“Among her settlers, Charlotte holds a strong Celtic connection. This shared language tradition goes back to early settlement in the 1740s and continues among descendants of Scots-Irish, Irish, Welsh and Cornish peoples who arrived, changed us, stayed or moved on.

     By far the dominant groups were the hardy, independent Scotch-Irish. In the 1630s thousands of Scots had moved from Scotland’s strife-torn Low Country sailing across the Irish Sea to Ulster, Ireland, at the suggestion of James I, the Scottish King of England. These families (known as Scots-Irish) stayed several generations before fleeing harsh landlords and potato famines, and between 1725-60 nearly 300,000 left Northern Ireland. Fantastic reports of fertile land drew them to Pennsylvania, but rising land costs pushed them south along the Great Wagon Road through Virginia into the Carolina Piedmont. They brought strict Calvinist Presbyterianism and traits as “energetic, industrious people with an unerring instinct for a good trade.”

    Soon after settlements came the Gold Era, since gold found here in 1799 was the first documented in North America. Farmers found it in creeks and furrows, but more lay in rich veins underground. Experienced miners were hired from Cornwall, England, where copper and tin mining has been carried on for centuries.

    Beginning about 1880, the textile era brought many local entrepreneurs, both Scots-Irish and German, to found the cotton mills for a new century of southern growth and prosperity. Those creeks we cross and live beside bear names from our Celtic heritage: McMullen, McAlpine, McDowell Creeks and many others. Celtic influences of immigration and intermarriage in the Charlotte region are essential to our everyday living. Thrifty and energetic, these settlers of Celtic background and their descendants became strong religious and governmental leaders, philanthropists, educators and commercial wizards.

    When a kilted bagpiper pipes a bride down the long aisle of a church, or when the family rolls up the rug so visiting nieces can perform Highland or Irish dances, the tradition is among us still.”