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

At first glance, this book documents an important legacy of artistically rendered gravestones in the Carolinas every bit as compelling as the more familiar images of New England Puritan and Pennsylvania German cemetery art. But the book is much more and stands as a major contribution to material culture studies in the last few years. As a craftsman study, it follows the Bigham family workshop tradition from Pennsylvania in the early eighteenth century to the Carolinas in the mid-nineteenth century and interprets the artistic and symbolic mark that members of the workshop left on the landscape. As an ethnic-regional inquiry, it uses the work of this family for their Scotch-Irish customers who dominated the area politically, economically, and culturally. More broadly, in Daniel Patterson’s eloquently stated words, the workshop “broke open a fresh path into a confused issue: the character, experience, and role of Scotch Irish immigrants in the Carolinas during the crucial century between their first arrival and the entry of some like Andrew Jackson and James Knox Polk as major actors upon the national stage” (p. 10). This approach suggests insight into historical process and context as revealed in text and images capturing the meaning of a past life. The interpretative power of folkloristics is pervasive as well, particularly in chapter 6 on the relation of legendry to Scotch-Irish ethnic experience and connection to war in the Carolinas. Patterson recognizes visual as well as verbal motifs in chapters on Scotch-Irish iconography and inscriptions. He brilliantly untangles uses of dove, winged cherub, rising sun, fylfot cross, and the tree of life in memorializing a Scotch-Irish life and the insertion of patriotic symbols in the advent of an American identity.

Patterson does not rest his study on the evidence of the stones alone. He reconstructs the Bigham family tradition with legal documents, land records, deeds, tax lists, and architecture. The result is a window into the social worlds in which the Bighams lived and worked. He traces their movement down the Great Wagon Road along with a stream of Scotch-Irish settlers from Pennsylvania to South Carolina driven by the hunger for land and complicated pulls of kinship, religion, and politics. He treats the reader to accounts of marriage customs and the “great day” on the first Sunday after a marriage, to point out the ties that bound Scotch-Irish settlers together as communities as well as congregations. Outside of church, the settlers gathered at the militia muster and the convening of the county court, venues that Patterson sagely interprets as old institutions transformed into instruments of a new American society. Returning to the Bigham workshop in relation to nearby Scotch-Irish stonecutters in chapter 3, Patterson views their work as reflections, and perhaps agents, of social change because stones broadcast a move from the mourning of Old World bodies to the future-oriented remembrance of their memories. Winged cherubs and skulls give way to memorial iconography and, in many cases, acknowledgment of the permanent American home with eagles and stars replacing the heraldry of family and homeland. Patterson thus tests and revises the seminal thesis of James Deetz and Edwin Dethlefsen drawn from the succession of death’s head, cherub, and willow tree iconography on New England gravestones that reveals dividing lines of sharp social change between Puritan Calvinist worldview and first, the Great Awakening, followed by industrialism. Patterson finds more variety of symbolism in the Carolinas and influence of evolving national, regional, and ethnic identity on social change. The iconography in Patterson’s study is not just evidence of historical succession but also artistic expression that can be viewed as a process of production that differentiates different carvers by their working...