Excerpt: A Scotch-Irishman speaks of his own
"These people were high-spirited, energetic, careful, loving principle as they loved life, pertinacious, thritfy, filled with the love of country, deeply imbued through centuries of oppression with the thought of civil and religious liberty. They... resolutely turned their faces to the rich interior of America and undertook the greater task of subduing the Indian, laying low the forest, tilling the land and raising the home, erecting the church and the school, all under equal rights to every man...
"The homes of these people were homes of plenty, not wastefulness. Wherever I have seen them they were cultivated people, for wherever any community of them existed the school and the college rose next to the house of worship. There is not a large family holding the names of these people which has not sent one of its sons to some institution of learning. Their houses are filled with the substantial and beautiful things which adorn a house of plenty. In my...home the old clock which has rung the births, the deaths, the marriages, and has for one hundred and fifty years looked upon all the changes of the day; the old candle stand; the book case; the corner cupboard; and the grandmother's chair; the high poster bed upon which I was born - all made by a Scotch-Irishman, and which adorned the house of my grandfather and his father and my father, are as exquisitely cared and beautifully formed, and evidence as much taste as anything known to me in any place or any country."
Source: Gov. William A. MacCorkle, The Recollections of Fifty Years of West Virginia (1928).
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