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ETHNIC ORIGINS
THE OZARKER has been described as insular by some outsiders who are probably secretly envious of this Eden. Even though the insular label is a bit too harsh, it could have some validity if one believes in atavism, for the ancestral source of many Ozarkers is the British Isles.
The term Scotch-Irish is commonly used in describing the heritage of the southern Appalachians and Ozarks. The use of "Irish" in this compound word can be debated because the immigrants from North Ireland were Scots transplanted to Ireland on land confiscated in the early 1600s as a result of the Irish Rebellion. These transplanted Scots retained their cultural, theological, and political identity-thus the history of conflict which has persisted in North Ireland.
Migration from Scotland and North Ireland to the Colonies was stimulated in the 1660s and later years by friction between the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and the established state church of the British monarchy. Between 1705 and 1775 about a half million
Scotch-Irish migrated to the colonies. Many of these immigrants moved westward rapidly into the then frontier area of Pennsylvania and the southern Appalachians. By the time of the Revolutionary War they were a significant block opposed to British rule. This opposition was inevitable, in keeping with the tradition of individualism as exemplified by Bobby Burns and relations with the Church of England.
Kephart, in his 1913 publication, Our Southern Highlanders, does not find the southern Appalachian peoples to be faultless, but he takes a strong stand against those who consider them "poor whites" when he says:
Now these poor whites had nothing to do with settling the mountains. There was then, and still is, plenty of wild land for them in their native lowlands. They had neither the initiative nor the courage to seek a promised land far away among the unexplored and savage peaks of the western country. They were a brave enough folk in facing familiar dangers, but they had a terror of the unknown, being densely ignorant and superstitious. The mountains, to those who ever heard of them, suggested nothing but laborious climbing amid mysterious and portentous perils. The poor whites were not highlanders by descent, nor had they a whit of the bold, self-reliant spirit of our western pioneers. They never entered Appalachia until after it had been won and settled by a far manlier race, and even then they went only in driblets. The theory that the southern mountains were peopled mainly by outcasts or refugees from old settlements in the lowlands rests on no other basis than imagination.
The typical Scotch-Irish Ozarker has an ancestral history of comparative isolation in the southern Appalachians from the early to middle 1700s, followed by migration to the Ozarks in the 1820s and 1830s. The isolation resulted in a retention of many Old World characteristics and in the case of theology, a departure in part from the precepts of ancestors in the British Isles.
“The isolation resulted in a retention of many old world characteristics”
(Photo courtesy of B. Miller)