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heritage significant in
Tuscarawas County
Monday the Times Reporter
Posted Sep 30, 2013 at 12:01 AM Updated Sep 30, 2013 at 1:54 PM
By Jon Baker
The Scotch-Irish are a key part of the ethnic mix of the Tuscarawas Valley.
Arriving here when the area was opened for settlement at the beginning of
the 19th century, they spread out across most of Harrison and Carroll
counties.
The English had ruled the island for 500 years, but their grip on Ireland was
tenuous at best. By the late 1500s, they were fearful that Spain the
worlds superpower at the time would use Ireland as a base to conquer
England.
Then a new opportunity arose. The Catholic Earl of Tyrone, based in the
province of Ulster in northern Ireland, rose up in revolt, aided by the Earl of
Tyrconnell. After nine years of war, English armies forced the two Irish
noblemen to sue for peace in 1603 by starving the Irish into submission.
Still dissatisfied, the two earls fled Ireland, and their lands in Ulster were
forfeited to the English crown. James I, the king of Scotland who had just
inherited the English throne, decided to parcel out those lands to the leading
men of England and Scotland on condition that they settle Ulster with
Protestants from both countries.
After a slow start, the plantation took off, fueled by people looking for a
better life. By 1620, an estimated 50,000 people from England and Scotland
had settled in Ulster, and the estimates for 1640 are twice that amount.
Meanwhile, the native Irish grew discontented as they were displaced from
their ancestral lands in Ulster. As a result, they rose in revolt in 1641, and
several thousand Protestants and Catholics were killed. The fighting
continued until 1653.
The Irish revolted again in 1688 when James II, the deposed Catholic king of
England, landed in Ireland at the head of a French army to reclaim his throne.
Irish Catholics rallied to his cause. Peace was restored after the English
defeated James army at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
In the years that followed, a new wave of settlers from Scotland and England
headed for Ulster. The number was estimated at between 50,000 and
80,000. Agriculture and the textile industry flourished there, and by the
beginning of the 18th century, Ulster was the most prosperous province in
Ireland. But that prosperity did not last for long.
The Scottish and English immigrants who settled the province of Ulster in
northern Ireland in the 17th century were relatively prosperous at the
beginning of the 18th century.
Several economic depressions hit the woolen and linen industry that many
families depended on. The leases on numerous farms in the province expired
in the first half of the 18th century, and landlords demanded substantially
higher rents when they renegotiated the leases. To make the situation worse,
drought and severe frosts hit farmers, causing the price of food to rise.
When the French and their native American allies began raiding western
settlements at the start of the French and Indian War in 1755, the Scotch-
Irish bore the brunt of the assaults. But the emigrants from Ulster quickly
developed into skilled Indian fighters, who pushed into western Pennsylvania,
the Ohio Valley and Kentucky once peace was restored in the 1760s.
People of Scotch-Irish descent were among the squatters who illegally settled
in eastern Ohio before the territory was opened to white settlement. They
were driven out by U.S. authorities in 1785.
The pioneer preacher of Harrison County was the Rev. John Rea, a native of
Ireland, who began serving the Beech Spring Presbyterian Church, five miles
east of Cadiz, in 1804. Rea helped establish the Ridge Presbyterian Church
near Scio and a congregation at Cadiz.
Jon Baker is a reporter for The Times-Reporter. He can be reached via email
at jon.baker@timesreporter.com.