By Ben Rappaport
When the voluminous melody of bagpipes began to play, Bob Stewart felt a stirring in his blood. The rich, haunting sound connected him to his ancestors in the southern Scottish Highlands dating back to 1654.
“I used to wonder why the pipes got my blood pumping,” Stewart said. “But now I know when I feel it in my chest that it means something bigger than myself.”
Stewart, 62, traveled from his home in Durham to attend the annual Scotland County Highland Games in Laurinburg on Saturday. The event is the county’s largest tourism attraction and has grown each year since its inception in 2008.
Through cultural education, athletic events and ancestral ceremonies, the games serve as a reminder of the deep ties to Scottish ancestry and the history of southeastern North Carolina.
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Scotland County, which was established in 1899, was named because the area was home to the largest settlement of Highland Scots in all of North America into the 19th century.
Many of the surnames and place names found within a 10-county region from Cumberland to New Hanover counties and neighboring South Carolina counties bear testimony to the size and scope of Scottish influence in the area, said Bill Caudill, one of the organizers of the games and director of the Scottish Heritage Center at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg.
Highland Scots were largely Presbyterians who fled their homeland between the late 1600s and the 1770s amid religious persecution. The coastal plains of the Carolinas were attractive because the governor, Gabriel Johnston, who was himself a Scot offered them large land grants and tax-free land for 10 years, pushing them to come to the region.
Many European settlers who ended up in North Carolina, including those from Germany, Wales and Ireland, migrated from other colonies. Highland Scots were the only group that came directly to the region from their homeland, Caudill said. They arrived by boat to the ports in Wilmington and Georgetown, South Carolina, and traveled along the Pee Dee and Cape Fear rivers before settling in what is now Bladen, Hoke, Richmond, Robeson and Scotland counties. There, they found a landscape vastly different from their mountainous homeland.
“To them, it must’ve seemed like Tarzan’s Jungle,” Caudill said. “But they were persistent and really developed the land into a place of their own.”
They utilized the longleaf pine trees native to the region to make turpentine, which soon became a booming industry and contributed to North Carolina’s moniker as the “Tar Heel State.” The turpentine was sold in naval stores across the state, and as late as 1870, more than 95% of all naval stores produced in the U.S. came from North Carolina’s coastal plain, according to research from historian David Cecelski.
While the turpentine industry is no longer as prominent as it once was, Scottish influence is still salient in a multitude of other ways, most prominently education. The Fayetteville Presbytery opened Floral College in 1896 in Robeson County, making it the first institution in the state to offer degrees to women. As the school expanded after World War II, it merged with Presbyterian Junior College in 1958 to form St. Andrews University in Laurinburg.
“I think it’s very important for us to keep that tie to Scotland all these years later,” said Blake Tyner, a historian at the Museum of the Southeast American Indian at UNC Pembroke. “They did so much for this area, especially with education. They helped pave the path for the success of future generations through their attention to that education.”
The Museum of the Southeast American Indian is currently working on a historical preservation project to better understand the relationship of the Scottish settlers and the Lumbee tribe, which is based in Robeson County.
The 3,000 people who attended the Highland Games had a vested interest in the history of the region. Various Scottish clans set up tents with artifacts and documents tracing their lineage back to their homeland — some even down to the exact street.
“My ancestors lived right next to the paddelsteamers on Brown Street in Glasgow,” Sandy MacCallum Dunlap said as she pointed at an old map of Glasgow. “And I was just over in another tent and found their ancestors grew up less than a block away.”
Dunlap, 72, of Pender County said such connections are commonplace at the Highland Games. The sense of community has kept her involved in the culture for nearly four decades. Dunlap still plays bagpipes and even bakes Scottish shortbread using a recipe from 1755 from her fourth great-grandmother’s cookbook. Meanwhile, her sons sit by her side sipping whiskey and donning green, black and blue kilts — the colors of their clan.
“I know who I am because of my history,” she said. “That history is rich and tumultuous but I am here because of it — and I hope future generations don’t forget that.”
Stewart echoed that sentiment.
“We all want to know why we are the way we are,” he said. “And here, I feel like we all share in that longing and in a shared history.”