The True Image: Gravestone Art and the Culture of Scotch Irish Settlers in the Pennsylvania and Carolina Backcountry by Daniel W. Patterson (review)

What has it meant to be Scotch-Irish in America? Since this ethnic group's earliest arrival in North America in the late seventeenth century, delineating their cultural identity has stymied scholars, the general public, and Scotch-Irish descendants themselves. For a complex variety of reasons, the usual markers of ethnicity—language, religion, material culture—have been of limited value in identifying this group. Now Daniel Patterson's study of Scotch-Irish gravestones—a clue previously ignored—enriches our understanding of their cultural identity.

While traveling in New England during the 1960s, Patterson, now a distinguished professor emeritus of folklore at the University of North Carolina, became captivated by colonial gravestones. Subsequently studying stones in his native North Carolina, he identified a small circle of stone carvers centered around three generations of the Scotch-Irish Bigham family that had immigrated to Pennsylvania in the late 1730s. Connecting similarities that he saw in their carved stones, he traced the family's migration from Pennsylvania to the western Carolinas. The resulting multigenerational family history offers fresh suggestions for pursuing the early evolution of Scotch-Irish identity in the southern backcountry.

Patterson lists a variety of markers that define the Bigham circle's stone carving style: a smooth finished surface on both front and back of the gravestones, a semicircular tympanum flanked by rounded shoulders, a simple lettering style employing both incised and relief forms, and, in some cases, a symbolic dot carved over a diamond. By the 1760s this group of carvers incorporated others besides Bighams and had arrived in the western Carolinas. Overall, Patterson ascribes some 1,100 gravestones to them: 100 in five Pennsylvania counties from Lancaster County westward, about 1,000 in seven North Carolina counties centered around Mecklenburg County, a handful in four South Carolina counties centered around York County, and a single stone in East Tennessee.

In addition to their distinctive carving markings, Patterson identified a core of symbols and styles that appear regularly in the Bigham circle's repertoire. Those symbols include skulls, winged faces, craft and Masonic emblems, coats of arms, American eagles, and doves. Stylistic similarities entail an infrequent use of titles (reserved mostly for ministers, doctors, elders, magistrates, and militia officers), the inclusion of married women's maiden surnames, use of the introductory rubric "Here lies the body of," and a partiality to quotations from the Scottish Presbyterian Church's Psalmes of David in English Meeter.

Patterson's study of the Bigham circle's gravestones is useful in extricating the elusive nature of Scotch-Irish identity. The Bigham carvers migrated from the Ulster counties of Antrim and Down, and Patterson demonstrates how the gravestone symbols and styles they carved in America reflected their Ulster and Scottish roots. This previously unexamined marker of ethnicity adds to our understanding of the material culture that the Scotch-Irish brought to America. It also shines light on the assimilation of the Scotch-Irish into a newly emerging national American cultural identity. Judging by their gravestone preferences, the Scotch-Irish rapidly abandoned elements of their identity in the western Carolinas. By the 1780s most Ulster and Scottish traditions had disappeared from the Bigham circle's stones. The rubric "Here lies the body of" had morphed into "In memory of," titles appeared more often, and short and austere inscriptions gave way to more prolix eulogistic and testimonial ones.

In sum, Patterson presents fresh insights into the nature and evolution of Scotch-Irish identity in America. But, true to form, Scotch-Irish ethnicity retains its elusivity. Part of the mystery involves a lack of records. Time and again Patterson falls back on equivocations: "if, perhaps, probably, likely, must have, would have, deduce." He also relies on anecdotal evidence, much of which depicts persons who were not Scotch-Irish. Nevertheless, Patterson has assembled an extraordinary work of historical...