Scotlands Mark on America | Page 7

out among the passengers and nearly half on board perished including Scot and his wife. A son and daughter survived and the proprietors a year after issued a confirmation of the grant to Scot's daughter and her husband (John Johnstone), many of whose descendants are still living in New Jersey.
Walter Ker of Dalserf, Lanarkshire, banished in 1685, settled in Freehold, and was active in organizing the Presbyterian Church there, one of the oldest in New Jersey. The Scots settlers who came over at this period occupied most of the northern counties of the state but many went south and southwest, mainly around Princeton, and, says Samuel Smith, the first historian of the province, "There were very soon four towns in the Province, viz., Elizabeth, Newark, Middletown and Shrewsbury; and these with the country round were in a few years plentifully inhabited by the accession of the Scotch, of whom there came a great many." These Scots, says Duncan Campbell, largely gave "character to this sturdy little state not the least of their achievements being the building up if not the nominal founding of Princeton College, which has contributed so largely to the scholarship of America."
In 1682 another company of nobles and gentlemen in Scotland arranged for a settlement at Port Royal, South Carolina. These colonists consisted mainly of Presbyterians banished for attending "Conventicles." The names of some of these immigrants, whose descendants exist in great numbers at the present day, included James McClintock, John Buchanan, William Inglis, Gavin Black, Adam Allan, John Gait, Thomas Marshall, William Smith, Robert Urie, Thomas Bryce, John Syme, John Alexander, John Marshall, Matthew Machen, John Paton, John Gibson, John Young, Arthur Cunningham, George Smith, and George Dowart. The colony was further increased by a small remnant of the ill-fated expedition to Darien. One of the vessels which left Darien to return to Scotland, the Rising Sun, was driven out of its course by a gale and took refuge in Charleston. Among its passengers was the Rev. Archibald Stobo, who was asked by some people in Charleston to preach in the town while the ship was being refitted. He accepted the invitation and left the ship with his wife and about a dozen others. The following day, the Rising Sun, while lying off the bar, was overwhelmed in a hurricane and all on board were drowned. This Rev. Archibald Stobo was the earliest American ancestor of the late Theodore Roosevelt's mother. In the following year (1683) the colony was augmented by a number of Scots colonists from Ulster led by one Ferguson. A second Scottish colony in the same year under Henry Erskine, Lord Cardross, founded Stuartstown (so named in honor of his wife). Another colony from Ulster was that of Williamsburgh township (1732-34), who named their principal village Kingstree.
There were settlements of Scots Highlanders in North Carolina, on the Cape Fear River, as early as 1729; some indeed are said to have settled there as early as 1715. Neill McNeill of Jura brought over a colony of more than 350 from Argyllshire in 1739, and large numbers in 1746, after Culloden, and settled them on the Cape Fear River. Cross Creek, now Fayetteville, was the center of these Highland settlements, and hither came the Scottish heroine, Flora MacDonald, in 1775. The mania for emigration to North Carolina affected all classes in Scotland and continued for many years. The Scots Magazine for May 1768 records that a number of settlers from the Western Isles had embarked for Carolina and Georgia, including forty or fifty families from Jura alone. In September of following year it is stated that a hundred families of Highlanders had arrived at Brunswick, North Carolina, and "two vessels are daily expected with more." In August 1769 the ship Mally sailed from Islay full of passengers for North Carolina, which was the third or fourth emigration from Argyll "since the conclusion of the late war." In August 1770 it was stated that since the previous April six vessels carrying about twelve hundred emigrants had sailed from the western Highlands for North Carolina. In February of the following year the same magazine states that five hundred souls in Islay and adjacent islands were preparing to emigrate to America in the following summer. In September of the same year three hundred and seventy persons sailed from Skye for North Carolina, and two entries in the magazine for 1772 record the emigration of numbers from Sutherland and Loch Erribol. In the same year a writer says the people who have emigrated from the Western Isles since the year 1768 "have carried with them at least ten thousand pounds in specie. Notwithstanding this is a great loss to us, yet the depopulation by these emigrations is a much greater.... Besides, the continual emigrations from Ireland and Scotland, will