Celtic Heritage Day
The public is invited to Pricketts Fort this Saturday, July 23, from 10 to 4:30, for Celtic Heritage Day, a special event day that focuses on the 18th century traditions of Brittany, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales that were brought to the frontier. Regular fort admission is required, but there will be free admission for anyone wearing a kilt!
Featured will be the West Virginia Highland Dancers, bagpipes, kilt demonstration, raffle drawing, spinning & weaving, Bonnie Knees Contest, fencing & swords, bobbin lace, and victuals. The raffle drawing will be for a Belleek Colleen Vase or Irish Blackthorn Handmade Walking Stick – ($1 each or 6 for $5).
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Celts on the Virginia frontier
As to the question of how many Celts were actually on the frontier in the 1770s, the answer would be “a very great many indeed”, but that nearly all of them were Scotch-Irish. These were not the kilt-wearing, bagpiping Scots of the highlands, but rather Scottish lowlanders, mostly impoverished, who migrated to Ulster in northern Ireland from about 1610 on, in hopes of improving their lot. What brought them in vast numbers to the American colonies about a century later was a combination of political & religious oppression and severe economic hardship.
So considerable were their numbers that by the time of the American Revolution, somewhere between one in every ten to fifteen colonists was Scotch-Irish. From their earliest appearance in the colonies, the majority of Scotch-Irish gravitated directly to the back-country, from Pennsylvania southward as far as Georgia. They were among the vanguard of pioneers who moved into the Ohio Valley region, including the Monongahela valley, just prior to and after the Revolution.
As a people the Scotch-Irish were quick to adapt themselves to frontier conditions, often learning woodcraft and survival techniques directly from the Indians and so, not surprisingly, were soon famous as Indian fighters. The great majority of Scotch-Irish were ardent supporters of the American cause in the Revolution, naturally chafing under any outside authority and possessing little love for the Crown. Notable Scotch-Irish frontiersmen included George Rogers Clark and Andrew Jackson.
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Source: James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962).
