority Scotch-Irish in 1792 demonstrated their opposition to the federal excise tax on distilled beverages (if not federal fiscal policy in general) with a liberty pole and placard declaring “Down with Tyrants! Plenty of Whiskey and No Excise!” Donehoo, 265; Espenshade, 246; Wharton, 132-133; Donehoo, 266. Greencastle is a village on the Inishowen peninsula, across Lough Foyle from Magilligan Point. 4. The Juniata Valley and Central Pennsylvania Acknowledging the frontier’s westward movement, Pennsylvania officials in January 1750 created Cumberland County out of the considerable territory that had been Lancaster County west of the Susquehanna (excepting York County, erected in 1749). The Penn family’s 1754 purchase from the Indians of a vast tract of land west of the Susquehanna legalized the Fannett settlement and led to the creation of additional townships over the mountains to the north of the Cumberland Valley. County officials in 1754 organized four townships on “tother side of N. Mountain”: Tyrone, Lack, Fannett, and Aire (or Ayr). That three of the four names were from West Ulster and the fourth from southwestern Scotland is likely indicative of many settlers’ origins. Fannett, as we have seen, encompassed settlements in narrow mountain valleys parallel to the Cumberland Valley and became part of modern Franklin County. Tyrone and Lack lay north and northwest of the Cumberland Valley, across mountain ridges where incomers created farmsteads along streams flowing toward the meandering Juniata River. The Juniata rises deep in the Appalachian Mountains in west-central Pennsylvania and loops east through mountain passes and between ridges to its confluence with the Susquehanna in present-day Perry County. Many of those who initially settled along the Juniata and its tributaries appear to have been from the north of Ireland. Their communities became bases of Juniata, Mifflin and Perry Counties. Franklin Ellis and Austin Hungerford, History of that part of the Susquehanna and Juniata Valleys Embraced in the Counties of Mifflin, Juniata, Perry, Union and Snyder… (Philadelphia, 1886), 532. The provincial land office in 1755 began sales of territory in Sherman’s Valley and along the Juniata included in the Indians’ cessation of land under the Treaty of Albany. The outbreak of war prevented widespread migration into the region—particularly following the spectacular defeat of combined British and colonial forces under General Edward Braddock in western Pennsylvania in July of that year. Squatters had already attempted settlement. In 1750 provincial authorities burned cabins along Sherman’s Creek before the territory had become open for purchase. Among the squatters dispersed were Owen McKeeb, John McClare, Richard Kirkpatrick, James Murray, John Scott and Simon Girty. Following the 1754 purchase Sherman’s Valley became the new Cumberland County township of Tyrone. Early settlers, with biting humor, referred to the district as “the eternal state of Tyrone.” The 1767 assessment list for Tyrone Township included persons with the surnames Alexander, Black, Carson, Cunningham, Diven, Dunbar, Elliot, Ferguson, Hamilton, Kelly, Kennedy, Kilkead, McClure, McConnell, Miller, Orr, Patterson, Roddy and Wilson. The list suggests the apparent return of Owen McKeeb. Rupp, 545; Dunaway, 67; Rupp, 545; H.H. Hain, History of Perry County (Harrisburg, 1922), 911-912, 1009; Hain, 1069. The Irish-born Simon Girty was the father of the notorious, same-named Loyalist who helped organize and lead Indian raids on American settlements during the Revolutionary War. In 1763 the first township created out of Tyrone was named for the Parish of Taughboyne in the Barony of Raphoe, County Donegal. Toboyne had as a boundary line Alexander Roddy’s mill run. Today Toboyne occupies the mountainous southwestern corner of Perry County at the head of Sherman Valley, bordered by Cumberland, Franklin and Juniata Counties. Among the first settlers to receive land warrants there were John Wilson (1755), William Wallace (1765), John Watt (1766) and John Rhea (1767). Another early settler, John Clendenin, had the misfortune to be killed and scalped by Indians. In Perry County, early settlers named a rock formation Magilligan’s Rocks. Near the present town of Marysville in Perry County, where Fishing Creek enters the Susquehanna a 1770 map had the notation “Saut”—the (Ulster) Scots word for “salt.” Among the Revolutionary War veterans in that portion of Perry were men named Gilmore, O’Donald, O’Neil and Rooney. Hain, 1064; Shoemaker, 12; Hain 160. For “saut” see C.I. Macafee, ed, A Concise Ulster Dictionary (Oxford, 1996). West of Tyrone and Toboyne, Cumberland County officials established Lack Township in 1754, named for the townland and village in County Fermanagh or alternately, Leck Parish in central County Donegal. The county magistrates declared: “And we do further erect the settlement called the Tuskerora Valey [sic] into a sepparate [sic] Township and nominate the same the Township of Lac, and we appoint John Johnston to act therein as constable for the remaining part of the current year.” At its inception the township encompassed all of present-day Juniata County south and west of the Juniata River and a portion of Huntingdon County. The name “Lack” continues as a township name in Juniata County. Many of the earliest settlers fled during the hostilities of the 1750s but returned once British forces occupied the Forks of the Ohio. Among the eighty taxpayers on record in 1763: James Armstrong, David Bell, James Calhoun, Robert Campbell, John Collins, William Cunningham, Robert Houston, William Irwin, John Little, John McClellan, George McConnell, Robert Robinson, David Wallace and John and Thomas Wilson. Blackburns, Christys, Hoggs and Johnsons also numbered among early settlers. John W. Jordan, ed., A History of the Juniata and Its People, Vol. I (New York: 1913), 153, 162. The Co. Donegal Leck (like the Fermanagh name derived from the Irish An Leac) borders Raphoe Parish; Raphoe (in various spellings) occurred frequently among Pennsylvania place-names of Ulster origin. In late 1754 or early 1755 Cumberland County organized the newly purchased territory north of the Juniata River as a township named Fermanagh. The township initially encompassed all of modern Juniata and portions of Perry, Snyder, Mifflin, Centre and Huntingdon Counties; Juniata County today retains a much-shrunken Fermanagh. The township’s earliest settlers included Alexander Lafferty, Thomas McCormick, James Purdy and James Sharon; located there by 1755, they were driven out several times. Warfare with Native Americans smoldered through 1780. Serving as township officers in 1763 were Arthur Moody, constable; John Nicholson and Samuel Mitchell, supervisors; Andrew McKeener and George Hays, overseers of the poor; and Alexander Lafferty and James Gallagher. Taxables included Robert Calhooen, William Curran, William Henderson, John McBride, Thomas McKee, Hugh McCalester, Andrew McClure, Hugh McCormick,William McLevy, Samuel Mitchell, John Nickson, Robert Neilson, James Patterson and William Stewart. Ellis and Hungerford, 532, 808-9, 809, 811. Robert Nelson came from Derry, Ireland about 1750 and settled near Anderson’s Ferry on the Susquehanna. Sometime before 1763 he purchased a tract from William Huston in Fermanagh, married, settled in the township. During the Revolution, his house was regarded as “a rendezvous for all patriotic men in this section.” Thomas McCormick, remembered as “an Irishman,” took out a warrant on March 7, 1755 for a tract of 311 acres along Horning’s Run, which he named Armagh. (The name does not appear to have survived.) Controversy within the Associate Reformed Church which eventually led to the secession of western and southern presbyteries in 1812 occasioned a formal protest to the denomination’s General Synod from the congregation of “Fermanah” in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania—likely a remnant of the original settlement. Ellis and Hungerford, 817, 818; Associate Reformed Synod of the West, A Statement of the Grievances (Pittsburgh, 1823), 10-13. An Associate, later Associate Reformed, congregation called Fermanagh organized in 1776 in what was Juniata County in 1903. That the minister of this Fermanagh congregation, the Irish immigrant Thomas Smith, linked to the United Irishmen at the time of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, was a noted participant in the denominational controversy suggests it is the same. (William Melanchton Glasgow, Cycopledic Manual of the United Presbyterian Church of North America [Pittsburgh, 1903], 439.) The Cumberland County Court in 1767 established the boundaries of Fermanagh Township and added three new townships, one of them Derry. The new Derry took in roughly the eastern half of what is now Mifflin County north of the Juniata. Among the earliest settlers in Derry Township were the brothers Matthew and George Kelly, who took out a warrant for 156 acres at the south end of Dry Valley. A village named Kellyville (which no longer appears to exist) was named for Moses Kelly, who acquired lands in Derry Township in 1791. The first tax assessment in 1768 collected a wealth of names with likely connections to Ulster: Alexander, Armstrong, Bell, Brown, Buchanan, Cannon, Crawford, Davis, Dunn, Forster, McCartney, McDonald, McKee, Magill, McKee, McMeans, Montgomery, Patton, Ross, Stewart and Wallace. Ellis and Hungerford, 543, 537, 533. Each of these surnames is found in Robert Bell, The Book of Ulster Surnames (Belfast, 1988). With many settlers locating north of Jack’s Mountain in the East Kishacoquillas Valley, authorities acceded to the pioneers’ petition to subdivide Derry Township—with the result that Armagh Township was created in 1770. The 1770 assessment found families by the name of Armstrong, Alexander, Calhoune, Cameron, Cochran, Davidson, Dickson, Duncan, Ewing, McClay, McClure, McKibbon, Sterrett, Taylor and Wallace. A Neal Dougherty also numbered among the taxpayers. An assessment of Armagh Township following the creation of Mifflin County in 1789 found many of these names as well as Boyd, Burns, Dunlap, Erwin, Fleming, Huston, Jackson, McDowell, McNamar, Mitchell, Moore, Murphy, Nealy, O’Hara, Vance and Wilson. Ellis and Hungerford, 534, 551-552, 553-554. The name McNamar is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it is of Irish Gaelic origin, a variant of Macnamara—Mac con na mara. Secondly, this is likely the family of Richard McNemar, a Presbyterian minister closely identified with the Great Revival of 1800 and later affiliated with the Shakers. A biographer, who gives McNemar’s mother’s maiden name as Knox, describes the future preacher’s family as part of the Scotch-Irish migration. McNemar was born in 1770 in Tuscarora, Pa. near the Fermanagh settlement in what is now Juniata Co.; in 1775 the family moved further up the Juniata River and, following other relocations, in the early 1780s settled in the Kishacoquillas Valley. (J.P. Maclean, Sketch of the Life and Labors of Richard McNemar [Franklin, Ohio, 1905], 5.) Near the foot of the Seven Mountains in northern Armagh Township, the McNitt brothers—Alexander, James, John, Robert and William—began permanent settlement in 1766. With Indian raids an ever-present danger, the brothers built a stockade on Robert’s property. Their fears were well-founded. The Revolutionary War raged to the east when late on a summer day in 1777 the McNitts were in Robert Thompson’s rye field, helping with the reaping. Alexander McNitt’s young son Robert and a small girl were following the reapers, picking berries. Indians attacked suddenly, letting loose a volley of musket fire. A bullet passed through Alexander McNitt’s hat. The adults raced for the house, leaving young Robert crying for his father. The small girl, showing greater presence of mind, hid in the rye. Captured, Robert was carried off to Canada and there remained until 1781. Ellis and Hungerford, 553-554, 536. The East Kishacoquillas settlers organized a Presbyterian congregation and issued a call in March 1783 to Rev. James Johnston, a Cumberland County native and Revolutionary War veteran. The call was signed by, among others, John and Robert McNitt, Joseph McKibbins, James Lauglin, James McCay, Joseph Adams, John McManagill, Samuel Mitchell and Robert Allison. Rev. Johnston also ministered to Derry Township’s Dry Valley congregation, which met in a log meeting house in Kellysville. Ellis and Hungerford, 555, 537. South of Derry and the long, deep Kishacoquillas Valley, Hugh Brown bought land along a loop in the Juniata River in 1762. Upon his death the tract passed to his daughter Margaret Hamilton. A town named Newton Hamilton (located within Wayne Township, Mifflin County) was laid out in 1802. The precise Irish connection is unknown. Even if inspired by the heiress’s new familial connections, recent immigrants were likely aware that the village of Newtownhamilton had been established in County Armagh circa 1770. A more likely source is County Donegal’s Newtown Hamilton. This is a townland in the Foyle Valley bordering County Derry, in Killea Parish, Raphoe North Barony, and not far distant from Taughboyne Parish. Lots in the Pennsylvania village were soon sold to Samuel McCurdy and James Irvine. When Catharine McAneer and her parents came to live in Newton Hamilton in 1826, the town consisted of just log houses; their neighbors included John Murray and John McGeehan. Ellis and Hungerford, 588. 5. West Ulster Place-Names and the Westward Movement A consistent theme in the naming of places during the first half century of movement across Pennsylvania, 1710-1760, is the recourse to toponyms of West Ulster provenance, from Lough Erne north to Lough Swilly. Particularly apparent are names from the Laggan district consisting of northeastern Donegal, the Mourne valley of Tyrone and the Foyle valley of northwestern Derry. Hence, Derry, Letterkenny, Londonderry, Raphoe, Strabane, Taughboyne/Toboyne and Tyrone. Together with Fahan/Fawn, Fanad/Fannett, Greencastle and Magilligan, these represent areas in the hinterland of Derry city. In the eighteenth century the population was predominantly Protestant, with Presbyterians outnumbering Episcopalians. Breandán Mac Suibhne, “Patriot Paddies: The Volunteers and Irish Identity in Northwest Ulster, 1778-1786” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1999), 19-20. Small-scale migration of Ulster Scots from County Donegal to North America was underway even before the end of the seventeenth century. Presbyterians no doubt predominated during the eighteenth-century migration, although departures from Derry and smaller ports on the coast of County Donegal possibly involved Catholics of native Irish origin—as the surname evidence strongly suggests. The relatively slower pace of economic growth in west Ulster in the first half of the eighteenth century may have acted a spur to movement out of the region during that period. Fitzgerald and Lambkin, 111; R.J. Dickson Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1773 ( Belfast, 1988), 4; Graeme Kirkham, in Dickson, xvi-xvii. The term “redemptioner” could be a clue to the economic circumstances of some eighteenth-century migrants from Ulster, if not West Ulster specifically. Those intent on crossing the Atlantic but unable to pay their way had two choices: sign an indenture agreement or agree to pay the cost of passage shortly after arrival. If the “redemptioner” failed to raise his passage money within the agreed time, as R.J. Dickson explained, “his services were then sold by the ship’s master to the highest bidder as in the case of the indentured servant.” When Folklorist Henry W. Shoemaker collected the term in the mountains of central Pennsylvania in the early years of the twentieth century; to his informants, it meant “A descendant of continental settlers sold on the Philadelphia docks for their passage money.” (German-speakers also numbered among the colonial-era redemptioners.) Community awareness of this aspect of the emigration experience seems to have lingered among the generations along the tributaries of the Juniata River and the West Branch of the Susquehanna. Dickson, 87-88; Peter Gilmore, Scots-Irish Words from Pennsylvania’s Mountains, Taken from the Shoemaker Collection (Bruceton Mills, W.Va., 1999), 83. Another factor in the diffusion of West Ulster place-names is the substantial concentration of Ulster migrants in the older counties and their further movement carried westward and northwestward across Pennsylvania. A number of such migrants had origins in the Laggan. In the 1770s nearly half of the settlers in the valley of the West Branch of the Susquehanna and its tributaries—those sometimes known as the “Fair Play Settlers” are thought to have been “Scotch-Irish who originated in Chester, Cumberland, Dauphin and Lancaster Counties.” As networks of extended family and friends migrated out of the original core areas, it appears that attachment to certain names—reinforced by Pennsylvanian experience—traveled with them. Griffin, 106, 110; George D. Wolf, The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784: A Study of Frontier Ethnography (Harrisburg, 1969), 19. Further, there appears to be a correlation between Pennsylvania place-names and northern Irish ports, towns and villages identified by R.J. Dickson as having an association with emigration out-agents. Dickson’s data, drawn from the period 1750-1775, located emigration out-agents in Antrim, Armagh, Belfast, Coleraine, Fahan, Letterkenny, Lisburn, Lurgan, Moyallon, and Raphoe—all names found in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. What is particularly interesting is that (in most instances) these names had been assigned to places in Pennsylvania earlier than the period from which Dickson culled his information. This suggests that agents acting on behalf of the owners of emigrant ships operated in areas which by the third quarter of the century already demonstrated interest in migration. Dickson, 99-103. 6. Deeper Into the Appalachians: Bedford and Fulton Counties When organized in March 1771 out of the western-most reaches of Cumberland County, Bedford County covered the mountains and valleys now found within the boundaries of Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Fulton, Huntingdon, Somerset and Westmoreland Counties, and portions of others as well. Bedford had sixteen townships, each covering extensive (and unsettled) territory; among them, Colerain, Dublin, Ross Straver, Tullileague and Tyrone. Within this subset, west Ulster names (Tullileague and Tyrone) are now balanced with toponyms from the east of the province (Colerain and Ross Straver). In the case of Bedford’s original townships the names largely preceded the pioneers. Tullyleague is a townland (also known as Tullybrook) in the Parish of Drumhome in southeastern County Donegal; the name (or a variant) does not appear to have survived as a Pennsylvania place-name. Bedford County, according to A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania, “was originally settled by emigrants from other parts of the state, and from the north of Ireland.” Rupp, 488-490; Espenshade, 186; E. Howard Blackburn, William H. Koontz and William Henry Welfley, History of Bedford and Somerset Counties, Pennsylvania (New York, 1906), 87, 77-78; Gazetteer, Part 2, 32. The appearance of Dublin points up the relative paucity of Irish place-names from outside the province of Ulster. The first settlers in what became Fulton County arrived in the 1740s and took up their lands illegally. In 1750 several of these precipitous pioneers located in the Big Cove signed a petition to provincial authorities asking for understanding and retention of the lands they cleared in violation of Pennsylvania’s treaty with the Indians. Among the signers were Andrew Donaldson, John Jamison, John McMean, John Martin, William Mulligan, Roger Murphy and Charles Stewart, along with McConnells and Wilsons. (McConnellsburg—located in the valley known as Big Cove—is today the seat of Fulton County.) Early in the 1740s, according to Dunaway, “a few venturesome individuals among the Scotch-Irish” crossed the Tuscarora Mountains, moving westward from the Cumberland Valley (and present-day Franklin County) to settle in the valley known as Great Cove. Located near the center of this valley, which occupies much of modern Fulton County, Belfast Township survives as a reminder of the initial Ulster Scots settlement. The township was organized as part of Bedford County prior to 1785. Taxable inhabitants of Belfast in 1785 included Francis Allison, Simon Boyle, Benjamin Galbreath, Daniel Gillan, John Madden, Daniel McConnel and John McKewn. Rupp, 514, 515; Dunaway, 65; History of Bedford, Somerset and Fulton Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1884), 654. The last county to be created out of the vast territory that Bedford County in 1771, modern Fulton was established in 1750. The only Pennsylvanian President, James Buchanan, was born in 1791 to a Donegal-born father in what became Fulton County. In Fulton and Bedford Counties both, human habitation occurs in valley between mountain ridges that stretch north from Maryland deep into Pennsylvania. The first settlers, mainly Scotch-Irish, began to enter the territory of modern Bedford County in the early 1750s. Colerain Township, located in Friends Cove in south central Bedford, continues an original township name and recalls a relatively old Ulster Scots settlement. When demarcated in 1771, Colerain comprised much of the southeast of the present county. Settlement in this area was aided by proximity to Fort Bedford, the basis of the modern county seat, Bedford. Colerain’s tax rolls in 1771 included Henry Armstrong, Robert Bradshaw, William Buchanan, John Cunningham, Hugh Ferguson, John Finley, James Hunter, Thomas Johnston, Daniel McDonald, Robert McFerren, Robert McKinnie, Oliver Miller, Henderson Murphy, James Newell, James Patterson, Gideon Ritchey, Charles Stewart and Adam Young. Dunaway, 66; William A. Jordan in Winona Garbrick, ed., The Kernel of Greatness: An Informal Bicentennial History of Bedford County (State College, Pa., 1971), 64; Blackburn, 224; Rupp, 490; Blackburn, 224; Harriette M. Bradley and Thomas C. Imler in Garbrick, 70. The Irish-born Miller later relocated to Allegheny County; there his farm became the scene of a signal event in the Whiskey Rebellion. Although not among the original townships, Londonderry Township is relatively old, its organization dating from the 1780s. The township today occupies the southwestern corner of Bedford County; the settlements along Wills Creek have probably always been the center of its existence. John Miller settled on Wills Creek shortly after seeing service in the Revolutionary War. Cornelius Devore, the owner of one of the first mills, was among the earlier settlers. Jordan, 64; Blackburn, 239. 7. Appalachia along the Juniata: Blair and Huntingdon Counties The Juniata River is born in Huntingdon County with the confluence of the Little Juniata River (from the northwest) and Raystown Branch (from the southwest); there the Juniata begins its serpentine passage through mountain ridges to enter the Susquehanna River to the east. Along the western reaches of the Juniata and its principal tributaries, Ulster-bred families established settlements known originally by Ulster place-names that have largely disappeared. Robert Ray (or Rea) in the early 1750s established a trading post that became the basis of a village called Raystown, which in turn became the town of Bedford. That portion of the Juniata rising in western Bedford County and which then flows through Bedford town became known as the Raystown Branch. Alexander Ewing settled in Huntingdon County in 1777, a decade before political leaders created it. Ewing took out a warrant in August 1786 for 350 acres which he called Aughnacloy, the name of a town in County Tyrone. His new home became part of Tyrone the following year: the organization of Huntingdon County in 1787 included creation of eight townships, among them Tyrone and Dublin. Ewing farmed and built both a grist mill and a saw mill. Other early settlers in the vicinity included James Hunter and the Henderson family. J. Simpson Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1883), 4, 268-269, 272; Jordan, 68 Through division and further division the name “Tyrone” ceased to exist in Huntingdon County in August 1794. But it survives in neighboring Blair County, a part of Huntingdon until 1846. Tyrone Township is found in northern Blair’s Sinking Valley. The valley takes its name from Sinking Run, a stream that annually disappears due to an underlying limestone formation. The name “Tyrone” is also continued in a town and a village in nearby Snyder Township, formerly part of Tyrone. James Crawford, “a native of Ireland,” moved to the Sinking Valley from Adams County before the Revolutionary War. The threat of Indian raids sent him back to Adams, but he returned in a few years’ time with his wife and infant son, accompanied by Robert Stewart, Samuel Kyle and others. Africa, 228-229, 231. Sinking Valley’s first settlers, according to a nineteenth-century chronicler of Blair County, “adhered to the tenets of the Presbyterian Church.” Joseph Moore, described as “an Irishman,” lived in Tyrone before the Revolutionary War; on numerous occasions he had “to defend his home against the attacks of Indians.” Mordecai McLain, also “an Irishman,” came from Maryland before cessation of hostilities with native peoples. Robert Morrow “also an Irishman,” located in Tyrone as early as 1783, arriving from the Path Valley in northwestern Franklin County (encompassed by Fannett Township). Africa, 236, 232, 233, 232. Associate Presbyterians (Seceders) had organized a congregation and built a log meeting house in the town of Huntingdon by 1808 and obtained a minister in November 1811; however, the time of Rev. Thomas Smith was divided among the town and numerous preaching stations. Rev. Smith traversed a wide area. Among others, he served Seceder families in Sinking Valley in Tyrone Township, Blair County, and in Newton Hamilton, Wayne Township, Mifflin County. Reid W. Stewart, History of Scottish Dissenting Presbyterianism in Huntingdon County, PA (Lower Burrell, Pa., 2003), 3-5. 8. Over the Mountains: Westmoreland and Fayette Counties No lands were available for purchase in what became Westmoreland County until after 1769. Indifferent to legal distinctions, some settlers arrived earlier, laying their claim to land through “tomahawk title”—by hacking some symbol into trees to signify their presence. The volume of migration—and settlement—increased rapidly after 1769. Probably a majority of settlers in Westmoreland had Ulster origins; it has been reckoned that the Scotch-Irish constituted a majority in 1790, when the first federal census recorded a population of 16,018. “Westmoreland co. was originally settled by German and Irish emigrants, and is now inhabited by their descendants,” wrote the author the 1832 Gazetteer of Pennsylvania. Seven Presbyterian congregations were organized before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, and another five by 1795. Dunaway, 80; George Dallas Albert, History of the county of Westmoreland, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1882), 44; A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania, Part Two, 483; Dunaway, 81. In Westmoreland County and in Fayette to the south, township names of Ulster origin largely preceded settlement. Much of the Ligonier Valley was known as Donegal when that region between the Laurel and Chestnut ridges was part of Bedford County. The name was retained when newly established Westmoreland County organized its townships in 1773. Ross Straver also predated the county’s formal organization. As one of the original townships of Bedford County in 1771, Rostraver (to use its modern spelling) encompassed a large swath of territory now found in Allegheny, Fayette and Westmoreland Counties—all of the land lying between the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Rivers, from where Jacobs Creek enters the Yough, north to where the Yough enters the Monongahela, south to where Redstone Creek flows in the Monongahela. Like Donegal, Rostraver became one of Westmoreland’s original townships. John Newton Boucher, History of Westmoreland County, Vol. 1 (Chicago, 1906), 534-535; Blackburn, 77-79; Boucher, 519. Although named for a village in County Down by distant officials prior to large-scale migration into the region, Rostraver nonetheless became a center of Ulster settlement. Early settlers included Caldwells, Findleys, Fullertons, Lowerys, McClains, McClures, Orrs, Pattersons, Pinkertons, Robinsons, Steels, Thompsons and Wilsons. Rehoboth Church, a Presbyterian congregation, was served initially by Rev. James Power, born in Chester County to Irish-born parents, and later by Rev. James Findley (1725-1795), born in County Armagh. Revolutionary War-era taxpayers included John and William Drennan, William Finny, Isaac Greer, John Hall, Matthew and Robert Jamison, Joseph McClain, Adam, John and Robert McConnell, Henry McGlaughlin, Edward Mitchell, George Shields, John Stewart and Robert Walker. Boucher, 519-520. Rostrevor (or Rosstrevor) is located in southeastern Co. Down in the Parish of Kilbroney. The modern Pennsylvania spelling agrees with Ulster pronunciation. The movement of Irish-born migrants and the children of earlier cohorts into Westmoreland County brought additional Ulster place-names. Among the first was John Pomroy, who made have made the trek in 1758. A farmer of Scotch-Irish background in the Cumberland Valley, Pomroy heard reports of land across the Alleghenies from returning militia men who had gone west with General Forbes during the French and Indian War. He decided to see for himself. After staying with relatives at Fort Ligonier (then in Donegal Township), Pomroy continued westward, crossing the Chestnut Ridge. Hard by the ride’s western slopes, he built a log cabin. Not long after, Pomroy gained a neighbor: James Wilson built his cabin about a mile away. The two men gave each other a helping hand in building their crude dwellings, clearing land, raising corn and potatoes and eventually sowing wheat and rye. Pomroy’s wife, Isabella Barr, joined him, as did her father and brothers and other Cumberland Valley neighbors. Albert, 584; Boucher, 537-538, 514, 539, 515, 517; Albert, 585. The expanding settlement of the 1760s became the basis of Derry Township, created by the Court of Quarter Session in April 1775. Originally encompassing a much larger territory today’s Derry Township takes in the towns of Derry, New Derry, West Derry, Latrobe and New Alexandria. John Shields came from Adams County in 1766 and purchased land near the present town of New Alexandria. A blacksmith and a ruling elder in Congruity Presbyterian Church, Shields served as a captain in the Revolutionary War. John McGuire settled in Derry Township in 1778. James Cummins settled near Chestnut Ridge towards the end of the Revolutionary War. Hugh Cannon became among the first settlers in the vicinity of what became Derry Borough. Rev. Samuel Porter, born in Ireland and ordained in1790, served the Congruity congregation. Other early settlers in Derry included John Agey, Thomas Alison, Thomas Burns, Andrew Dixon, William Lowry, Thomas McCree, Alexander McCurdy, Daniel McKisson, James Mitchell, James Simpson, William Smith, Alexander Taylor and George Trimble. Boucher, 541, 542, 565, 541. Numerous early settlers chose to apply Irish names to their Westmoreland land grants. New landowners chose Derry repeatedly; Antrim and Raphoe appeared several times, as did Armagh, Rathmelton and Strabane. Settlers entered “Newry” into the records three times, “Belfast” twice, “Downpatrick” once. Settlers frequently recalled Ulster townlands, making use of the names of Ballintoy, Ballygowan, Castleward, Drumgold, Drumreagh, Glenavy and St. Johnston. Westmoreland farmers in the 1780s also named their lands “Hibernia,” “Ireland,” “St. Patrick’s” and “Shillelagh.” See the appendix. Information derived from Sharon Cook MacInnes, Early Landowners of Pennsylvania: Atlas of Township Patent Maps of Westmoreland County, PA (Apollo, Pa., 2007). In each instance I have used the conventional spelling found in modern Ireland rather than an eighteenth-century Pennsylvanian variant. Among the original eleven townships comprising Westmoreland County in 1773 were Tyrone and Mannillin (Menallen/Moyallon); these, with a portion of Donegal Township, became part of Fayette County upon its organization in 1783. The designation Tyrone originated with the Tyrone Township drawn up as part of the establishment of Bedford County in 1771. Both names may have been derived from their earlier usage in central Pennsylvania. (“Tyrone” survives in the names of two Fayette townships: Upper Tyrone and Lower Tyrone.) Albert, 42, 52; Blackburn, 77-78. Matthew Wylie (or Wiley) received a certificate from Yohogania County, Virginia in1772. Wylie and his son John settled in what became Franklin Township with the 1783 organization of Fayette County. (A portion of Franklin became Dunbar Township in 1798.) In December 1785 he patented tracts he named “Killelay” and “Killinchy.” Killelay is a phonetic rendering of Killyleagh, a town and civil parish in County Down on the western shore of Strangford Lough. Killinchy is an adjoining parish, also in County Down on the western side of Strangford Lough. As an early settler, farmer and distiller, Wylie enjoyed the trust of his neighbors who elected him to various township offices. Personal communication from Mary Beth Pastorious; Franklin Ellis, History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania… (Philadelphia, 1882), 556-557. Like many of his neighbors Wylie and his family belonged to the Laurel Hill Presbyterian Church. About a third of Laurel Hill’s congregants withdrew when the minister introduced the hymns of Isaac Watts as a substitute for the metrical psalms integral to Presbyterian worship in Ireland and Scotland. The dissidents reconstituted themselves as the Associate Reformed Congregation of Laurel Hill in 1791. Two years later they called as their minister Robert Warwick, who had been born a little more than thirty years earlier in Cremore, County Armagh. He emigrated in 1792. Wylie sold six acres of his Killelay tract to the trustees of the Associate Reformed congregation in 1797. Ibid; Glasgow, 469,355. 9. Allegheny, Greene and Washington Counties As in Westmoreland County, some initial European settlement occurred to the west and southwest in the 1750s; the Land Purchase of 1769 led to a great rush into the southwestern corner of the colony. Most of the early settlers were of English extraction, especially those coming from Virginia and Maryland. But a number of settlers of Irish origins arrived, particularly in the 1770s and later. These, too, came from Virginia but principally from the Cumberland Valley and Scotch-Irish enclaves in eastern Pennsylvania, and directly from Ulster. Thirteen Presbyterian congregations were organized in Washington County by 1790. By this date, Dunaway argues, “the Scotch Irish were overwhelmingly strong in Washington County…and that this was the most distinctively Scotch-Irish community in Western Pennsylvania.” Such a dominant presence apparently influenced the naming of Washington County’s original townships. When organized in 1781, Washington County comprised thirteen townships, among them Donegal and Stabane. Dunaway, 82; Boyd Crumrine, ed, History of Washington County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1882), 742, 953; Joseph F. McFarland, 20th Century History of the City of Washington and Washington, County, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1910), 338. Natives of Ireland are conspicuous among the earlier settlers in Donegal Township. Born in Ireland, James Allison settled in eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1750s, where he married Sarah Rea. In the spring of 1776, he brought his family to Donegal (that portion which is in modern Buffalo Township). John Laird, also born in Ireland, was likewise an early settler. Hercules and James Roney emigrated in about 1775; just four years later Hercules is recorded as a landowner in Donegal Township (that portion now in West Finley). John Barr, a native of Ireland, stopped first in Cumberland County before proceeding westward. Other early settlers include the Bonars, Brysons, Donougheys, Kellys, Kirkpatricks, McClures, McCulloughs and Stephensons. Residents of Donegal organized the Three Ridges Presbyterian congregation by 1785; it was rent by controversy over psalmody, leading to the creation of the Associate Reformed congregation of Three Ridges in 1793. Its first minister was the Irish-born Alexander McCoy, who had arrived in Pennsylvania with his parents in 1774. Roman Catholic services were conducted in the log cabin of Henry Montague following the Revolutionary War. Crumrine, 673, 346, 982, 679, 745. Both Hercules Roney and James Allison owned land in Strabane Township in 1780. William Huston was reputedly the white child born within the boundaries of Strabane. John McDowell, “born a few miles from Belfast” in 1738, emigrated as a young man. With his wife, Agnes Bradford, the Scotts, Allisons and others, McDowell crossed the mountains in 1773 and settled on Chartiers Creek, in what would become Strabane Township. The Chartiers Presbyterian congregation was organized in the 1770s with the help of Rev. John McMillan, the Pennsylvanian-born son of County Antrim parents. Crumrine, 953; McFarland, 338; Crumrine, 873. A brother of the Rev. McMillan and his family had settled along Peter’s Creek, which rises in Washington County and flows east-northeast into the Monongahela River. A portion of the Peter’s Creek valley in what had originally been Washington County became part of a new county, Allegheny, in 1788. The Peter’s Creek settlement, which gave rise to two Presbyterian congregations both in Allegheny County, was heavily Scotch-Irish in composition. The minister’s father, William McMillan, also settled in the vicinity of Peter’s Creek. Although born in County Antrim, he named the 210 acres surveyed on a Virginia certificate “Donegal,” perhaps for the Lancaster County settlement. Elsewhere in the Peter’s Creek valley, Joseph Logan used the name “Carn Tell” for his farm. A townland Carntall is located in County Antrim, Parish of Ballylinny while townlands with the element Carntall and Carnteel appear in County Tyrone. Henry Hulse named his tract “Carrickfergus,” for the Antrim townland, town and parish; David Steel called his “St. Johnston, for the Donegal townland and village. Thomas Bigden named his land grant “Screagan,” for the Derry townland Scriggin; William Bigden designated his “Derry.” Dwight Raymond Guthrie, John McMillan, The Apostle of Presbyterianism in the West, 1752-1833 (Pittsburgh, 1952), 25; Bethel Presbyterian Church, South Hills, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary, 1778-1928. (by church, n.d.), 6; Noah Thompson, Early History of the Peters Creek Valley and the Early Settlers (self-published, 1973), 42, 57, 69, 78. Information on townlands from Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, Townlands website, www.proni.gov.uk/index/local_history/geographical_index/townlands.htm. Townland names appeared north and east of Pittsburgh. A village named Tally Cavey developed in northern Allegheny County in Pitt Township (today Hampton Township), named for the home of an early settler. The Pennsylvania designation is derived from Tullycavey, an alternative for Tullykevin, a townland in Grey Abbey parish, on the Ards peninsula, County Down. Among the early settlers in this area of Allegheny County: Robert Hardie, James and John Herron, Samuel McCaslin, William and Henry McCully, Robert McCurdy, John McNeal, Ephraim Morrow, Philip Mowry, David Patton, Robert A. Sample and George Whitesell. The first religious organization in the vicinity was the Pine Creek Reformed Presbyterian Church. An advertisement of land for sale which appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette, 4 January 1822 included a tract called “Bally Spallen” on Turtle Creek. Ballyspallan is a townland in the Parish of Tamlaght Finlaggan, Co. Derry. Samuel W. Durant, History of Allegheny Co., Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1876), 169; History of Allegheny county (Chicago, 1889), 143; Pittsburgh Gazette, 4 Jan. 1822. Tullycavey was granted by Charles I to Hugh, Viscount Montgomery ca. 1623 and was part of the Annesley estate in County Down. (See the Annesley Papers, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.) Along the eastern territory of Allegheny in what had formerly been a part of Westmoreland County, a village and district designated as “Antrim” developed within Plum Township (and the bounds of what became the Plum Presbyterian Church). In Greene County (formerly part of Washington County), Baptist preacher John Corbeley called his farm “Slave Gallent,” for Slieve Gallion in south County Derry. Not surprisingly, Corbeley was himself from County Derry. He left home at age 14, in 1747; an indentured servant in eastern Pennsylvania, he eventually made his way into Virginia and then north into what became Greene County, Pennsylvania. John J. Lolla Jr., "The Creek Runs Deep," unpublished ms, 2006, 13; personal correspondence, Katie White (Corbeley descendant). 10. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Northeastern Pennsylvania To a degree unlike any other political jurisdiction with an Ulster name, the political history of Derry Township in Montour County is closely bound up with the history of the county itself. This territory on the upper reaches of the Susquehanna received European settlement relatively late. When created in 1786, Derry and Montour Townships included all of the present county as well as parts of modern Columbia and Northumberland Counties. These counties are arrayed between the shores of the two branches of the Susquehanna. The West Branch, flowing south and southeast, meets the Susquehanna as it flows southwest, just north of Sunbury, near to where the boundaries of Snyder, Union and Northumberland Counties join. Montour is bordered by Northumberland County on the west and south, the Susquehanna on the south, Columbia on the east and Lycoming on the north. All of its present townships were eventually carved from Derry and Montour when Montour County was organized in 1850. J.H. Battle, ed, History of Columbia and Montour Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1887), 121. Florin observes there were two principal reasons for delayed settlement: the Penn family “did not acquire the area above Shamokin on the West Branch of the Susquehanna until 1768.” Not until then did large numbers of settlers moved freely along the length of the river. Also, Florin says, “the Susquehanna was route to nowhere,” in contrast with the Juniata (72). Due to its exposed position, the territory beyond the Blue Mountains and between the two branches of the Susquehanna received few European settlers before the War of Independence. Brady’s Fort (also known as Boyle’s) was built in the later years of the Revolutionary War. Settlers from the north of Ireland as well as Pennsylvania-born incomers of Ulster descent moved into the region at the war’s close. Battle, 125-126. Stephen Ellis and his wife Mary Cunningham, Episcopalians born in County Donegal, were among the township’s early settlers. John Blee, who had left Ireland at age 12, learned brickmaking in Philadelphia, practiced his trade in Norristown and settled in Montour County. Also born in Ireland, William McCormick emigrated as boy and worked as a store clerk before relocating to Derry Township. He came with his wife Mary and father-in-law William Shaw. McCormick became the township’s shopkeeper. The four Caldwell brothers left Ulster at the close of the Revolutionary War; John settled in Derry. The immigrant Irish shoemaker William McVicker settled first in Northampton County and located in Derry Township in the early 1790s. Battle, 126, 184, 193, 126, 163, 182, 188. Derry’s Presbyterian congregation worshipped under two white oak trees before constructing a log church in 1802. (The site is now in Anthony Township, originally part of Derry Township.) “It had only a dirt floor, was covered with branches of trees and grass and leaves, and on the ground in the center of the structure was built a fire in extreme weather.” Nonetheless, the log structure had a high pulpit as in Ulster Presbyterian meetinghouses. The faithful came there to worship from a wide area, from scattered farms and hamlets in what are now Montour, Columbia, Northumberland, Luzerne and Lycoming Counties. The shoemaker William McVicker was among the original elders who helped organize the congregation. Ibid, 122-123. 11. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Newry The decades of the 1770s and 1780s, according to geographer John Florin, “represented largely a period of gradual filling in of the broad expanse of territory that had been so rapidly and loosely occupied” the decade or more prior to the American Revolution. The early development of the town of Newry in Blair County is tied to the resumption of Irish immigration into central Pennsylvania following the conclusion of hostilities. The town’s founder, however, had arrived in the region earlier. Patrick Cassidy came to America as the youthful servant of a British Army officer prior to the Revolution. He became a proficient and successful surveyor and settled at Aughwick in Huntingdon County, where he married a Miss Mooney. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Cassidy purchased 300 acres in what was to become Blair County. The tract was located along Poplar Run, a tributary of the Frankstown Branch of the Juniata in south central Blair. Cassidy moved to the property in 1787; in 1793 he laid out the new town named for his Ulster birthplace. Espenshade, 315; Florin, 73; Africa, 53-54. Henry McConnell, a native of County Antrim, spent his first six months in the United States in Philadelphia before coming to Newry in 1797. Malcolm McIntosh, another Irish immigrant, settled there in about 1802. Within the next two decades they would be joined by Robert McNamara, merchant and distiller, and Alexander Knox, merchant. McNamara “and a man named McCoy” are the town’s first teachers of record. St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church was built of stone in 1816 for Irish immigrants who included, apparently, town fathers Cassidy and McConnell. Africa, 53-54. 12. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Armagh Scotch-Irish settlers from east of the mountains and immigrants from Ireland alike settled in Indiana County, created in 1803 largely out of Westmoreland County. (The Conemaugh River presently divides Indiana to the north and Westmoreland to the south.) Wayland Dunaway described the town of Armagh in the county’s southeastern corner as “a typical Scotch-Irish settlement”—but the complex of love, class prejudice, religious dissension and organized emigration add up to perhaps a less than typical origin. Dunaway, 87. Mary Jane Tomb had been married to William Parker, a Belfast man of a distinguished family. After his death, according to the story, she fell in love with the estate’s caretaker, James Graham. With little hope of an untroubled married life in Ireland, the widow sold her property, married the caretaker and sailed for America. But not alone: a large company of friends and relations—twenty-seven persons in all—accompanied the Grahams as they embraced a new life. With them were the four children fathered by Mary Jane’s first husband; her brother David Tomb and his wife and child; her sisters Elizabeth and Catharine and their husbands, James Anderson and Alexander Carnahan and children; and families of Fees and Leslies, among others. The eight families arrived in September 1792. The members of the new community became known as communicants of the Associate Reformed church, which suggests they were likely Burgher Seceders in Ireland. Dunaway, 87; Clarence D. Stephenson, Indiana County: 175th Anniversary History (Indiana, Pa., 1978), 133; Lewis Clark Walkinshaw, Annals of southwestern Pennsylvania, Vol. 3 (New York, 1939), 23. A schism in the Church of Scotland in the 1730s created a new denomination (Associate Presbyterians) which took root in Ireland in the next decade. A further schism in the 1740s split the new church into two rival factions, Burghers and Antiburghers. In the United States in 1782 a union of Associate Presbyterians (Seceders) and Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) created the Associate Reformed church. Most immigrant Irish Burgher Seceders arriving after that date affiliated with the Associate Reformed church. Development of the area faced initial delay. The continuing danger of Indian attacks in the fall of 1792 forced the newcomers to flee across the Conemaugh River to the security of a blockhouse in the Ligonier Valley. The territory north of the Conemaugh was then covered with “a thin, scrubby growth of oaks” awaiting the settlers’ industry and patience. Armagh would become “the center of a fine farming region” and for a time a lively hub. The Grahams located along what would be a bustling highway, and operated the first tavern in the area. Westbound emigrant traffic along the Northern Turnpike led to the establishment of nine hotels and five stores by 1820. Stephenson, 133; Dunaway, 87; Walkinshaw, 23. 13. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Donegal Ongoing border warfare slowed but did not halt settlement in western Pennsylvania, even in the exposed territory north of the Ohio River. Squatters had begun to make claims north of the Ohio as early as 1779. The following year the Pennsylvania legislature set aside western territory as “Donation Lands” to reward citizens who had fought in the Revolutionary War. In 1783 the legislature granted “Depreciation Lands” in lieu of certificates of depreciation which had been designed to compensate for revolutionary currency’s loss of value. With the announcement of peace in the fall of 1782 land-hungry farmers began flocking across the river in increasing numbers. The Treaty of Greenville concluded with warring Native American tribes in late 1795 eliminated the immediate threat of Indian raids; landless and land-hungry whites rushed into the region the following spring. Butler County, north of Allegheny County in central-western Pennsylvania, separated from Allegheny in 1800 with less than 4,000 inhabitants. Butler’s population grew by more than two and a half times between 1800 and 1820. Florin, 77-78; Peter Gilmore, “Rebels and Revivals: Ulster Immigrants, Western Pennsylvania Presbyterianism and the Formation of Scotch-Irish Identity, 1780-1830.” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2009, 81-82; Dunaway, 86-87. John Florin writes that “A final major extension of settlement developed in the 1790’s with the opening of all of northwest Pennsylvania to settlement (89).” Numerous settlers of Irish origin, both Presbyterian and Catholic, settled in the vicinity of Buffalo Creek and its tributaries; this territory was largely encompassed in what was originally organized as Buffalo Township, Butler County. In northern Buffalo Township, Alexander Storey, Matthew Smith and William Ray and their families—all natives of Ireland—settled along Bear Creek. The Hemphill brothers, James and Adam, were early settlers, as were Daniel Maloney, a Revolutionary War veteran, and the distiller John Gillespie. James Denny came to the United States with his parents in 1794 and arrived in Butler County in 1799. The weaver John Coyle came to America in 1791 and to Butler County in 1800. The weaver Robert Allison, blacksmith William Carr and the tanner Andrew McKim all owned land in Buffalo Township. Not surprisingly, a new township erected from Buffalo in 1804 was named Donegal—most likely influenced an influx from the southeast of that county as the result of a 1792 organized migration. James A. McKee, 20th Century History of Butler and Butler County (Chicago, 1909), 233; History of Butler County (Chicago, 1883), 494-495, 506-507, 47-48; Edmund Adams and Barbara Brady O’Keefe, Catholic Trails West, Vol. 2 (Baltimore, 1989), 574. Modern Fairview Township was originally part of Donegal; the Bear Creek Presbyterian congregation there met outdoors until a log church was built in about 1800. The migrants, who originated from the vicinity of the Erne River and Lough Erne, were commemorated in the verse of their own bard. Jerry Monaghan wrote: On the fourth of June, in the afternoon, We sailed from Londonderry; Early next day we put to sea To cross the tedious ferry; We hoisted sail with a pleasant gale As Phoebus was arising. Bound for New York, in America, In the grand brig Eliza. … September ninth we took our leave Of captain, mate, and sailors, Likewise of the Eliza brave, For no less than can we name her; We gave three cheers for old Ireland, It being our former quarter, And then, like wandering sheep, we strayed, And parted from each other. Adams and O’Keefe, 574-575. The brave Eliza docked at New Castle, Delaware, not New York; the bard then parted from his fellow passengers, most of whom remained together in a trek westward. The families followed the well-established trails across the mountains and along the river valleys, eventually arriving in the region between Jacobs Creek and the Youghiogheny River in northern Fayette County (near present-day Connellsville). In 1795, many of the original migrants moved north, settling in eastern Butler County along Buffalo Creek. Charles Duffy arrived in 1796, Archibald Black, Denis Dugan, Patrick McBride and Peter McKeever in 1798. Adams and O’Keefe, 575; McKee, 233; History of Butler County, 506-507; History of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Vol. 1. 273-274. Maloney’s Corners served as the original center of the Donegal settlement; mass was said at Maloney’s Hill and a cemetery established there as well, on land owned by the Dugans. Early in the nineteenth century, Owen McQueen purchased a farm near Sugar Creek not far to the east in Armstrong County with a view to establishing a proper chapel. Construction of St. Patrick’s Church was completed in spring 1806. McKee, 233; History of Butler County, 506-507; History of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Vol. 1. 273-274. 14. Ulster Place-Names and Early Industry Many (and probably most) Ulster folk arriving in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century and opening decades of the nineteenth century sought the security and independence they perceived in farming and land ownership. Not Robert Coleman, an ambitious, enterprising Irish immigrant from whose origins York County’s Castle Fin received its name. Coleman separated himself from his contemporaries economically, socially and politically. The village on Muddy Creek in Lower Chanceford Township may be little more than a ghost town today, but it once celebrated the success of one of Pennsylvania’s first industrial tycoons. Coleman was born in Castlefinn, County Donegal in 1748. An emigrant at age 16, Coleman arrived with letters of introduction to wealthy and influential Philadelphians, including the Derry-born merchant Blair McClenachan. Such references helped secure him a position as clerk in Reading. After a few years, however, the youthful Coleman decided to take his chances west of the Schuylkill River. Finding himself in an iron ore district, Coleman obtained work at the Grubb family’s Hopewell Forges. He moved on six months later, to a forge about eight miles west of Lebanon. James Old operated this forge and owned the Speedwell Forge on Hammer Creek, not far from the Hopewell Forges. The Committee on Historical Research, Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Forges and Furnaces in the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1914), 86. Coleman so impressed Old that his employer brought the young Irishman with him to the Reading Furnace on French Creek, gave him a promotion and his daughter Anne’s hand in marriage. However, Coleman again stuck out on his own, running his own forge on lease. In 1785 he purchased one-sixth of the Grubb estate; thirteen years later he purchased all but one-sixth of the family’s remaining ore banks and iron operations. He built himself a mansion near the Elizabeth Furnace in Elizabeth Township, Lancaster County, where he died in 1809. Many Pennsylvanians of Ulster origin opposed ratification of the Federal Constitution in 1788; Coleman voted for the new system of government at the state ratifying convention. He served as a commander of cavalry raised to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, as an associate Lancaster County judge and as a delegate to the 1790 convention which overturned Pennsylvania’s democratic 1776 constitution. Forges and Furnaces, 86-87; Egle, 218; Forges and Furnaces, 88. Of the six Ulster-born delegates to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention, three voted in favor. These included Coleman and fellow Lancaster Co. representative Stephen Chambers. All three voting “nay” lived west of the Susquehanna. Of the nine delegates with a parent or grandparent born in Ireland, all but two voted against ratification. (Peter Gilmore, “Scotch-Irish Opposition to the Federal Constitution in the Pennsylvania Backcountry: A Contribution to a New Interpretation,” Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4 [Fall 2008], 16-17) Thomas Coleman, the immigrant’s son, first operated iron forges in Lebanon County before establishing operations in lower York County. In 1810 he built a forge on Muddy Creek and in 1819 a 17-room mansion, naming both after his father’s birthplace in County Donegal. Victoria Lyles, “Forges and Furnaces of York County,” Papers of the Historical Society of York County (n.d.); The Gazette and Daily (York, Pa.), Aug. 8, 1961, 30. The early iron industry in Huntingdon County (in a district later in Blair County) extended the use of a locally existing Ulster place-name when the Tyrone Forges came into operation in 1804. (The village of Tyrone Forge continues the name.) The Coleraine Forges were built near Spruce Creek in 1805 under the direction of the Irish-born Samuel Marshall. David Stewart, manager of the forges, was a native of Coleraine, County Derry. J. Leander Bishop, A History of American Manufactures from 1608 to 1860, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia 1868), 566; James M. Swank, Introduction to a History of Ironmaking and Coal Mining in Pennsylvania (self-published, 1878), 39; J. Peter Lesley, The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide to the Furnaces, Forges and Rolling Mills of the United States (New York, 1859), 176. See also, Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties. Pennsylvania’s coal and iron industries became associated with several other place-names of Ulster origin later in the nineteenth century with the construction of mining hamlets, railroad depots and mills. These include Antrim in Tioga County, Rathmel in Jefferson County, Strangford in Indiana, Dunlo in Cambria and Ardara in Westmoreland. 15. Pennsylvania’s Diamonds The term “diamond,” referring to a village square or town center, occurs frequently in the province of Ulster but is rare elsewhere in Ireland. Similarly, “diamond” used in this sense was formerly quite common throughout Pennsylvania and into adjacent Ohio. The Dictionary of American English (1938) noted that In all the towns of Pennsylvania, of any size, the public buildings and offices are built on squares in the centre of their towns… These squares are uniformly called “The Diamond”. Among other locations, diamonds could be found in Elizabethtown in Lancaster County and Carlisle in Cumberland; in Huntingdon in Huntingdon County, Boalsburg and Bellefonte in Centre County; in Newport in Indiana County, in Mount Pleasant in Westmoreland County; in Pittsburgh and in the county seats of Washington and Butler. In the same-named county seat of Warren, according to an early nineteenth-century source, near the center of the town at the crossing of two principal streets were “four lots of an acre each, …left for the public buildings. This is called the diamond.” Similar to the application of place-names to Pennsylvania locales, the use of diamond in newly established towns represented the marking of an imagined cultural landscape. Brendan Adams, “The Diamonds of Ulster and Pennsylvania,” Yearbook: Ulster Folk and Transport Museum 1975-1976, 18-19; Evans, 85; Karen J. Harvey, “Diamonds in the Rough: Scotch-Irish Town Planning in Northern Appalachia During the Early Republic,” The Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 2001), 109, 114; A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania, Part 2, 467. Diamonds in Ulster take two meanings: rural crossroads and town squares. In the Ulster context, did “crossroads” function as a synonym for “diamond”? A village simply called “Cross Roads” existed by 1835 in eastern Donegal. Contemporaneously, northwestern Washington County had a Presbyterian congregation and hamlet of the same name. Washington County was also home to Donaldson’s Crossroads; Westmoreland County had Salem Cross Roads; Bucks County, Jamieson’s Cross Roads, among others in the state. To what extent did the plethora of early nineteenth-century place-names in Pennsylvania with the element “cross roads” reflect an Ulster influence? In the Pennsylvania instances cited above, “diamond” refers to a town square. Brendan Adams noted that “all the cases of The Diamond being the central town square occur… in north-west and south-west Ulster,” with one exception. This finding corresponds with the similar observation here that Pennsylvania place-names of eighteenth century and Ulster origin appear to derive most heavily from west Ulster. Among the towns cited by Adams in which The Diamond is the name applied to the town square were Donegal, Londonderry, Monaghan and Raphoe—all well-represented in the nomenclature of Pennsylvania’s southern tier. If correct, Adams’ suggestion that “The term may be English rather than Scottish in origin” would bolster the argument that the first waves of Ulster immigrants to Pennsylvania came from districts in which a critical conglomeration of factors—including, perhaps, perceptions of Anglican dominance and relations with English landlords—contributed to Presbyterians’ decision to leave. Adams, 19-20. Conclusion The number and breadth of Ulster place-names applied in Pennsylvania, 1700-1830, is consistent with contemporary and scholarly estimates of the volume of migrants from Ireland’s northern counties. The frequency with which these toponyms appeared suggests a considerable strength of association with Ulster as “home,” as a site of powerfully symbolic emotional and spiritual significance. The intense localism and personal attachment implied by this naming is suggested by the use of townland names. Overall, there is a strong impression of a persistent regional consciousness. Patrick Griffin has persuasively argued that the colonial-era Ulster Presbyterian migrants to America did not develop a coherent, unifying group identity. However, Griffin and Kevin Yeager have both noted the Scotch-Irish tended to congregate in identifiably ethnic communities. Yeager, who argues for a considerable degree of cultural continuity, Ulster to Pennsylvania, connects ethnic self-segregation to an “extremely high” degree of ethnic self-awareness in early eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The act of giving places in Pennsylvania familiar Ulster names signifies the strength of an ethnoreligious and religiously based self-perception. Griffin, 6-7, 106; Kevin Yeager, “The Power of Ethnicity: The Preservation of Scots-Irish Culture in the Eighteenth-Century American Backcountry” (Ph.D. dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2000), Vol. I, 80, 53-54, 50, 76-77, 79-80. The evidence suggests that there were many more place-names in use, formally and otherwise, than are still in use or easily recovered for this discussion, names that have long since slipped out of sight and memory. In at least two instances, migrants made use of townland names (Tullycavey and Tullyleague) later superseded in Ireland; further investigation may uncover other eighteenth-century Ulster toponyms no longer favored. The spellings of Pennsylvanian place-names may give clues to eighteenth-century pronunciation, as in the examples of “Monallon” and “Ross Straver.” The place-name data offers suggestive connections to emigration ports and source-areas of migration. The place-names of West-Ulster origin are particularly interesting with regards to locating the counties, parishes and townlands of eighteenth-century migrants. Chosen relatively early in the westward movement of Irish migrants, the place-names used in colonial Pennsylvania clearly showed a regional bias, with West-Ulster names predominating, notably Derry, Donegal, Fahan, Fanad, Fermanagh, Greencastle, Leck, Letterkenny, Monaghan, Raphoe, Strabane, Tullyleague and Tyrone. While by no means conclusive, this evidence—particularly when combined with what is known about the origins of individual migrants—indicates a western origin for numbers of Ulster folk relocating to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. A.H. Espenshade calculated that Pennsylvania contained five townships named Donegal, five named Londonderry and give named Tyrone. (Espenshade, 324.) Names, an historian has suggested, “are basic to a sense of communal identity; they are redolent of memories and aspirations.” Rees Davies may have been referring to personal names in a different context, but the observation seems equally valid when applied to place-names. In choosing “Strabane” as the name of a township or a farm, migrants looked backwards and forward to remembered hopefulness of life in the Foyle Valley and expectations of improvement in Appalachian foothills, evoking a sense of identity as a discernable people linked to landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic. Rees R. Davies, “Presidential address: the peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100-1400: II. Names, boundaries and regnal solidarities,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Ser. v. (1995), 4, quoted in Simon Kingston, Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim (Dublin, 2004), 205.

From Rostrevor to Raphoe: An Overview of Ulster Place-Names in Pennsylvania, 1700-1820 By Peter Gilmore Tens of thousands of immigrants from the north of Ireland arrived at Delaware River ports in the eighteenth century. The most recent estimate is that between 100,000 and 250,000 persons left Ireland for North America 1700-1775. Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History 1607-2007 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2008), 123. Upon arrival many traveled west in search of available farm land, and in so doing dominated initial European settlement in much of Pennsylvania. Geographer John Florin writes that, “it seems apparent that after 1730 the only areas of initial settlement in the state where the Scotch-Irish were not present in a percentage larger than was theirs for the state as a whole (about thirty per cent) was in those areas settled by either Connecticut Yankees or by Virginians and Marylanders.” (The advance of frontier settlement in Pennsylvania [University Park, 1977], 21.) Robert D. Mitchell, also a geographer, proposed the proliferation of Presbyterian churches as an indicator of Scotch-Irish westward expansion. While in some states “there is no doubt that certain churches were Scots-founded and dominated,” he wrote, the “rapid spread” of Presbyterianism in the Pennsylvania and Virginia backcountry following major waves of immigration from Ulster indicates an Irish source. Based on the location of Presbyterian congregations in western Pennsylvania by the close of the eighteenth century, Mitchell suggested further that the region surrounding Pittsburgh should be considered one of four major areas of Scotch-Irish settlement. (Robert Mitchell, “The Presbyterian Church as an Indicator of Westward Expansion in the 18th Century America,” The Professional Geographer, Vol. 18 [1966 ], 293-294, 295-296.) Their westward movement can be traced through names derived in Ireland’s northernmost province, Ulster. More so than in any other of Britain’s American colonies, Pennsylvania’s farms, communities and political jurisdictions received a remarkable profusion of northern-Irish place-names. From east to west, the names of seven of Ulster’s nine counties appear and reappear as political jurisdictions within the Colony (and later the Commonwealth) of Pennsylvania. Place-names derived from eight Ulster counties are recorded as toponyms in court documents and folklore. The use of place-names of Ulster origin represents a continuum in time and space, spanning the eighteenth century, the ocean and the breadth of Pennsylvania along its southern tier. Cavan appears to be the only Ulster county unrepresented. The place-names derived from the northern province of Ulster far out-number those from elsewhere in Ireland (Dublin, most notably) or those of Scottish origin (such as Ayr). See Appendix II, “Negative Examples: Pennsylvania Place-Names Not Tied Directly to Irish Migration.” Migrants who crossed the Atlantic, traveling along the margins of empire, faced many challenges once situated within the North American frontier zone. Among other tasks required by the exigencies of removal: reorganizing their world symbolically. Identifying specific elements in their new environment—hills, streams, rock formations, particular fields—led to choices no less deliberate than decisions about which tree to fell or which acre to plow. Naming a land-holding “Scriggan” or “Drumreagh” for the townland on which kith and kin still lived and toiled may have helped assuage emotional pain and psychic trauma occasioned by migration. Irish-born migrants understood and made sense of their new surroundings by re-imaging their former Irish environments. Although the majority of these migrants were Presbyterians of Scottish origin, theirs was a worldview shaped by their immediate Irish past. The contents of Irish nomenclature—county, barony, parish and townland—became the basis of official Pennsylvanian divisions—counties, townships, boroughs and villages. Ulster toponyms became legally recorded designations of land grants and informal descriptors of natural features. The act of naming became an integral part of the overall process of adaptation, of the dynamics of settlement and adjustment which created a sense of being Pennsylvanian and American while holding on to the familiar and far-away. A few features stand out when one considers Pennsylvania’s Ulster place-names in their entirety. See Appendix I, “Ulster Place-Names in Pennsylvania, 1700-1830.” The overwhelming majority of these names are the result of eighteenth-century migration and especially colonial-era migration. Consequently, Coleraine appears more frequently than Belfast, and Rathmelton more often still: Belfast had yet to realize its commercial and industrial potential while the Donegal village of Rathmelton then thrived as an integral part of transatlantic trade. Nini Rodgers, “Ramelton in the Caribbean: Presbyterians and the plantation complex, 1730 -1857,” paper presented to XVII Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, Omagh, County Tyrone, 25 June 2008. “Derry” is repeated more often as a Pennsylvania place-name than any other Ulster toponym, all the more so when “Londonderry” (a less frequently occurring variant) is added to the count. The preponderance of this name may be due in part to that city’s famous (1689) siege and its already mythic significance in the Protestant psyche—after all, Pennsylvania townships received their names from that of the ship which broke the siege. Derry’s significant commercial role as a home port in transatlantic shipping doubtlessly affected settlers’ choices as well. Many migrants would have left Ulster by way of Lough Foyle. This profusion of the names “Derry” and “Londonderry” leads to another impression formed by the data. Based on the geographic distribution of the place-names in Ireland, a significant number of the colonial-era migrants appear to have originated in the province’s cultural borderlands in the southern and western margins of Ulster. In particular, names from northwestern Ulster (Counties Derry, Donegal and Tyrone) are disproportionately represented among the place-names used in Pennsylvania. Names from Armagh and Monaghan (including those names themselves) outnumber references to County Antrim, where Presbyterians enjoyed considerable majorities in many parishes. We should not expect each instance of an Ulster place-name—and particularly those surviving on modern maps—to correlate exactly to the presence of pioneers from the same-named locale in the north of Ireland. Provincial authorities applied Ulster nomenclature to newly created townships in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, 1725-1775, labeling spaces on maps often before significant numbers of settlers occupied the actual places. This led to the somewhat ironic result that Ulster place-names occasionally preceded an influx of Ulster migrants. Political subdivision perpetuated some of the earliest used names, as in the case of an inaugural township in Cumberland County. That county’s “Tyrone” became the source-name of townships in new counties created from the geographically extensive original. Nor should we ignore the possibility that in the second half of the eighteenth century especially westbound migrants originating in Pennsylvania’s Scotch-Irish enclaves named their frontier communities in memory of the home township east of the mountains—just as their parents’ generation had preferred the names of homes in Ireland. Estyn Evans suggested that migrants from the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania reapplied “Cumberland” in traveling through the Cumberland Gap between 1775 and 1800 and settling in the Cumberland Valley of Tennessee. (“The Scotch-Irish: Their Cultural Adaptation” in E.R.R. Green, ed., Essays in Scotch-Irish History [Belfast, 1991], 75.) Similarly, York, Lancaster and Chester Counties in South Carolina’s piedmont, home to Scotch-Irish families who had followed the Great Wagon Road south from Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, appear to have been named for the migrants’ counties of origin in the northern colony. That said, migrants throughout the century clearly gave their new homes comfortably familiar names. In addition to the names of townships, towns and villages are the less visible names of land grants and farms. These are often derived from Ulster townlands and parishes as well as counties. Western Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century displayed a variant, supplying farms with names that celebrated the island-nation itself or reflected patriotic slogans and motifs. Earlier in the century, English, Dutch and German neighbors referred to the ethnically cohesive communities as “Irishtowns.” Consonant with the late eighteenth-century self-identification of Protestants as the “Irish Nation,” migrant Presbyterians constituted themselves as the Irish Nation-in-Exile with self-conscious naming symbolism. As suggested above, the principal geographic units in eighteenth century Pennsylvania—particularly in the backcountry frequently dominated by settlers of Irish origin—were counties and townships. Counties, regarded by many contemporaries as “the most important unit of government,” covered considerable geographic areas in the eighteenth century. The organization of counties and townships reflected either an increasing density of settlement or the assumption of sustained population growth to follow. The legislative action creating counties frequently followed the demand of residents for a physically less remote seat of government. The successive creation of counties maps population flows: for example, Lancaster, site of significant Ulster settlement in the second quarter of the century and the colony’s fourth county, was erected out of Chester County in 1729; York (1749) and Cumberland (1750) were created out of Lancaster; Cumberland gave rise to Bedford (1771), which also yielded new counties to the west. Officials of new counties had the job of setting up the apparatus of local governance: courts, county-wide officers and townships. Kenneth W. Keller, Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism (Philadelphia, 1982) 3; Abraham Howry Espenshade, Pennsylvania place names (State College, 1925), 41-42; Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck. The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1995), 432-433. What follows is less a comprehensive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject than a guide to what Ulster place-names in Pennsylvania have been recovered so far. In other words, these are names gathered with relative ease. The work completed so far suggests that more place-names, long abandoned and forgotten, remain to be located, dusted off, and studied for what they can tell us of past migration flows and their attendant hopes and tragedies. The discussion of place-names below is ordered by geography and the chronology of migration. Although this study necessarily references the history of Ulster migration across Pennsylvania it should not be regarded as any more than a rough outline of that history. 1. Between the Delaware and the Susquehanna: The Oldest Settlements When emigrants from the north of Ireland began arriving in William Penn’s colony in sizeable numbers in the early eighteenth century, they found the land closest to Philadelphia already taken by English families. They moved into Chester County, then Pennsylvania’s only significant territorial division west of Philadelphia. Settlements of people from Ulster began in western Chester County as early as 1710, along Octoraro Creek and at Faggs Manor and New London. Octoraro Creek, which flows southwest into the Susquehanna River in Maryland, became the western boundary of Chester County when Lancaster was established in May 1729. The Faggs Manor settlement in Chester County became the basis for the political jurisdiction with what is likely the oldest Irish place-name in Pennsylvania: Londonderry Township. A nineteenth-century history of Chester County observed that “the early settlers were from Ireland, and the name is derived from Londonderry, in Ireland.” Wayland F. Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill, 1944), 51; J. Smith Futhey and Gilbert Cope, History of Chester County (Philadelphia, 1881), 182. Chester was among the three counties established by William Penn in 1682. Ulster migrants also settled west of Octoraro Creek, spreading out across the unorganized frontier of what would become Lancaster, Dauphin and Lebanon Counties. Today, Lancaster County is often associated in the public imagination—and in tourist brochures—with the descendants of German-speaking Pietists who also migrated in the eighteenth century: this is “Pennsylvania Dutch” country. But early arrivals from Ireland are recalled in the names of five Lancaster County townships: Colerain, Donegal, Drumore, Mount Joy and Rapho. Lancaster, the fourth county created in Pennsylvania, was the first to be organized in the eighteenth century. (Espenshade, 41-42.) Amidst the rolling hills on the broad Susquehanna’s eastern shores, Ulster families may have begun settling in what became Drumore in southern Lancaster County as early as 1700. Organized as one of the county’s original townships in 1729, Drumore took its name from the town and parish of Dromore on the Lagan River in County Down. Between 1765 and 1800 the Lancaster County township’s account book had on its headings both “Dromore” and “Drommore;” the present spelling became formalized after 1800. Drumore’s Presbyterian congregation appears to have met for some years prior to 1730. John Thomson, an Irish-born minister who arrived as a probationer in 1715, served the Drumore congregation. In 1727 he became the first presbyter to propose that America’s Presbyterian ministers be required to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Espenshade, 246; Franklin Ellis and Samuel Evans, History of Lancaster County (Philadelphia, 1883), 789, 790, 794; Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name (Princeton, 2001), 117. The “Break of Dromore” was a noted (and lamented) battle in 1689; perhaps even less gloriously, Dromore was described in the late eighteenth century as “a miserable nest of dirty mud cabins.” (Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster [Belfast, 1992], 153, 200-201.) The formal organization of a township “followed the original settlement of an area by an average of perhaps ten years.” (Florin, 8.) In a pattern found repeatedly across Pennsylvania in eighteenth-century communities with Irish place-names, Drumore surnames displayed a preponderance of those recognizably Ulster Scots together with those of probable native Irish origin. Drumore taxpayers in 1756 and 1759 included individuals named Boyd, Caldwell, Carson, Dixon, Dunlop, Johnston, Patterson, Porter, Ramsey and Steele. Town records also listed Patrick O’Harrah and “Light foot obrine;” among the township’s freemen were found James Gallahore, Torrence Fitchpatrick and Hugh Galahor. Dunaway, 52-53; Ellis and Evans, 790-792. Migrants from Ulster settled along Chickies Creek in northwestern Lancaster County in the mid-1710s. They built homes amidst a dense forest, in what was in every sense a frontier. Located near Indian villages, some settlers availed themselves of the opportunity to become traders as well as farmers. So many Scotch-Irish rushed into the region that in 1722 West Conestoga Township was formally renamed Donegal. The township, taking in all the territory west and northwest of Pequea Creek, encompassed most of the western half of present Lancaster County. Ellis and Evans, 757. Clearly some (and possibly most) of the settlers had come from West Ulster, continuing a movement of Presbyterians from that region that had begun more than a generation earlier. George and John Stewart emigrated from County Donegal in 1717, John and James Galbraith in 1718, Patrick Campbell and James Cunningham in 1720. David McClure came from Raphoe, County Donegal; Samuel Smith from Ballymagory, County Tyrone. Whatever their point of origin in Ireland, the Scotch-Irish by the 1720s comprised the vast majority of the European population in this frontier region. The eastern shores of the Susquehanna had become “an Irish haven,” attracting a stream of new arrivals. Fitzgerald and Lambkin, 111; Ellis and Evans, 759; H.M.J. Klein, History of Lancaster County (New York, 1924), 296; Dunaway, 53; Griffin, 106. The Donegal settlers organized what is now the Donegal Springs Presbyterian Church in Mount Joy Township by 1720. Donegal men would be active participants in the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, pledging their lives under the branches of an old oak dubbed the Witness Tree on the grounds of the Donegal Presbyterian Church. The Donegal settlement lent its name and became the basis of the first Pennsylvania presbytery west of Philadelphia. The Synod of Philadelphia created the Donegal Presbytery in response to the Scotch-Irish presence which had led to the organization of fifteen or more congregations during barely two decades. Dunaway, 52; Anne Hollingsworth Wharton, In Old Pennsylvania Towns (Philadelphia, 1920), 96; Alfred Nevin, Churches of the Valley (Philadelphia, 1852), 21; Griffin, 116. A growing migrant population led to a proliferation of Ulster place-names. Provincial Secretary, James Logan (an Ulster-born Quaker) attempted to direct the continuing flow of Irish migrants toward the “lower end” of the frontier, the settlements in the Susquehanna Valley closer to the disputed border with Maryland. The “lower end” settlements included those within Drumore and Colerain Township, organized in 1738. The latter township is situated in southeastern Lancaster County between Drumore and Chester County. Colerain was “settled principally by the Irish;” some of the earliest settlers—Allisons and Andersons—were living in what became Colerain as early as 1716. By 1751, township tax collector Charles McCalester reported that Colerain’s taxable inhabitants included Clarks, Cunninghams, Gilmores, Hendersons, McClellands, McCulloughs, McKneelys and Pattersons. Griffin, 105-106; Ellis and Evans, 729, 735. Many migrants in the 1720s and 1730s, however, persisted in a steady movement to the “upper end” Donegal settlement—often occupying the land without purchase or rent, deed or lease. Inhabitants of the northeastern section of Donegal Township began clamoring for their own jurisdiction; Lancaster County officials responded in 1741 by creating a new township named for the town, barony, parish and diocese of Raphoe in eastern County Donegal. Located between the Big Chickies and Little Chickies Creeks, Rapho (to use the modern Pennsylvania spelling) boasted rich, desirable farmland and represented the third largest township in Lancaster County. Another township derived from the Donegal settlement took its name from the English merchant ship which broke the boom across the River Foyle and lifted the siege of Derry in 1689. Mount Joy Township was organized in 1759; European incomers who settled in the 1730s included Cunninghams, Moorheads, Lytles and Scotts. Griffin, 105-106; Ellis and Evans, 1024-1025; Mount Joy Centennial Souvenir History, 22-23; Klein, 296. The Irish spelling “Raphoe” persisted until at least 1833. (Thomas F. Gordon, A Gazetteer of the State of Pennsylvania [Philadelphia, 1832].) Espenshade asserted that Mount Joy Township received its name from “the title of General Sir William Stewart, who owned large estates in County Donegal, who was raised to the peerage of Ireland in 1683 as Baron Stewart and Viscount Mountjoy, and who later deserted the cause of James II for that of William III… (337).” The “upper end” of Scotch-Irish settlement continued to push north along the eastern shores of the Susquehanna. John Allison departed Derry in the 1720s to settle in the Pennsylvania wilderness given the unflattering title “the barrens of Derry”—a misleading name, given the rich potential of the lands north of the Donegal settlement drained by Swatara Creek. Patrick Hayes and his three brothers came from County Donegal in 1728. They and many others—Campbells, Carrs, Clarkes, Johnstons, McGrees, McNairs, Walkers and Wilsons—settled in the frontier region initially known as Peshtank. The settlement became organized as Derry Township in 1729, becoming a constituent element of a new county, Dauphin, in 1759. Londonderry Township followed in 1768. (These original townships were quite expansive in size; present-day townships of North and South Londonderry in Lebanon County were originally part of Dauphin’s extensive Londonderry Township.) The early settlers built their farms along running water supplied by hillside springs. Derry’s Presbyterians conducted their first services along a spring-fed stream (where it flowed into Spring Creek) in April 1724. Five years later they built a log and clapboard church building. Dunaway, 53; William Henry Egle, Adolphus S. Dudley, Harry I. Huber and Rebecca H. Schively, Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. (Chambersburg, 1896), 85, 114; G.G. Stoctay, Dauphin County: Elements Toward a 20th Century Pictoral History (Harrisburg, 1971), 235; William Henry Egle, History of the Counties of Dauphin and Lebanon (?, 1883), 25-27, 216, 218, 420, 409, 409. In the mountain ridges that traverse northern Dauphin and Lebanon Counties, some Ulster migrants found similarities to scenes possibly observed from emigrant ships leaving Lough Foyle. The name Magilligan’s Rocks was applied to a portion of Second Mountain. A rock on a nearby ridge became The King’s Stool because of its perceived similarity to a same-named formation among Magilligan’s Rocks near Lough Foyle. These rocky ridges are likely included within the areas unsuited for agriculture which geographer John Florin identifies with “the first sizable enclaves of unsettled land [which began] to appear on the map” in the 1720s. A section of the border between Lancaster and Lebanon Counties remained unpopulated by 1730 and likewise is depicted as empty on a map published in 1954. Florin observes that “a part of the same northeastern boundary [of Lancaster County] is classified on a soil map of Pennsylvania as rough and stoney [sic].” He finds this suggestive of the “high degree of reliability of local history material” used in mapping the movement of the frontier. Henry W. Shoemaker, Place Names and Altitudes of Pennsylvania Mountains, 11-12; Florin 51-52, Fig. 13. Such “local history” material is crucial to this study. 2. Crossing the Susquehanna: York and Adams Counties No settlements could be made legally west of the Susquehanna River under the Land Purchase of 1718 without arrangements with the Native Americans occupying the lands. Nonetheless, “a few hardy Scotch-Irish… crossed the Susquehanna and ‘squatted’ on Indian lands west of the river… Colonial officials complained that these illegal settlers had not even offered to buy the land from the Penns”! Concerned by movement into contested lands from Maryland, however, provincial authorities reached an understanding with Indians that in 1722 allowed for a cross-river settlement. Ulster migrants began crossing the Susquehanna in the 1720s, with ever-heavier numbers in the 1730s, to stake out claims, legally and otherwise. Families coming from Chester County settled in the “Red Lands” in the hilly country which became northwestern York County; they called their new community “Monaghan.” Early settlers along Yellow Breeches Creek included McMullins, Dares, Baileys, Parks and Elliots. Formally organized in 1745 (four years before the erection of York from Lancaster), Monaghan encompassed modern Carroll, Franklin and Monaghan Townships. Sometime before 1752 a log house near Yellow Breeches Creek in what is now Dillsburg, Carroll Township, began serving as Monaghan Presbyterian Church. Dunaway, 56-57; Florin, 50; James W. Schaffer in John Gibson, ed., History of York County, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1886), 646; Nevin, 270-272. Pennsylvania derived from a seventeenth-century land grant to William Penn; the Penn family continued to exert ownership over much of the colony in the eighteenth century. Most Scotch-Irish settlers moved into the (future) county’s southeast, a region known as the “York Barrens” apparently as a result of the Indians’ practice of regulating brush growth through fires. A nineteenth-century antiquarian surmised that Fawn Township took its name from the deer plentiful in the York Barrens; however, John Gibson admitted that if so, this would be an unusual reason for a name. The more likely explanation would be Fahan, a parish on the Inishowen peninsula of County Donegal close to Derry (and with a pronunciation often similar to “Fawn”). Fawn, Chanceford (and present-day Lower Chanceford) and Peach Bottom Townships represented the principal Ulster settlements in southeastern York County. Among the first buildings in Chanceford was a crudely built inn on the York and Peach Bottom Road. A traveler, commenting on the absence of the customary sign, offered the innkeeper his shoe. The proposal accepted, the tavern became known as Brogue, as did the village that developed around it. Gibson, 757; Alan Crozier, “The Scotch-Irish Influence on American English.” American Speech 59 (1984), 314, 323; B.F. Porter in Gibson, 734. Brogue, meaning shoe, is derived from Irish and Scots Gaelic and is regarded as Hiberno-English. Migrants from Ireland have been identified the first people of European origins to locate along Marsh and Conewago Creeks in the western reaches of York County, organized as modern Adams County in 1800. A parcel once owned by Cornelius Campbell and known as the Armagh Tract lay near the headwaters of Conewago Creek in Pleasant (later Buchanan) Valley in what became Franklin Township. Quakers from Friends’ meetings in Moyallan, County Down, and Lurgan, County Armagh, among others, settled further east along the Conewago. They called their community “Monallon,” formalized as Menallen Township. (Possbily recalling the township’s origins are toponyms presently found within its borders: Quaker Valley and Quaker Run, the latter a stream.) As in Ireland, the Pennsylvanian version of Moyallan lies relatively close to Hamiltonsbawn and Warringstown. Dunaway, 58; I. Daniel Rupp, The History and Topography of Dauphin, Cumberland, Franklin, Bedford, Adams and Perry Counties (Lancaster, 1846), 540; Samuel P. Bates, History of Cumberland and Adams Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1886), 256-257, 307; Historical Sketch of Moyallon Meeting, quoted in “More on Menallen,” Adams County Historical Society Newsletter, Vol. 17, No. 3 (March 1990). The Gazetteer of Pennsylvania (1832) rendered the name “Manallen.” See below for Hamiltonsbawn. Warringstown, Co. Down, may be the source for Warrington, a York County township immediately south of Monaghan. To the east and south of Menallen, also along Conewago Creek, Ulster pioneers made settlements they called Tyrone and Straban, the basis of present-day townships so-named. Just south of Straban, Ulster folk congregated at the hamlet called Managhan, on lands purchased by the Hamilton family from the Penns in what is now Mount Pleasant Township. A hamlet called Irishtown grew up across the South Branch of the Conewago from Mount Pleasant Township. “Hugh and Andrew Lynch erected a house, then James McBarron, followed by the Coligans, McClains, McBrides, Coltons, Marshalls, Pattersons and others.” To the south of Mount Pleasant, Mount Joy Township may have taken its name from the Lancaster County jurisdiction, the famous merchant ship, or the castle and hamlet in County Tyrone of that name, or the County Donegal estates of the Viscount Mountjoy. The first men to purchase land here were William Smith (1739), Robert Linn and Robert McKenny (1740), and Adam Linn, Gabriel McAllister and William McKenny (1741). Bates, 307, 315, 324; Patrick McKay, A Dictionary of Ulster Place-Names (Belfast, 1999), 111; Espenshade, 337; Bates, 313-315. The Gazetteer of Pennsylvania (1832) gave the spelling as “Strabane.” The spelling “Straban” reflects the Irish pronunciation. Marsh Creek settler Samuel Gettys in the 1770s opened a tavern at a muddy crossroads in Straban Township. After the Revolutionary War, his son James purchased a portion of that parcel. James Gettys, together with the Irish-born Covenanter minister, Alexander Dobbin, later laid out the village of Gettysburg on that land. Nearly a century nearby fields would be the scene of the American Civil War’s bloodiest and most celebrated battle. Born in Derry in 1742, Rev. Dobbin(s) was ordained by the Reformed Presbytery of Ireland as a missionary to America in 1772. He was a founding member of the Reformed Presbytery of North America, pastor to the Rock Creek congregation at Gettysburg, in 1782 a founder of the Associate Reformed Church, and founder and principal of the Gettysburg Academy, regarded as the first classical school west of the Susquehanna. A nineteenth-century Pennsylvanian historian located the origins of the earliest settlers in northwestern Ireland—and suggested that “They spoke bad Irish and as bad English.” Samuel P. Bates wrote, “Between 1735-6 and 1741 a number of Irish peasantry from the hills of Tyrone, Derry, Cavan and Sligo Counties, came hither to stay.” Numbered among those settling along Marsh Creek in the late 1730s: Campbells, Darbys, and Eddys; William and Matthew Black; Henry McDonah, James McMichell, John McWhorter and Hugh Swainey. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, several of these surnames have historic associations with northwestern Ireland. Bates, 241; Rupp, 541. Bates indicated no source for his information on language; the present writer has found no independent evidence of Irish-speaking among eighteenth-century immigrants to Pennsylvania. For information on the surnames, see Robert Bell, The Book of Ulster Surnames (Belfast, 1988). Those settling along McDowell’s Run and Little Marsh Creek called their community Hamiltonban, after Hamiltonsbawn, a townland and village in County Armagh. Families here in 1789 included those of the name Ferguson, Finlay, McAllister, McCarley, McGinley, Knox, Orr and Porter. Hamiltonsban Township today encompasses the southwestern corner of Adams County, including the slopes of South Mountain. A mountain ridge that stretches from Maryland north into Pennsylvania, South Mountain sets off the Cumberland Valley and physically separates Adams and Franklin Counties. Bates, 256-257. Pennsylvania experienced a dramatic expansion of settlement in the 1730s, fueled by “the large number of immigrants landing at Philadelphia beginning in the late 1720’s and continuing through the 1730’s.” Immigrants from Ulster figured prominently among this influx, particularly in the years 1725-1729. As James Logan, provincial secretary, notably observed in 1729, “It looks as if Ireland is to send all its inhabitants hither, for last week not less than six ships arrived, and every day, two or three arrive also.” Florin, 52; James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962), 170-171. 3. The Cumberland Valley: ‘Seed-plot and Nursery of Their Race” The broad, fertile and crescent-shaped Cumberland Valley arches from the Potomac River (on the Virginia-Maryland border) northeast to the Susquehanna River, flanked on the west by Kittatinny Mountain, on the north by Blue and Little Mountains and to the east by Piney, Rocky and South Mountains. What Pennsylvanians call South Mountain is a northern extension of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. In southern Pennsylvania the Blue Ridge splits into two, creating “a hollowed-out center” with relatively fertile terrain accessible to agriculture. The valley’s diagonal swath meant that “nearly all” settlers gained access from the Susquehanna and moved southwest, rather than by crossing the mountain ridge east-to-west. The valley would be a major route during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Florin, 55-56. The allure of the Cumberland Valley proved irresistible to the newly emigrated and first-generation Pennsylvanians alike. The bold and desperate moved beyond the frontier to make illegal settlements in 1730-31; the first settler for whom there is documentation was apparently Andrew Ralston of Big Spring. A steady flow of migrants developed after 1733; once the Province allowed the unrestricted sale of lands along the Conodoguinet and Conocoheague Creeks in 1736, the region quickly experienced a great influx of the land-hungry from Lancaster County and directly from Ireland and Scotland, “nearly all of whom were Presbyterians.” “This valley,” wrote Wayland F. Dunaway, became the headquarters of the Scotch-Irish not only in Pennsylvania but in America as well. It was the seed-plot and nursery of their race, the original reservoir, which, after having been filled to overflowing, sent forth a constant stream of emigrants to the northward and especially to the South and West. Of the 5,000 people located in the valley by 1751, all but fifty families are said to have been Scotch-Irish or Scots. The valley comprises the modern counties of Franklin and Cumberland. Only in Lancaster County is there as great a profusion of surviving Ulster place-names readily observable from modern maps. Conway Phelps Wing, History of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1879), 22; George O. Seilhamer, “Old Mother Cumberland,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1900, 22; Nevin, 22; Dunaway, 59. Writing less than a century later, the author of A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania proposed “The population of [Cumberland] co. is composed chiefly of the Germans and the Irish, who were the first settlers.” (Part 2, 127.) The Conodoguinet and Conocoheague Creeks are the principal streams in Cumberland and Franklin Counties. Young men from Scotch-Irish settlements such as Donegal in Lancaster County were among the first to cross the Susquehanna—moving beyond the recognized frontier—and occupy land in the valley. Also on the move: emigrants who had first sought out friends and family east of the river. Four brothers named Chambers who had emigrated from County Antrim in the 1720s in 1730 became among the very first to move beyond the river-frontier. (Benjamin Chambers, a millwright, became the founder of Chambersburg, the Franklin County seat.) Many hundreds of their compatriots soon followed them. Wing, 22-23. Lisburn is the oldest village in Lower Allen Township in eastern Cumberland County. Located in a loop of Yellow Breeches Creek in the township’s southern corner, the land was conveyed by the heirs of William Penn to Alexander Frazer in 1739. (Lisburn is a town in County Antrim.) “New Lisburn,” “Lisborn” and “Lisbon” are among the renderings of the name found in deeds and other documents dating back to 1765. Early settlers reportedly recreated the annual country fairs known in Ireland for hiring of labor and sales of livestock and produce. Bates, 299; J.C. Nesbit in Wing, 200; Mrs. Gilbert E. Swope in George P. Donehoo, ed., A History of the Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1930), 489. Among the village’s more illustrious—or infamous—early residents was James Galbraith, known alternately as Indian trader and Indian fighter. The emigrant from County Donegal originally settled in Lancaster County, established a ferry across the Susquehanna and purchased land in Lisburn around 1761. Others residing in Lisburn and environs circa 1760 were Abernathys, Andersons, Armstrongs, Atkinsons, Beattys, Boyds, Brysons, Chambers, Clarks, Crocketts, Cuffs, Cunninghams, Dunlaps, Elliotts, Frees, Gibsons, Hannahs, Lairds, Martins, McCormicks, McCues, McCurdys, McGees, McMains, McNails, Quiqleys, Rankins, Sandses, Semples, Steels, Stewarts, Whitesides and Wilsons. Bates, 300; Swope in Donehoo, 491. A man named Mitchell opened the first tavern in present-day West Pennsborough Township, Cumberland County in 1786; soon it became universally known as “The Irish House,” a place where whiskey was reportedly consumed in prodigious quantities. Scotch-Irish settlers brought the name Magilligan’s Rocks west across the Susquehanna; applying it to a rock formation in Cumberland County perceived as similar to the Ulster original. Peter Ritner in Wing, 268; Shoemaker, 12. In the rugged northwestern corner of what became Franklin County, pioneers of Irish origin built homes where the Path, Amberson and Horse Valleys occupy the narrow space between the Tuscorora and Kittatinny mountain ridges. In 1750 the original European settlers were driven out and their cabins burnt—but not by Native Americans. When Indians objected to the occupation of their lands by a growing number of pioneers, provincial authorities acted “to expel the interlopers.” Officials, among them Cumberland County magistrates Benjamin Chambers, William Maxwell and William Allison, oversaw the evictions. (The place-name Burnt Cabins recalls those events; the village is in Dublin Township, Fulton County, close by the border with Huntingdon and Franklin Counties.) Among those suffered fines imposed by the magistrate’s court—as well as burnt homes—were Moses Moore, Alexander McCartie, Felix Doyle and Samuel Ramage. Once the land had been purchased from the Indians by the province in 1758 most of these pioneers returned. Donehoo, 415; Espenshade, 301. Their settlement was called Fannett after a northern peninsula in County Donegal; Fanad Head may have been some migrants’ last sight of Ireland. William McIntire, Alexander Walker and Francis Elliott settled along the Tuscarora Path (from which Path Valley received its name) in what became known as Fannettsburg. Early settlers along the West Branch of the Conococheague Creek in the southern reaches of Fannett Township (organized as Metal Township in 1795) included Archibald Elliott, Francis McConnell, John and Thomas Clark, Patrick Davidson, Hugh and James McCurdy, James Mackey and Robert McGuire. Espenshade, 309; Donehoo, 415, 417. A Presbyterian congregation in Co. Donegal known as “Fannet” was organized in 1654. (Alexander G. Lecky, In the Days of the Laggan Presbytery [Belfast, 1908], 142.) Rev. Charles Beatty, a Presbyterian minister appointed by the Synod of New York and Pennsylvania in 1766 to preach to frontier inhabitants, traveled through Fannett. He lodged with Francis Elliott. Beatty recorded the following in his diary for 25 August: This Path-Valley is twenty-three miles in length, and in general about three miles in breadth. In one township, called Fanet, there are about seventy families, who are desirous of the gospel, and willing to support it, according to their abilities, being very unanimous. They have fixed upon a place, about eight or nine miles from the head of the valley, where they propose to build a house for worship. Donehoo, 24, 211. Donegal names also feature prominently in northern Franklin County. County officials established Letterkenny as a township in 1762 out of Lurgan’s expansive territory. (Letterkenny is a townland and town in County Donegal.) Surveys and land warrants document settlement in Letterkenny as early as 1736. Among those locating in Letterkenny prior to 1754 were settlers named Allison, Barnhill, Boyd, Culbertson, Henderson, Irwin, McKean, Mitchell, Rogers and Stewart. As a result of this early occupation and exposed position, Letterkenny’s pioneers were hard-hit during the French and Indian War. Those not victims of massacres and destruction of their cabins fled to more settled areas, abandoning their hardscrabble holdings. Donehoo, 423, 424, 423. The Rocky Spring Presbyterian Church served as the center of the Letterkenny settlement from its organization in 1738 by the Presbytery of Donegal. The congregation took its name from a nearby spring and stream. Not surprisingly, congregation’s first minister was also the first settled Presbyterian minister west of the Susquehanna. Also unsurprisingly, this first minister had Donegal connections. Rev. Thomas Craighead was the son of Rev. Robert Craighead, first minister of the Donoughmore congregation in County Donegal. Both father and son were members of the Laggan Presbytery. Thomas Craighead was ordained and installed in 1698 as minister to the Presbyterians of Donegal town, Mountcharles, Ballintra and southeastern Donegal generally. Craighead and his immediate family emigrated in the mid-1710s together with his brother-in-law Rev. William Holmes, a Donegal native ordained and installed by the Laggan Presbytery as minister to the Strabane congregation in 1692. Craighead settled first in Massachusetts, moving to Lancaster County in 1733. He died in 1739, while in the Rocky Spring pulpit. Donehoo, 423; Lecky, 17; Bolton, Scotch Irish pioneers in Ulster and America (Boston, 1910), 79-82, 87-89; James Terry White, The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1898), 130; Seilhamer, 26-27. To the south, hundreds of pioneer families settled along the Conococheague Creek and its tributaries; these streams drain the lower the Cumberland Valley as the Conococheague meanders south to the Potomac. The “Conococheague Settlement” and “East Conococheague Settlement” became the homes of settlers among whom numbered Allisons, Craigs, Davidsons, McClellans, Poes and Watsons. William Allison acquired a large tract of land in the Conococheague Settlement and built a fort for the community’s protection (and to safeguard his investment). Fort Allison became a nucleus of settlement, as did a blacksmith’s shop located at the intersection of the King’s Highway and a pioneer trail. The community’s first church, “the old red meeting house,” was built circa 1737 and located at Moss Springs. The first pastor to this Presbyterian congregation, Rev. Samuel Cavin, ministered to both sides of the Conococheague Creek, as did the steely John Steel in the mid-1750s. Wharton, 132-133; Donehoo, 263, 415; Nevin, 162-163. In response to the considerable influx of settlers, Lancaster County officials created Hopewell Township in 1735. Six years later, the Court of Quarter Sessions ordered the frontier township divided into two; the western half became Antrim. Named for the Irish county from which many of its inhabitants originated, the new township comprised much of what is now Franklin County. Early settlers in Antrim included James Johnston, John and James McLanahan and James Roddy, as well as Laughlins, McIlvaines, McKeehans, McKinneys, Nesbits, Peebles, Pollocks, Scroggses and Trimbles. Seilhamer, 23; Lenore Embick Fowler in Donehoo, 547; Donehoo, 264; Wing, 30; Donehoo 414. Antrim was subdivided in 1743 to create an additional township, Lurgan. (Lurgan is a townland and town in County Armagh.) A principally Irish pioneer settlement in the Cumberland Valley, Lurgan developed along the level land watered by Conodoguinet Creek at the heart of the Cumberland Valley, astride the main route that brought settlers deeper into the Cumberland Valley. When assigned as the name of a township in Lancaster County (which then took in all of the western-most reaches of the province), Lurgan encompassed much of modern Franklin County. Among the earliest settlers in Lurgan was the Irish-born Thomas Pomeroy and his wife; the Pomeroys had a son, also Thomas, in 1733, purportedly the first white child born in Franklin County. Fort McAllister was built in Lurgan Township during the French and Indian War. Donehoo, 425. Pomeroy, born in Ireland, was of “Huguenot extraction.” (Seilhamer, 41) As a frontier settlement during the French and Indian War of the 1750s, Antrim experienced the ravages of that conflict. According to tradition, Indians attacked the crude log schoolhouse where Enoch Brown listened to his scholars’ morning recitations. The school was set ablaze and all there tomahawked to death except young Archie McCullough, who escaped with the horrific tale. On another occasion, Rev. John Steel was delivering a sermon when word reached Fort Allison that the Walker family had been massacred at Rankin’s mill only a mile away. The appropriately surnamed minister abruptly halted his teaching, took down his musket from the wall and led the men to battle. Donehoo, 264; Dunaway, 214. In 1782, Col. John Allison laid out a new town within the boundaries of Antrim Township with the assistance of a schoolmaster, James Crawford; he named it Greencastle for his emigrant father’s birthplace in County Donegal. An Englishman who visited Greencastle some three years later described it a “poor mean little town” and expressed his relief in having left quickly. Greencastle then consisted of about twenty houses and the “old red meeting house.” The majority Scotch-Irish in 1792 demonstrated their opposition to the federal excise tax on distilled beverages (if not federal fiscal policy in general) with a liberty pole and placard declaring “Down with Tyrants! Plenty of Whiskey and No Excise!” Donehoo, 265; Espenshade, 246; Wharton, 132-133; Donehoo, 266. Greencastle is a village on the Inishowen peninsula, across Lough Foyle from Magilligan Point. 4. The Juniata Valley and Central Pennsylvania Acknowledging the frontier’s westward movement, Pennsylvania officials in January 1750 created Cumberland County out of the considerable territory that had been Lancaster County west of the Susquehanna (excepting York County, erected in 1749). The Penn family’s 1754 purchase from the Indians of a vast tract of land west of the Susquehanna legalized the Fannett settlement and led to the creation of additional townships over the mountains to the north of the Cumberland Valley. County officials in 1754 organized four townships on “tother side of N. Mountain”: Tyrone, Lack, Fannett, and Aire (or Ayr). That three of the four names were from West Ulster and the fourth from southwestern Scotland is likely indicative of many settlers’ origins. Fannett, as we have seen, encompassed settlements in narrow mountain valleys parallel to the Cumberland Valley and became part of modern Franklin County. Tyrone and Lack lay north and northwest of the Cumberland Valley, across mountain ridges where incomers created farmsteads along streams flowing toward the meandering Juniata River. The Juniata rises deep in the Appalachian Mountains in west-central Pennsylvania and loops east through mountain passes and between ridges to its confluence with the Susquehanna in present-day Perry County. Many of those who initially settled along the Juniata and its tributaries appear to have been from the north of Ireland. Their communities became bases of Juniata, Mifflin and Perry Counties. Franklin Ellis and Austin Hungerford, History of that part of the Susquehanna and Juniata Valleys Embraced in the Counties of Mifflin, Juniata, Perry, Union and Snyder… (Philadelphia, 1886), 532. The provincial land office in 1755 began sales of territory in Sherman’s Valley and along the Juniata included in the Indians’ cessation of land under the Treaty of Albany. The outbreak of war prevented widespread migration into the region—particularly following the spectacular defeat of combined British and colonial forces under General Edward Braddock in western Pennsylvania in July of that year. Squatters had already attempted settlement. In 1750 provincial authorities burned cabins along Sherman’s Creek before the territory had become open for purchase. Among the squatters dispersed were Owen McKeeb, John McClare, Richard Kirkpatrick, James Murray, John Scott and Simon Girty. Following the 1754 purchase Sherman’s Valley became the new Cumberland County township of Tyrone. Early settlers, with biting humor, referred to the district as “the eternal state of Tyrone.” The 1767 assessment list for Tyrone Township included persons with the surnames Alexander, Black, Carson, Cunningham, Diven, Dunbar, Elliot, Ferguson, Hamilton, Kelly, Kennedy, Kilkead, McClure, McConnell, Miller, Orr, Patterson, Roddy and Wilson. The list suggests the apparent return of Owen McKeeb. Rupp, 545; Dunaway, 67; Rupp, 545; H.H. Hain, History of Perry County (Harrisburg, 1922), 911-912, 1009; Hain, 1069. The Irish-born Simon Girty was the father of the notorious, same-named Loyalist who helped organize and lead Indian raids on American settlements during the Revolutionary War. In 1763 the first township created out of Tyrone was named for the Parish of Taughboyne in the Barony of Raphoe, County Donegal. Toboyne had as a boundary line Alexander Roddy’s mill run. Today Toboyne occupies the mountainous southwestern corner of Perry County at the head of Sherman Valley, bordered by Cumberland, Franklin and Juniata Counties. Among the first settlers to receive land warrants there were John Wilson (1755), William Wallace (1765), John Watt (1766) and John Rhea (1767). Another early settler, John Clendenin, had the misfortune to be killed and scalped by Indians. In Perry County, early settlers named a rock formation Magilligan’s Rocks. Near the present town of Marysville in Perry County, where Fishing Creek enters the Susquehanna a 1770 map had the notation “Saut”—the (Ulster) Scots word for “salt.” Among the Revolutionary War veterans in that portion of Perry were men named Gilmore, O’Donald, O’Neil and Rooney. Hain, 1064; Shoemaker, 12; Hain 160. For “saut” see C.I. Macafee, ed, A Concise Ulster Dictionary (Oxford, 1996). West of Tyrone and Toboyne, Cumberland County officials established Lack Township in 1754, named for the townland and village in County Fermanagh or alternately, Leck Parish in central County Donegal. The county magistrates declared: “And we do further erect the settlement called the Tuskerora Valey [sic] into a sepparate [sic] Township and nominate the same the Township of Lac, and we appoint John Johnston to act therein as constable for the remaining part of the current year.” At its inception the township encompassed all of present-day Juniata County south and west of the Juniata River and a portion of Huntingdon County. The name “Lack” continues as a township name in Juniata County. Many of the earliest settlers fled during the hostilities of the 1750s but returned once British forces occupied the Forks of the Ohio. Among the eighty taxpayers on record in 1763: James Armstrong, David Bell, James Calhoun, Robert Campbell, John Collins, William Cunningham, Robert Houston, William Irwin, John Little, John McClellan, George McConnell, Robert Robinson, David Wallace and John and Thomas Wilson. Blackburns, Christys, Hoggs and Johnsons also numbered among early settlers. John W. Jordan, ed., A History of the Juniata and Its People, Vol. I (New York: 1913), 153, 162. The Co. Donegal Leck (like the Fermanagh name derived from the Irish An Leac) borders Raphoe Parish; Raphoe (in various spellings) occurred frequently among Pennsylvania place-names of Ulster origin. In late 1754 or early 1755 Cumberland County organized the newly purchased territory north of the Juniata River as a township named Fermanagh. The township initially encompassed all of modern Juniata and portions of Perry, Snyder, Mifflin, Centre and Huntingdon Counties; Juniata County today retains a much-shrunken Fermanagh. The township’s earliest settlers included Alexander Lafferty, Thomas McCormick, James Purdy and James Sharon; located there by 1755, they were driven out several times. Warfare with Native Americans smoldered through 1780. Serving as township officers in 1763 were Arthur Moody, constable; John Nicholson and Samuel Mitchell, supervisors; Andrew McKeener and George Hays, overseers of the poor; and Alexander Lafferty and James Gallagher. Taxables included Robert Calhooen, William Curran, William Henderson, John McBride, Thomas McKee, Hugh McCalester, Andrew McClure, Hugh McCormick,William McLevy, Samuel Mitchell, John Nickson, Robert Neilson, James Patterson and William Stewart. Ellis and Hungerford, 532, 808-9, 809, 811. Robert Nelson came from Derry, Ireland about 1750 and settled near Anderson’s Ferry on the Susquehanna. Sometime before 1763 he purchased a tract from William Huston in Fermanagh, married, settled in the township. During the Revolution, his house was regarded as “a rendezvous for all patriotic men in this section.” Thomas McCormick, remembered as “an Irishman,” took out a warrant on March 7, 1755 for a tract of 311 acres along Horning’s Run, which he named Armagh. (The name does not appear to have survived.) Controversy within the Associate Reformed Church which eventually led to the secession of western and southern presbyteries in 1812 occasioned a formal protest to the denomination’s General Synod from the congregation of “Fermanah” in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania—likely a remnant of the original settlement. Ellis and Hungerford, 817, 818; Associate Reformed Synod of the West, A Statement of the Grievances (Pittsburgh, 1823), 10-13. An Associate, later Associate Reformed, congregation called Fermanagh organized in 1776 in what was Juniata County in 1903. That the minister of this Fermanagh congregation, the Irish immigrant Thomas Smith, linked to the United Irishmen at the time of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, was a noted participant in the denominational controversy suggests it is the same. (William Melanchton Glasgow, Cycopledic Manual of the United Presbyterian Church of North America [Pittsburgh, 1903], 439.) The Cumberland County Court in 1767 established the boundaries of Fermanagh Township and added three new townships, one of them Derry. The new Derry took in roughly the eastern half of what is now Mifflin County north of the Juniata. Among the earliest settlers in Derry Township were the brothers Matthew and George Kelly, who took out a warrant for 156 acres at the south end of Dry Valley. A village named Kellyville (which no longer appears to exist) was named for Moses Kelly, who acquired lands in Derry Township in 1791. The first tax assessment in 1768 collected a wealth of names with likely connections to Ulster: Alexander, Armstrong, Bell, Brown, Buchanan, Cannon, Crawford, Davis, Dunn, Forster, McCartney, McDonald, McKee, Magill, McKee, McMeans, Montgomery, Patton, Ross, Stewart and Wallace. Ellis and Hungerford, 543, 537, 533. Each of these surnames is found in Robert Bell, The Book of Ulster Surnames (Belfast, 1988). With many settlers locating north of Jack’s Mountain in the East Kishacoquillas Valley, authorities acceded to the pioneers’ petition to subdivide Derry Township—with the result that Armagh Township was created in 1770. The 1770 assessment found families by the name of Armstrong, Alexander, Calhoune, Cameron, Cochran, Davidson, Dickson, Duncan, Ewing, McClay, McClure, McKibbon, Sterrett, Taylor and Wallace. A Neal Dougherty also numbered among the taxpayers. An assessment of Armagh Township following the creation of Mifflin County in 1789 found many of these names as well as Boyd, Burns, Dunlap, Erwin, Fleming, Huston, Jackson, McDowell, McNamar, Mitchell, Moore, Murphy, Nealy, O’Hara, Vance and Wilson. Ellis and Hungerford, 534, 551-552, 553-554. The name McNamar is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it is of Irish Gaelic origin, a variant of Macnamara—Mac con na mara. Secondly, this is likely the family of Richard McNemar, a Presbyterian minister closely identified with the Great Revival of 1800 and later affiliated with the Shakers. A biographer, who gives McNemar’s mother’s maiden name as Knox, describes the future preacher’s family as part of the Scotch-Irish migration. McNemar was born in 1770 in Tuscarora, Pa. near the Fermanagh settlement in what is now Juniata Co.; in 1775 the family moved further up the Juniata River and, following other relocations, in the early 1780s settled in the Kishacoquillas Valley. (J.P. Maclean, Sketch of the Life and Labors of Richard McNemar [Franklin, Ohio, 1905], 5.) Near the foot of the Seven Mountains in northern Armagh Township, the McNitt brothers—Alexander, James, John, Robert and William—began permanent settlement in 1766. With Indian raids an ever-present danger, the brothers built a stockade on Robert’s property. Their fears were well-founded. The Revolutionary War raged to the east when late on a summer day in 1777 the McNitts were in Robert Thompson’s rye field, helping with the reaping. Alexander McNitt’s young son Robert and a small girl were following the reapers, picking berries. Indians attacked suddenly, letting loose a volley of musket fire. A bullet passed through Alexander McNitt’s hat. The adults raced for the house, leaving young Robert crying for his father. The small girl, showing greater presence of mind, hid in the rye. Captured, Robert was carried off to Canada and there remained until 1781. Ellis and Hungerford, 553-554, 536. The East Kishacoquillas settlers organized a Presbyterian congregation and issued a call in March 1783 to Rev. James Johnston, a Cumberland County native and Revolutionary War veteran. The call was signed by, among others, John and Robert McNitt, Joseph McKibbins, James Lauglin, James McCay, Joseph Adams, John McManagill, Samuel Mitchell and Robert Allison. Rev. Johnston also ministered to Derry Township’s Dry Valley congregation, which met in a log meeting house in Kellysville. Ellis and Hungerford, 555, 537. South of Derry and the long, deep Kishacoquillas Valley, Hugh Brown bought land along a loop in the Juniata River in 1762. Upon his death the tract passed to his daughter Margaret Hamilton. A town named Newton Hamilton (located within Wayne Township, Mifflin County) was laid out in 1802. The precise Irish connection is unknown. Even if inspired by the heiress’s new familial connections, recent immigrants were likely aware that the village of Newtownhamilton had been established in County Armagh circa 1770. A more likely source is County Donegal’s Newtown Hamilton. This is a townland in the Foyle Valley bordering County Derry, in Killea Parish, Raphoe North Barony, and not far distant from Taughboyne Parish. Lots in the Pennsylvania village were soon sold to Samuel McCurdy and James Irvine. When Catharine McAneer and her parents came to live in Newton Hamilton in 1826, the town consisted of just log houses; their neighbors included John Murray and John McGeehan. Ellis and Hungerford, 588. 5. West Ulster Place-Names and the Westward Movement A consistent theme in the naming of places during the first half century of movement across Pennsylvania, 1710-1760, is the recourse to toponyms of West Ulster provenance, from Lough Erne north to Lough Swilly. Particularly apparent are names from the Laggan district consisting of northeastern Donegal, the Mourne valley of Tyrone and the Foyle valley of northwestern Derry. Hence, Derry, Letterkenny, Londonderry, Raphoe, Strabane, Taughboyne/Toboyne and Tyrone. Together with Fahan/Fawn, Fanad/Fannett, Greencastle and Magilligan, these represent areas in the hinterland of Derry city. In the eighteenth century the population was predominantly Protestant, with Presbyterians outnumbering Episcopalians. Breandán Mac Suibhne, “Patriot Paddies: The Volunteers and Irish Identity in Northwest Ulster, 1778-1786” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1999), 19-20. Small-scale migration of Ulster Scots from County Donegal to North America was underway even before the end of the seventeenth century. Presbyterians no doubt predominated during the eighteenth-century migration, although departures from Derry and smaller ports on the coast of County Donegal possibly involved Catholics of native Irish origin—as the surname evidence strongly suggests. The relatively slower pace of economic growth in west Ulster in the first half of the eighteenth century may have acted a spur to movement out of the region during that period. Fitzgerald and Lambkin, 111; R.J. Dickson Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1773 ( Belfast, 1988), 4; Graeme Kirkham, in Dickson, xvi-xvii. The term “redemptioner” could be a clue to the economic circumstances of some eighteenth-century migrants from Ulster, if not West Ulster specifically. Those intent on crossing the Atlantic but unable to pay their way had two choices: sign an indenture agreement or agree to pay the cost of passage shortly after arrival. If the “redemptioner” failed to raise his passage money within the agreed time, as R.J. Dickson explained, “his services were then sold by the ship’s master to the highest bidder as in the case of the indentured servant.” When Folklorist Henry W. Shoemaker collected the term in the mountains of central Pennsylvania in the early years of the twentieth century; to his informants, it meant “A descendant of continental settlers sold on the Philadelphia docks for their passage money.” (German-speakers also numbered among the colonial-era redemptioners.) Community awareness of this aspect of the emigration experience seems to have lingered among the generations along the tributaries of the Juniata River and the West Branch of the Susquehanna. Dickson, 87-88; Peter Gilmore, Scots-Irish Words from Pennsylvania’s Mountains, Taken from the Shoemaker Collection (Bruceton Mills, W.Va., 1999), 83. Another factor in the diffusion of West Ulster place-names is the substantial concentration of Ulster migrants in the older counties and their further movement carried westward and northwestward across Pennsylvania. A number of such migrants had origins in the Laggan. In the 1770s nearly half of the settlers in the valley of the West Branch of the Susquehanna and its tributaries—those sometimes known as the “Fair Play Settlers” are thought to have been “Scotch-Irish who originated in Chester, Cumberland, Dauphin and Lancaster Counties.” As networks of extended family and friends migrated out of the original core areas, it appears that attachment to certain names—reinforced by Pennsylvanian experience—traveled with them. Griffin, 106, 110; George D. Wolf, The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784: A Study of Frontier Ethnography (Harrisburg, 1969), 19. Further, there appears to be a correlation between Pennsylvania place-names and northern Irish ports, towns and villages identified by R.J. Dickson as having an association with emigration out-agents. Dickson’s data, drawn from the period 1750-1775, located emigration out-agents in Antrim, Armagh, Belfast, Coleraine, Fahan, Letterkenny, Lisburn, Lurgan, Moyallon, and Raphoe—all names found in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. What is particularly interesting is that (in most instances) these names had been assigned to places in Pennsylvania earlier than the period from which Dickson culled his information. This suggests that agents acting on behalf of the owners of emigrant ships operated in areas which by the third quarter of the century already demonstrated interest in migration. Dickson, 99-103. 6. Deeper Into the Appalachians: Bedford and Fulton Counties When organized in March 1771 out of the western-most reaches of Cumberland County, Bedford County covered the mountains and valleys now found within the boundaries of Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Fulton, Huntingdon, Somerset and Westmoreland Counties, and portions of others as well. Bedford had sixteen townships, each covering extensive (and unsettled) territory; among them, Colerain, Dublin, Ross Straver, Tullileague and Tyrone. Within this subset, west Ulster names (Tullileague and Tyrone) are now balanced with toponyms from the east of the province (Colerain and Ross Straver). In the case of Bedford’s original townships the names largely preceded the pioneers. Tullyleague is a townland (also known as Tullybrook) in the Parish of Drumhome in southeastern County Donegal; the name (or a variant) does not appear to have survived as a Pennsylvania place-name. Bedford County, according to A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania, “was originally settled by emigrants from other parts of the state, and from the north of Ireland.” Rupp, 488-490; Espenshade, 186; E. Howard Blackburn, William H. Koontz and William Henry Welfley, History of Bedford and Somerset Counties, Pennsylvania (New York, 1906), 87, 77-78; Gazetteer, Part 2, 32. The appearance of Dublin points up the relative paucity of Irish place-names from outside the province of Ulster. The first settlers in what became Fulton County arrived in the 1740s and took up their lands illegally. In 1750 several of these precipitous pioneers located in the Big Cove signed a petition to provincial authorities asking for understanding and retention of the lands they cleared in violation of Pennsylvania’s treaty with the Indians. Among the signers were Andrew Donaldson, John Jamison, John McMean, John Martin, William Mulligan, Roger Murphy and Charles Stewart, along with McConnells and Wilsons. (McConnellsburg—located in the valley known as Big Cove—is today the seat of Fulton County.) Early in the 1740s, according to Dunaway, “a few venturesome individuals among the Scotch-Irish” crossed the Tuscarora Mountains, moving westward from the Cumberland Valley (and present-day Franklin County) to settle in the valley known as Great Cove. Located near the center of this valley, which occupies much of modern Fulton County, Belfast Township survives as a reminder of the initial Ulster Scots settlement. The township was organized as part of Bedford County prior to 1785. Taxable inhabitants of Belfast in 1785 included Francis Allison, Simon Boyle, Benjamin Galbreath, Daniel Gillan, John Madden, Daniel McConnel and John McKewn. Rupp, 514, 515; Dunaway, 65; History of Bedford, Somerset and Fulton Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1884), 654. The last county to be created out of the vast territory that Bedford County in 1771, modern Fulton was established in 1750. The only Pennsylvanian President, James Buchanan, was born in 1791 to a Donegal-born father in what became Fulton County. In Fulton and Bedford Counties both, human habitation occurs in valley between mountain ridges that stretch north from Maryland deep into Pennsylvania. The first settlers, mainly Scotch-Irish, began to enter the territory of modern Bedford County in the early 1750s. Colerain Township, located in Friends Cove in south central Bedford, continues an original township name and recalls a relatively old Ulster Scots settlement. When demarcated in 1771, Colerain comprised much of the southeast of the present county. Settlement in this area was aided by proximity to Fort Bedford, the basis of the modern county seat, Bedford. Colerain’s tax rolls in 1771 included Henry Armstrong, Robert Bradshaw, William Buchanan, John Cunningham, Hugh Ferguson, John Finley, James Hunter, Thomas Johnston, Daniel McDonald, Robert McFerren, Robert McKinnie, Oliver Miller, Henderson Murphy, James Newell, James Patterson, Gideon Ritchey, Charles Stewart and Adam Young. Dunaway, 66; William A. Jordan in Winona Garbrick, ed., The Kernel of Greatness: An Informal Bicentennial History of Bedford County (State College, Pa., 1971), 64; Blackburn, 224; Rupp, 490; Blackburn, 224; Harriette M. Bradley and Thomas C. Imler in Garbrick, 70. The Irish-born Miller later relocated to Allegheny County; there his farm became the scene of a signal event in the Whiskey Rebellion. Although not among the original townships, Londonderry Township is relatively old, its organization dating from the 1780s. The township today occupies the southwestern corner of Bedford County; the settlements along Wills Creek have probably always been the center of its existence. John Miller settled on Wills Creek shortly after seeing service in the Revolutionary War. Cornelius Devore, the owner of one of the first mills, was among the earlier settlers. Jordan, 64; Blackburn, 239. 7. Appalachia along the Juniata: Blair and Huntingdon Counties The Juniata River is born in Huntingdon County with the confluence of the Little Juniata River (from the northwest) and Raystown Branch (from the southwest); there the Juniata begins its serpentine passage through mountain ridges to enter the Susquehanna River to the east. Along the western reaches of the Juniata and its principal tributaries, Ulster-bred families established settlements known originally by Ulster place-names that have largely disappeared. Robert Ray (or Rea) in the early 1750s established a trading post that became the basis of a village called Raystown, which in turn became the town of Bedford. That portion of the Juniata rising in western Bedford County and which then flows through Bedford town became known as the Raystown Branch. Alexander Ewing settled in Huntingdon County in 1777, a decade before political leaders created it. Ewing took out a warrant in August 1786 for 350 acres which he called Aughnacloy, the name of a town in County Tyrone. His new home became part of Tyrone the following year: the organization of Huntingdon County in 1787 included creation of eight townships, among them Tyrone and Dublin. Ewing farmed and built both a grist mill and a saw mill. Other early settlers in the vicinity included James Hunter and the Henderson family. J. Simpson Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1883), 4, 268-269, 272; Jordan, 68 Through division and further division the name “Tyrone” ceased to exist in Huntingdon County in August 1794. But it survives in neighboring Blair County, a part of Huntingdon until 1846. Tyrone Township is found in northern Blair’s Sinking Valley. The valley takes its name from Sinking Run, a stream that annually disappears due to an underlying limestone formation. The name “Tyrone” is also continued in a town and a village in nearby Snyder Township, formerly part of Tyrone. James Crawford, “a native of Ireland,” moved to the Sinking Valley from Adams County before the Revolutionary War. The threat of Indian raids sent him back to Adams, but he returned in a few years’ time with his wife and infant son, accompanied by Robert Stewart, Samuel Kyle and others. Africa, 228-229, 231. Sinking Valley’s first settlers, according to a nineteenth-century chronicler of Blair County, “adhered to the tenets of the Presbyterian Church.” Joseph Moore, described as “an Irishman,” lived in Tyrone before the Revolutionary War; on numerous occasions he had “to defend his home against the attacks of Indians.” Mordecai McLain, also “an Irishman,” came from Maryland before cessation of hostilities with native peoples. Robert Morrow “also an Irishman,” located in Tyrone as early as 1783, arriving from the Path Valley in northwestern Franklin County (encompassed by Fannett Township). Africa, 236, 232, 233, 232. Associate Presbyterians (Seceders) had organized a congregation and built a log meeting house in the town of Huntingdon by 1808 and obtained a minister in November 1811; however, the time of Rev. Thomas Smith was divided among the town and numerous preaching stations. Rev. Smith traversed a wide area. Among others, he served Seceder families in Sinking Valley in Tyrone Township, Blair County, and in Newton Hamilton, Wayne Township, Mifflin County. Reid W. Stewart, History of Scottish Dissenting Presbyterianism in Huntingdon County, PA (Lower Burrell, Pa., 2003), 3-5. 8. Over the Mountains: Westmoreland and Fayette Counties No lands were available for purchase in what became Westmoreland County until after 1769. Indifferent to legal distinctions, some settlers arrived earlier, laying their claim to land through “tomahawk title”—by hacking some symbol into trees to signify their presence. The volume of migration—and settlement—increased rapidly after 1769. Probably a majority of settlers in Westmoreland had Ulster origins; it has been reckoned that the Scotch-Irish constituted a majority in 1790, when the first federal census recorded a population of 16,018. “Westmoreland co. was originally settled by German and Irish emigrants, and is now inhabited by their descendants,” wrote the author the 1832 Gazetteer of Pennsylvania. Seven Presbyterian congregations were organized before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, and another five by 1795. Dunaway, 80; George Dallas Albert, History of the county of Westmoreland, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1882), 44; A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania, Part Two, 483; Dunaway, 81. In Westmoreland County and in Fayette to the south, township names of Ulster origin largely preceded settlement. Much of the Ligonier Valley was known as Donegal when that region between the Laurel and Chestnut ridges was part of Bedford County. The name was retained when newly established Westmoreland County organized its townships in 1773. Ross Straver also predated the county’s formal organization. As one of the original townships of Bedford County in 1771, Rostraver (to use its modern spelling) encompassed a large swath of territory now found in Allegheny, Fayette and Westmoreland Counties—all of the land lying between the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Rivers, from where Jacobs Creek enters the Yough, north to where the Yough enters the Monongahela, south to where Redstone Creek flows in the Monongahela. Like Donegal, Rostraver became one of Westmoreland’s original townships. John Newton Boucher, History of Westmoreland County, Vol. 1 (Chicago, 1906), 534-535; Blackburn, 77-79; Boucher, 519. Although named for a village in County Down by distant officials prior to large-scale migration into the region, Rostraver nonetheless became a center of Ulster settlement. Early settlers included Caldwells, Findleys, Fullertons, Lowerys, McClains, McClures, Orrs, Pattersons, Pinkertons, Robinsons, Steels, Thompsons and Wilsons. Rehoboth Church, a Presbyterian congregation, was served initially by Rev. James Power, born in Chester County to Irish-born parents, and later by Rev. James Findley (1725-1795), born in County Armagh. Revolutionary War-era taxpayers included John and William Drennan, William Finny, Isaac Greer, John Hall, Matthew and Robert Jamison, Joseph McClain, Adam, John and Robert McConnell, Henry McGlaughlin, Edward Mitchell, George Shields, John Stewart and Robert Walker. Boucher, 519-520. Rostrevor (or Rosstrevor) is located in southeastern Co. Down in the Parish of Kilbroney. The modern Pennsylvania spelling agrees with Ulster pronunciation. The movement of Irish-born migrants and the children of earlier cohorts into Westmoreland County brought additional Ulster place-names. Among the first was John Pomroy, who made have made the trek in 1758. A farmer of Scotch-Irish background in the Cumberland Valley, Pomroy heard reports of land across the Alleghenies from returning militia men who had gone west with General Forbes during the French and Indian War. He decided to see for himself. After staying with relatives at Fort Ligonier (then in Donegal Township), Pomroy continued westward, crossing the Chestnut Ridge. Hard by the ride’s western slopes, he built a log cabin. Not long after, Pomroy gained a neighbor: James Wilson built his cabin about a mile away. The two men gave each other a helping hand in building their crude dwellings, clearing land, raising corn and potatoes and eventually sowing wheat and rye. Pomroy’s wife, Isabella Barr, joined him, as did her father and brothers and other Cumberland Valley neighbors. Albert, 584; Boucher, 537-538, 514, 539, 515, 517; Albert, 585. The expanding settlement of the 1760s became the basis of Derry Township, created by the Court of Quarter Session in April 1775. Originally encompassing a much larger territory today’s Derry Township takes in the towns of Derry, New Derry, West Derry, Latrobe and New Alexandria. John Shields came from Adams County in 1766 and purchased land near the present town of New Alexandria. A blacksmith and a ruling elder in Congruity Presbyterian Church, Shields served as a captain in the Revolutionary War. John McGuire settled in Derry Township in 1778. James Cummins settled near Chestnut Ridge towards the end of the Revolutionary War. Hugh Cannon became among the first settlers in the vicinity of what became Derry Borough. Rev. Samuel Porter, born in Ireland and ordained in1790, served the Congruity congregation. Other early settlers in Derry included John Agey, Thomas Alison, Thomas Burns, Andrew Dixon, William Lowry, Thomas McCree, Alexander McCurdy, Daniel McKisson, James Mitchell, James Simpson, William Smith, Alexander Taylor and George Trimble. Boucher, 541, 542, 565, 541. Numerous early settlers chose to apply Irish names to their Westmoreland land grants. New landowners chose Derry repeatedly; Antrim and Raphoe appeared several times, as did Armagh, Rathmelton and Strabane. Settlers entered “Newry” into the records three times, “Belfast” twice, “Downpatrick” once. Settlers frequently recalled Ulster townlands, making use of the names of Ballintoy, Ballygowan, Castleward, Drumgold, Drumreagh, Glenavy and St. Johnston. Westmoreland farmers in the 1780s also named their lands “Hibernia,” “Ireland,” “St. Patrick’s” and “Shillelagh.” See the appendix. Information derived from Sharon Cook MacInnes, Early Landowners of Pennsylvania: Atlas of Township Patent Maps of Westmoreland County, PA (Apollo, Pa., 2007). In each instance I have used the conventional spelling found in modern Ireland rather than an eighteenth-century Pennsylvanian variant. Among the original eleven townships comprising Westmoreland County in 1773 were Tyrone and Mannillin (Menallen/Moyallon); these, with a portion of Donegal Township, became part of Fayette County upon its organization in 1783. The designation Tyrone originated with the Tyrone Township drawn up as part of the establishment of Bedford County in 1771. Both names may have been derived from their earlier usage in central Pennsylvania. (“Tyrone” survives in the names of two Fayette townships: Upper Tyrone and Lower Tyrone.) Albert, 42, 52; Blackburn, 77-78. Matthew Wylie (or Wiley) received a certificate from Yohogania County, Virginia in1772. Wylie and his son John settled in what became Franklin Township with the 1783 organization of Fayette County. (A portion of Franklin became Dunbar Township in 1798.) In December 1785 he patented tracts he named “Killelay” and “Killinchy.” Killelay is a phonetic rendering of Killyleagh, a town and civil parish in County Down on the western shore of Strangford Lough. Killinchy is an adjoining parish, also in County Down on the western side of Strangford Lough. As an early settler, farmer and distiller, Wylie enjoyed the trust of his neighbors who elected him to various township offices. Personal communication from Mary Beth Pastorious; Franklin Ellis, History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania… (Philadelphia, 1882), 556-557. Like many of his neighbors Wylie and his family belonged to the Laurel Hill Presbyterian Church. About a third of Laurel Hill’s congregants withdrew when the minister introduced the hymns of Isaac Watts as a substitute for the metrical psalms integral to Presbyterian worship in Ireland and Scotland. The dissidents reconstituted themselves as the Associate Reformed Congregation of Laurel Hill in 1791. Two years later they called as their minister Robert Warwick, who had been born a little more than thirty years earlier in Cremore, County Armagh. He emigrated in 1792. Wylie sold six acres of his Killelay tract to the trustees of the Associate Reformed congregation in 1797. Ibid; Glasgow, 469,355. 9. Allegheny, Greene and Washington Counties As in Westmoreland County, some initial European settlement occurred to the west and southwest in the 1750s; the Land Purchase of 1769 led to a great rush into the southwestern corner of the colony. Most of the early settlers were of English extraction, especially those coming from Virginia and Maryland. But a number of settlers of Irish origins arrived, particularly in the 1770s and later. These, too, came from Virginia but principally from the Cumberland Valley and Scotch-Irish enclaves in eastern Pennsylvania, and directly from Ulster. Thirteen Presbyterian congregations were organized in Washington County by 1790. By this date, Dunaway argues, “the Scotch Irish were overwhelmingly strong in Washington County…and that this was the most distinctively Scotch-Irish community in Western Pennsylvania.” Such a dominant presence apparently influenced the naming of Washington County’s original townships. When organized in 1781, Washington County comprised thirteen townships, among them Donegal and Stabane. Dunaway, 82; Boyd Crumrine, ed, History of Washington County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1882), 742, 953; Joseph F. McFarland, 20th Century History of the City of Washington and Washington, County, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1910), 338. Natives of Ireland are conspicuous among the earlier settlers in Donegal Township. Born in Ireland, James Allison settled in eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1750s, where he married Sarah Rea. In the spring of 1776, he brought his family to Donegal (that portion which is in modern Buffalo Township). John Laird, also born in Ireland, was likewise an early settler. Hercules and James Roney emigrated in about 1775; just four years later Hercules is recorded as a landowner in Donegal Township (that portion now in West Finley). John Barr, a native of Ireland, stopped first in Cumberland County before proceeding westward. Other early settlers include the Bonars, Brysons, Donougheys, Kellys, Kirkpatricks, McClures, McCulloughs and Stephensons. Residents of Donegal organized the Three Ridges Presbyterian congregation by 1785; it was rent by controversy over psalmody, leading to the creation of the Associate Reformed congregation of Three Ridges in 1793. Its first minister was the Irish-born Alexander McCoy, who had arrived in Pennsylvania with his parents in 1774. Roman Catholic services were conducted in the log cabin of Henry Montague following the Revolutionary War. Crumrine, 673, 346, 982, 679, 745. Both Hercules Roney and James Allison owned land in Strabane Township in 1780. William Huston was reputedly the white child born within the boundaries of Strabane. John McDowell, “born a few miles from Belfast” in 1738, emigrated as a young man. With his wife, Agnes Bradford, the Scotts, Allisons and others, McDowell crossed the mountains in 1773 and settled on Chartiers Creek, in what would become Strabane Township. The Chartiers Presbyterian congregation was organized in the 1770s with the help of Rev. John McMillan, the Pennsylvanian-born son of County Antrim parents. Crumrine, 953; McFarland, 338; Crumrine, 873. A brother of the Rev. McMillan and his family had settled along Peter’s Creek, which rises in Washington County and flows east-northeast into the Monongahela River. A portion of the Peter’s Creek valley in what had originally been Washington County became part of a new county, Allegheny, in 1788. The Peter’s Creek settlement, which gave rise to two Presbyterian congregations both in Allegheny County, was heavily Scotch-Irish in composition. The minister’s father, William McMillan, also settled in the vicinity of Peter’s Creek. Although born in County Antrim, he named the 210 acres surveyed on a Virginia certificate “Donegal,” perhaps for the Lancaster County settlement. Elsewhere in the Peter’s Creek valley, Joseph Logan used the name “Carn Tell” for his farm. A townland Carntall is located in County Antrim, Parish of Ballylinny while townlands with the element Carntall and Carnteel appear in County Tyrone. Henry Hulse named his tract “Carrickfergus,” for the Antrim townland, town and parish; David Steel called his “St. Johnston, for the Donegal townland and village. Thomas Bigden named his land grant “Screagan,” for the Derry townland Scriggin; William Bigden designated his “Derry.” Dwight Raymond Guthrie, John McMillan, The Apostle of Presbyterianism in the West, 1752-1833 (Pittsburgh, 1952), 25; Bethel Presbyterian Church, South Hills, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary, 1778-1928. (by church, n.d.), 6; Noah Thompson, Early History of the Peters Creek Valley and the Early Settlers (self-published, 1973), 42, 57, 69, 78. Information on townlands from Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, Townlands website, www.proni.gov.uk/index/local_history/geographical_index/townlands.htm. Townland names appeared north and east of Pittsburgh. A village named Tally Cavey developed in northern Allegheny County in Pitt Township (today Hampton Township), named for the home of an early settler. The Pennsylvania designation is derived from Tullycavey, an alternative for Tullykevin, a townland in Grey Abbey parish, on the Ards peninsula, County Down. Among the early settlers in this area of Allegheny County: Robert Hardie, James and John Herron, Samuel McCaslin, William and Henry McCully, Robert McCurdy, John McNeal, Ephraim Morrow, Philip Mowry, David Patton, Robert A. Sample and George Whitesell. The first religious organization in the vicinity was the Pine Creek Reformed Presbyterian Church. An advertisement of land for sale which appeared in the Pittsburgh Gazette, 4 January 1822 included a tract called “Bally Spallen” on Turtle Creek. Ballyspallan is a townland in the Parish of Tamlaght Finlaggan, Co. Derry. Samuel W. Durant, History of Allegheny Co., Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1876), 169; History of Allegheny county (Chicago, 1889), 143; Pittsburgh Gazette, 4 Jan. 1822. Tullycavey was granted by Charles I to Hugh, Viscount Montgomery ca. 1623 and was part of the Annesley estate in County Down. (See the Annesley Papers, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.) Along the eastern territory of Allegheny in what had formerly been a part of Westmoreland County, a village and district designated as “Antrim” developed within Plum Township (and the bounds of what became the Plum Presbyterian Church). In Greene County (formerly part of Washington County), Baptist preacher John Corbeley called his farm “Slave Gallent,” for Slieve Gallion in south County Derry. Not surprisingly, Corbeley was himself from County Derry. He left home at age 14, in 1747; an indentured servant in eastern Pennsylvania, he eventually made his way into Virginia and then north into what became Greene County, Pennsylvania. John J. Lolla Jr., "The Creek Runs Deep," unpublished ms, 2006, 13; personal correspondence, Katie White (Corbeley descendant). 10. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Northeastern Pennsylvania To a degree unlike any other political jurisdiction with an Ulster name, the political history of Derry Township in Montour County is closely bound up with the history of the county itself. This territory on the upper reaches of the Susquehanna received European settlement relatively late. When created in 1786, Derry and Montour Townships included all of the present county as well as parts of modern Columbia and Northumberland Counties. These counties are arrayed between the shores of the two branches of the Susquehanna. The West Branch, flowing south and southeast, meets the Susquehanna as it flows southwest, just north of Sunbury, near to where the boundaries of Snyder, Union and Northumberland Counties join. Montour is bordered by Northumberland County on the west and south, the Susquehanna on the south, Columbia on the east and Lycoming on the north. All of its present townships were eventually carved from Derry and Montour when Montour County was organized in 1850. J.H. Battle, ed, History of Columbia and Montour Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1887), 121. Florin observes there were two principal reasons for delayed settlement: the Penn family “did not acquire the area above Shamokin on the West Branch of the Susquehanna until 1768.” Not until then did large numbers of settlers moved freely along the length of the river. Also, Florin says, “the Susquehanna was route to nowhere,” in contrast with the Juniata (72). Due to its exposed position, the territory beyond the Blue Mountains and between the two branches of the Susquehanna received few European settlers before the War of Independence. Brady’s Fort (also known as Boyle’s) was built in the later years of the Revolutionary War. Settlers from the north of Ireland as well as Pennsylvania-born incomers of Ulster descent moved into the region at the war’s close. Battle, 125-126. Stephen Ellis and his wife Mary Cunningham, Episcopalians born in County Donegal, were among the township’s early settlers. John Blee, who had left Ireland at age 12, learned brickmaking in Philadelphia, practiced his trade in Norristown and settled in Montour County. Also born in Ireland, William McCormick emigrated as boy and worked as a store clerk before relocating to Derry Township. He came with his wife Mary and father-in-law William Shaw. McCormick became the township’s shopkeeper. The four Caldwell brothers left Ulster at the close of the Revolutionary War; John settled in Derry. The immigrant Irish shoemaker William McVicker settled first in Northampton County and located in Derry Township in the early 1790s. Battle, 126, 184, 193, 126, 163, 182, 188. Derry’s Presbyterian congregation worshipped under two white oak trees before constructing a log church in 1802. (The site is now in Anthony Township, originally part of Derry Township.) “It had only a dirt floor, was covered with branches of trees and grass and leaves, and on the ground in the center of the structure was built a fire in extreme weather.” Nonetheless, the log structure had a high pulpit as in Ulster Presbyterian meetinghouses. The faithful came there to worship from a wide area, from scattered farms and hamlets in what are now Montour, Columbia, Northumberland, Luzerne and Lycoming Counties. The shoemaker William McVicker was among the original elders who helped organize the congregation. Ibid, 122-123. 11. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Newry The decades of the 1770s and 1780s, according to geographer John Florin, “represented largely a period of gradual filling in of the broad expanse of territory that had been so rapidly and loosely occupied” the decade or more prior to the American Revolution. The early development of the town of Newry in Blair County is tied to the resumption of Irish immigration into central Pennsylvania following the conclusion of hostilities. The town’s founder, however, had arrived in the region earlier. Patrick Cassidy came to America as the youthful servant of a British Army officer prior to the Revolution. He became a proficient and successful surveyor and settled at Aughwick in Huntingdon County, where he married a Miss Mooney. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Cassidy purchased 300 acres in what was to become Blair County. The tract was located along Poplar Run, a tributary of the Frankstown Branch of the Juniata in south central Blair. Cassidy moved to the property in 1787; in 1793 he laid out the new town named for his Ulster birthplace. Espenshade, 315; Florin, 73; Africa, 53-54. Henry McConnell, a native of County Antrim, spent his first six months in the United States in Philadelphia before coming to Newry in 1797. Malcolm McIntosh, another Irish immigrant, settled there in about 1802. Within the next two decades they would be joined by Robert McNamara, merchant and distiller, and Alexander Knox, merchant. McNamara “and a man named McCoy” are the town’s first teachers of record. St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church was built of stone in 1816 for Irish immigrants who included, apparently, town fathers Cassidy and McConnell. Africa, 53-54. 12. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Armagh Scotch-Irish settlers from east of the mountains and immigrants from Ireland alike settled in Indiana County, created in 1803 largely out of Westmoreland County. (The Conemaugh River presently divides Indiana to the north and Westmoreland to the south.) Wayland Dunaway described the town of Armagh in the county’s southeastern corner as “a typical Scotch-Irish settlement”—but the complex of love, class prejudice, religious dissension and organized emigration add up to perhaps a less than typical origin. Dunaway, 87. Mary Jane Tomb had been married to William Parker, a Belfast man of a distinguished family. After his death, according to the story, she fell in love with the estate’s caretaker, James Graham. With little hope of an untroubled married life in Ireland, the widow sold her property, married the caretaker and sailed for America. But not alone: a large company of friends and relations—twenty-seven persons in all—accompanied the Grahams as they embraced a new life. With them were the four children fathered by Mary Jane’s first husband; her brother David Tomb and his wife and child; her sisters Elizabeth and Catharine and their husbands, James Anderson and Alexander Carnahan and children; and families of Fees and Leslies, among others. The eight families arrived in September 1792. The members of the new community became known as communicants of the Associate Reformed church, which suggests they were likely Burgher Seceders in Ireland. Dunaway, 87; Clarence D. Stephenson, Indiana County: 175th Anniversary History (Indiana, Pa., 1978), 133; Lewis Clark Walkinshaw, Annals of southwestern Pennsylvania, Vol. 3 (New York, 1939), 23. A schism in the Church of Scotland in the 1730s created a new denomination (Associate Presbyterians) which took root in Ireland in the next decade. A further schism in the 1740s split the new church into two rival factions, Burghers and Antiburghers. In the United States in 1782 a union of Associate Presbyterians (Seceders) and Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) created the Associate Reformed church. Most immigrant Irish Burgher Seceders arriving after that date affiliated with the Associate Reformed church. Development of the area faced initial delay. The continuing danger of Indian attacks in the fall of 1792 forced the newcomers to flee across the Conemaugh River to the security of a blockhouse in the Ligonier Valley. The territory north of the Conemaugh was then covered with “a thin, scrubby growth of oaks” awaiting the settlers’ industry and patience. Armagh would become “the center of a fine farming region” and for a time a lively hub. The Grahams located along what would be a bustling highway, and operated the first tavern in the area. Westbound emigrant traffic along the Northern Turnpike led to the establishment of nine hotels and five stores by 1820. Stephenson, 133; Dunaway, 87; Walkinshaw, 23. 13. Post-Revolutionary Settlement: Donegal Ongoing border warfare slowed but did not halt settlement in western Pennsylvania, even in the exposed territory north of the Ohio River. Squatters had begun to make claims north of the Ohio as early as 1779. The following year the Pennsylvania legislature set aside western territory as “Donation Lands” to reward citizens who had fought in the Revolutionary War. In 1783 the legislature granted “Depreciation Lands” in lieu of certificates of depreciation which had been designed to compensate for revolutionary currency’s loss of value. With the announcement of peace in the fall of 1782 land-hungry farmers began flocking across the river in increasing numbers. The Treaty of Greenville concluded with warring Native American tribes in late 1795 eliminated the immediate threat of Indian raids; landless and land-hungry whites rushed into the region the following spring. Butler County, north of Allegheny County in central-western Pennsylvania, separated from Allegheny in 1800 with less than 4,000 inhabitants. Butler’s population grew by more than two and a half times between 1800 and 1820. Florin, 77-78; Peter Gilmore, “Rebels and Revivals: Ulster Immigrants, Western Pennsylvania Presbyterianism and the Formation of Scotch-Irish Identity, 1780-1830.” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2009, 81-82; Dunaway, 86-87. John Florin writes that “A final major extension of settlement developed in the 1790’s with the opening of all of northwest Pennsylvania to settlement (89).” Numerous settlers of Irish origin, both Presbyterian and Catholic, settled in the vicinity of Buffalo Creek and its tributaries; this territory was largely encompassed in what was originally organized as Buffalo Township, Butler County. In northern Buffalo Township, Alexander Storey, Matthew Smith and William Ray and their families—all natives of Ireland—settled along Bear Creek. The Hemphill brothers, James and Adam, were early settlers, as were Daniel Maloney, a Revolutionary War veteran, and the distiller John Gillespie. James Denny came to the United States with his parents in 1794 and arrived in Butler County in 1799. The weaver John Coyle came to America in 1791 and to Butler County in 1800. The weaver Robert Allison, blacksmith William Carr and the tanner Andrew McKim all owned land in Buffalo Township. Not surprisingly, a new township erected from Buffalo in 1804 was named Donegal—most likely influenced an influx from the southeast of that county as the result of a 1792 organized migration. James A. McKee, 20th Century History of Butler and Butler County (Chicago, 1909), 233; History of Butler County (Chicago, 1883), 494-495, 506-507, 47-48; Edmund Adams and Barbara Brady O’Keefe, Catholic Trails West, Vol. 2 (Baltimore, 1989), 574. Modern Fairview Township was originally part of Donegal; the Bear Creek Presbyterian congregation there met outdoors until a log church was built in about 1800. The migrants, who originated from the vicinity of the Erne River and Lough Erne, were commemorated in the verse of their own bard. Jerry Monaghan wrote: On the fourth of June, in the afternoon, We sailed from Londonderry; Early next day we put to sea To cross the tedious ferry; We hoisted sail with a pleasant gale As Phoebus was arising. Bound for New York, in America, In the grand brig Eliza. … September ninth we took our leave Of captain, mate, and sailors, Likewise of the Eliza brave, For no less than can we name her; We gave three cheers for old Ireland, It being our former quarter, And then, like wandering sheep, we strayed, And parted from each other. Adams and O’Keefe, 574-575. The brave Eliza docked at New Castle, Delaware, not New York; the bard then parted from his fellow passengers, most of whom remained together in a trek westward. The families followed the well-established trails across the mountains and along the river valleys, eventually arriving in the region between Jacobs Creek and the Youghiogheny River in northern Fayette County (near present-day Connellsville). In 1795, many of the original migrants moved north, settling in eastern Butler County along Buffalo Creek. Charles Duffy arrived in 1796, Archibald Black, Denis Dugan, Patrick McBride and Peter McKeever in 1798. Adams and O’Keefe, 575; McKee, 233; History of Butler County, 506-507; History of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Vol. 1. 273-274. Maloney’s Corners served as the original center of the Donegal settlement; mass was said at Maloney’s Hill and a cemetery established there as well, on land owned by the Dugans. Early in the nineteenth century, Owen McQueen purchased a farm near Sugar Creek not far to the east in Armstrong County with a view to establishing a proper chapel. Construction of St. Patrick’s Church was completed in spring 1806. McKee, 233; History of Butler County, 506-507; History of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Vol. 1. 273-274. 14. Ulster Place-Names and Early Industry Many (and probably most) Ulster folk arriving in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century and opening decades of the nineteenth century sought the security and independence they perceived in farming and land ownership. Not Robert Coleman, an ambitious, enterprising Irish immigrant from whose origins York County’s Castle Fin received its name. Coleman separated himself from his contemporaries economically, socially and politically. The village on Muddy Creek in Lower Chanceford Township may be little more than a ghost town today, but it once celebrated the success of one of Pennsylvania’s first industrial tycoons. Coleman was born in Castlefinn, County Donegal in 1748. An emigrant at age 16, Coleman arrived with letters of introduction to wealthy and influential Philadelphians, including the Derry-born merchant Blair McClenachan. Such references helped secure him a position as clerk in Reading. After a few years, however, the youthful Coleman decided to take his chances west of the Schuylkill River. Finding himself in an iron ore district, Coleman obtained work at the Grubb family’s Hopewell Forges. He moved on six months later, to a forge about eight miles west of Lebanon. James Old operated this forge and owned the Speedwell Forge on Hammer Creek, not far from the Hopewell Forges. The Committee on Historical Research, Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Forges and Furnaces in the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1914), 86. Coleman so impressed Old that his employer brought the young Irishman with him to the Reading Furnace on French Creek, gave him a promotion and his daughter Anne’s hand in marriage. However, Coleman again stuck out on his own, running his own forge on lease. In 1785 he purchased one-sixth of the Grubb estate; thirteen years later he purchased all but one-sixth of the family’s remaining ore banks and iron operations. He built himself a mansion near the Elizabeth Furnace in Elizabeth Township, Lancaster County, where he died in 1809. Many Pennsylvanians of Ulster origin opposed ratification of the Federal Constitution in 1788; Coleman voted for the new system of government at the state ratifying convention. He served as a commander of cavalry raised to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, as an associate Lancaster County judge and as a delegate to the 1790 convention which overturned Pennsylvania’s democratic 1776 constitution. Forges and Furnaces, 86-87; Egle, 218; Forges and Furnaces, 88. Of the six Ulster-born delegates to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention, three voted in favor. These included Coleman and fellow Lancaster Co. representative Stephen Chambers. All three voting “nay” lived west of the Susquehanna. Of the nine delegates with a parent or grandparent born in Ireland, all but two voted against ratification. (Peter Gilmore, “Scotch-Irish Opposition to the Federal Constitution in the Pennsylvania Backcountry: A Contribution to a New Interpretation,” Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4 [Fall 2008], 16-17) Thomas Coleman, the immigrant’s son, first operated iron forges in Lebanon County before establishing operations in lower York County. In 1810 he built a forge on Muddy Creek and in 1819 a 17-room mansion, naming both after his father’s birthplace in County Donegal. Victoria Lyles, “Forges and Furnaces of York County,” Papers of the Historical Society of York County (n.d.); The Gazette and Daily (York, Pa.), Aug. 8, 1961, 30. The early iron industry in Huntingdon County (in a district later in Blair County) extended the use of a locally existing Ulster place-name when the Tyrone Forges came into operation in 1804. (The village of Tyrone Forge continues the name.) The Coleraine Forges were built near Spruce Creek in 1805 under the direction of the Irish-born Samuel Marshall. David Stewart, manager of the forges, was a native of Coleraine, County Derry. J. Leander Bishop, A History of American Manufactures from 1608 to 1860, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia 1868), 566; James M. Swank, Introduction to a History of Ironmaking and Coal Mining in Pennsylvania (self-published, 1878), 39; J. Peter Lesley, The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide to the Furnaces, Forges and Rolling Mills of the United States (New York, 1859), 176. See also, Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties. Pennsylvania’s coal and iron industries became associated with several other place-names of Ulster origin later in the nineteenth century with the construction of mining hamlets, railroad depots and mills. These include Antrim in Tioga County, Rathmel in Jefferson County, Strangford in Indiana, Dunlo in Cambria and Ardara in Westmoreland. 15. Pennsylvania’s Diamonds The term “diamond,” referring to a village square or town center, occurs frequently in the province of Ulster but is rare elsewhere in Ireland. Similarly, “diamond” used in this sense was formerly quite common throughout Pennsylvania and into adjacent Ohio. The Dictionary of American English (1938) noted that In all the towns of Pennsylvania, of any size, the public buildings and offices are built on squares in the centre of their towns… These squares are uniformly called “The Diamond”. Among other locations, diamonds could be found in Elizabethtown in Lancaster County and Carlisle in Cumberland; in Huntingdon in Huntingdon County, Boalsburg and Bellefonte in Centre County; in Newport in Indiana County, in Mount Pleasant in Westmoreland County; in Pittsburgh and in the county seats of Washington and Butler. In the same-named county seat of Warren, according to an early nineteenth-century source, near the center of the town at the crossing of two principal streets were “four lots of an acre each, …left for the public buildings. This is called the diamond.” Similar to the application of place-names to Pennsylvania locales, the use of diamond in newly established towns represented the marking of an imagined cultural landscape. Brendan Adams, “The Diamonds of Ulster and Pennsylvania,” Yearbook: Ulster Folk and Transport Museum 1975-1976, 18-19; Evans, 85; Karen J. Harvey, “Diamonds in the Rough: Scotch-Irish Town Planning in Northern Appalachia During the Early Republic,” The Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 2001), 109, 114; A Gazetteer of Pennsylvania, Part 2, 467. Diamonds in Ulster take two meanings: rural crossroads and town squares. In the Ulster context, did “crossroads” function as a synonym for “diamond”? A village simply called “Cross Roads” existed by 1835 in eastern Donegal. Contemporaneously, northwestern Washington County had a Presbyterian congregation and hamlet of the same name. Washington County was also home to Donaldson’s Crossroads; Westmoreland County had Salem Cross Roads; Bucks County, Jamieson’s Cross Roads, among others in the state. To what extent did the plethora of early nineteenth-century place-names in Pennsylvania with the element “cross roads” reflect an Ulster influence? In the Pennsylvania instances cited above, “diamond” refers to a town square. Brendan Adams noted that “all the cases of The Diamond being the central town square occur… in north-west and south-west Ulster,” with one exception. This finding corresponds with the similar observation here that Pennsylvania place-names of eighteenth century and Ulster origin appear to derive most heavily from west Ulster. Among the towns cited by Adams in which The Diamond is the name applied to the town square were Donegal, Londonderry, Monaghan and Raphoe—all well-represented in the nomenclature of Pennsylvania’s southern tier. If correct, Adams’ suggestion that “The term may be English rather than Scottish in origin” would bolster the argument that the first waves of Ulster immigrants to Pennsylvania came from districts in which a critical conglomeration of factors—including, perhaps, perceptions of Anglican dominance and relations with English landlords—contributed to Presbyterians’ decision to leave. Adams, 19-20. Conclusion The number and breadth of Ulster place-names applied in Pennsylvania, 1700-1830, is consistent with contemporary and scholarly estimates of the volume of migrants from Ireland’s northern counties. The frequency with which these toponyms appeared suggests a considerable strength of association with Ulster as “home,” as a site of powerfully symbolic emotional and spiritual significance. The intense localism and personal attachment implied by this naming is suggested by the use of townland names. Overall, there is a strong impression of a persistent regional consciousness. Patrick Griffin has persuasively argued that the colonial-era Ulster Presbyterian migrants to America did not develop a coherent, unifying group identity. However, Griffin and Kevin Yeager have both noted the Scotch-Irish tended to congregate in identifiably ethnic communities. Yeager, who argues for a considerable degree of cultural continuity, Ulster to Pennsylvania, connects ethnic self-segregation to an “extremely high” degree of ethnic self-awareness in early eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The act of giving places in Pennsylvania familiar Ulster names signifies the strength of an ethnoreligious and religiously based self-perception. Griffin, 6-7, 106; Kevin Yeager, “The Power of Ethnicity: The Preservation of Scots-Irish Culture in the Eighteenth-Century American Backcountry” (Ph.D. dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2000), Vol. I, 80, 53-54, 50, 76-77, 79-80. The evidence suggests that there were many more place-names in use, formally and otherwise, than are still in use or easily recovered for this discussion, names that have long since slipped out of sight and memory. In at least two instances, migrants made use of townland names (Tullycavey and Tullyleague) later superseded in Ireland; further investigation may uncover other eighteenth-century Ulster toponyms no longer favored. The spellings of Pennsylvanian place-names may give clues to eighteenth-century pronunciation, as in the examples of “Monallon” and “Ross Straver.” The place-name data offers suggestive connections to emigration ports and source-areas of migration. The place-names of West-Ulster origin are particularly interesting with regards to locating the counties, parishes and townlands of eighteenth-century migrants. Chosen relatively early in the westward movement of Irish migrants, the place-names used in colonial Pennsylvania clearly showed a regional bias, with West-Ulster names predominating, notably Derry, Donegal, Fahan, Fanad, Fermanagh, Greencastle, Leck, Letterkenny, Monaghan, Raphoe, Strabane, Tullyleague and Tyrone. While by no means conclusive, this evidence—particularly when combined with what is known about the origins of individual migrants—indicates a western origin for numbers of Ulster folk relocating to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. A.H. Espenshade calculated that Pennsylvania contained five townships named Donegal, five named Londonderry and give named Tyrone. (Espenshade, 324.) Names, an historian has suggested, “are basic to a sense of communal identity; they are redolent of memories and aspirations.” Rees Davies may have been referring to personal names in a different context, but the observation seems equally valid when applied to place-names. In choosing “Strabane” as the name of a township or a farm, migrants looked backwards and forward to remembered hopefulness of life in the Foyle Valley and expectations of improvement in Appalachian foothills, evoking a sense of identity as a discernable people linked to landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic. Rees R. Davies, “Presidential address: the peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100-1400: II. Names, boundaries and regnal solidarities,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Ser. v. (1995), 4, quoted in Simon Kingston, Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim (Dublin, 2004), 205.