The Coming and Going
by Brady Huggett

After each meeting with his thesis advisor, Bill Caudill walks out of the folklore department and starts the trip back to Scotland County. It’s a two-hour drive through the countryside, and Caudill has done it so often that he barely notices the houses with caving front porches, the boarded-up and abandoned convenience stores, the fields with tremendous rolls of bound hay. Toward Laurinburg he passes Glasgow Street, Scotch Grove, and the Scotland Inn. This is an area marked by the influence of immigrants from Scotland, and Caudill’s own Scottish bloodlines may have quietly drawn him here, ensuring that the stories of his ancestors don’t fade like sea smoke under a morning sun.

Caudill is the director of the Scottish Heritage Center and instructor of the College Pipe Band at St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, where he also did his undergraduate work in history.

“When I came down here as a student to St. Andrews, it was sort of like coming home again,” says Caudill, a Waxhaw, N.C., native. “I have a lot of family roots here that I have been removed from for several generations.”

Caudill’s master’s thesis at Carolina focuses on the last major immigration of Highlanders into the Cape Fear River Basin area. In 1884, roughly 170 crofters—farmers who rent the land they work—voyaged from the Isles of Skye and Lewis. Nearly all of them returned home penniless in a matter of months.

What went wrong? The answer, Caudill says, begins with sheep. The introduction of the black-faced sheep into Scotland changed the way the land was used. Landowners, who had previously collected rent from citizens, now found that it was more profitable to tend sheep on this land instead. So they forced the people off during a period of Scotland’s history known as the Highland Clearances.

On Skye and Lewis, the landlords and emigration organizers worked together to persuade the people to leave, promising land and opportunity in the States.

At the same time, Scottish Americans in North Carolina were aware of the Highlanders’ plight and were reaching out to them, coaxing them over with tales of plenty. It seemed like a good solution. But as Caudill has learned, the motives behind this recruitment weren’t so altruistic.

The recruitment was fueled by a desire for an ethnically attractive labor force. If the area needed laborers, the thinking was, then let’s get people of similar appearance and background—“Scots, like us.” Soon, however, the Scottish Americans realized they weren’t getting the crack labor force they had envisioned, and they became intolerant of the very people they’d been so anxious to recruit.

“The Scots didn’t have the work skills,” Caudill says. “These people had no idea about working in cotton or corn. These people were fishermen in Scotland. We now know that the women didn’t speak any English at all. And a fair amount of the men as well were Gaelic speakers.”

> NEXT PAGE: "Drunken Skyemen?"

© Copyright 2000 Endeavors magazine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

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