THE FLEMINGS COME TO AMERICA

3. THE FLEMINGS COME TO AMERICA

The one thing that the Scotts were best at producing was more Scottsmen. Scotland is a northern country with a short growing season, though tempered by the Gulf Stream. Most of Scotland is mountainous and rocky. The soil is thin and mostly good for sheep-herding, and it is no mystery that the oldest and most productive industry has been wool production and weaving. We have seen that the early Eighteenth Century brought two new sources of income, whiskey manufacture and kelp-burning for potash, used in soap and glass manufacture. Campbeltown was at one time a major center of whiskey distilling.

The first great diaspora from Scotland was to the Irish plantations in the Seventeenth Century. They were settled on the estates that the English carved out of Ireland once England began seriously subduing Ireland beginning in Elizabethan times. The plantations were made all over Ireland, but concentrated in Ulster. The newly planted Scotts were mainly Presbyterian, a situation which caused the "Irish troubles" which persists to this day. The Scotch-Irish (as we have come to call them) felt abandoned and betrayed in the early Eighteenth Century, and large numbers emigrated to the American Colonies, where they settled the back country of the Colonies and created the dialect that has become standard American English.

The Scotts continued to emigrate to wherever the spread of the British empire allowed, and in fact contributed far more than their share to the administration of that empire. Many came to America directly from Scotland, and I have heard from Flemings whose ancestors came from Kintyre to such colonies as New Jersey and North Carolina well before the Great Diaspora of the early Nineteenth Century. It is interesting to note that though there are Scottish-American societies, the diaspora never developed the intense nostalgic nationalism of the Irish diaspora. Probably because the Scotts emigrants did not start out with the intense anti-English sentiments of the Irish, and came of Scotland more deliberately and with more pushed out by the Famine.

I haven't studied the exact causes of the Great Diaspora, except that the Scottish trend toward very large families inevitably caused constant over-population. Whatever the case may be, the outflow between the War of 1812 and the Civil War became a flood and as many as 300 Scotsmen came to the relatively small community of western Washington County in that short time.

The first emigrant to Washington County was John Harvey, who arrived in 1816. Why he chose the Marietta area can't be known, but there is a story that came down through the family that might hold a clue. The story goes that when John Fleming and family came down the Ohio River by flatboat, they intended to go to Cincinnati, but were halted at Belpre by low water, and agents from the Ohio land company came to the boat and persuaded them to settle in Washington County. The only trouble with that story is that there was already the nucleus of an extensive Scottish community already settled there, and two Fleming girls married so soon after their arrival that it seems clear that their fiances had come ahead to prepare for them. It is more likely that the story of the original Harveys got attached to the Flemings by repetition. Possibly John Harvey was intending to go farther down the river and was stopped by low water.

Why Ohio at all? At that time, there were two routes to the interior of the nation where the cheap land was. One could come to New York and across to the Great Lakes, or to Philadelphia and cross Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, where the Ohio was the highway to the West. Before the construction of the Erie Canal, Philadelphia was the larger city and the way through Pennsylvania more established. We can't know when John Fleming and his family decided to emigrate, but a surviving document holds a clue. See among the documents the Memorial for John Fleming.

The Duke of Argyl owned the whole of Kintyre, so even substantial farmers were renters. Some leased large tracts and subleased them. Here he states that he prefers to continue leasing rather than move to a strange country, but in less that four years the whole family moved, so either he is dissembling, or he changed his mind soon after.

Whatever the case, Agnes Fleming married John Breckenridge only two months after her arrival in Ohio, and Janet Fleming married George Turner the next March. Such promptitude indicates that engagements were made in Scotland and the men went ahead to prepare a home for their brides.

When The ship Telegraph docked in Philadelphia, her captain, Hector Coffin, signed the sworn statement included at the head of the Passenger List

We might be surprised at the name of the ship, since the Telegraph that we know was not invented yet. The Telegraph that the ship is named after was a large wooden device with arms like a semaphore that could communicate signals from the shore to a ship at sea.

Nearly all the passengers were from Campbeltown, and family tradition holds that the captain was a dear friend who picked them up at Campbeltown. The manifest indicates that the Telegraph sailed from Liverpool to Campbeltown to pick up its passengers and presumably their effects. This document does not say when the Telegraph sailed, but presumably the voyage took two months.

John Fleming and his family, are not indexed in the published Passenger Arrivals, and I always wondered about that until I finally found the Manifest. A look at the microfilmed sheet shows why. The second passenger is listed as from Pennsylvania, then apparently the transcriber forgot to note country of origin and indicated it with a long bracket, but he did not include John Fleming's family, so that the later reader thought they were being listed as from Pennsylvania.

It is unfortunate that nobody apparently thought to write a journal of such a momentous voyage. I suppose somewhere there are reports of similar voyages, but we would like to know how the living quarters were divided, up, what they ate, how they managed washing and personal hygiene. Apparently, no fever broke out on the voyage, and no one died. As far as I know, no romances broke out on the voyage.

The ship arrived in Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1821. In a letter dated Sept. 20, four of the men wrote to their local banker back home. Click here for the letter to their banker.

The details of the transactions need to be interpreted by someone who is familiar with British banking practices of the time, but the intention is clear. The signers had deposited their funds for safekeeping at the banks indicated for safekeeping, and having arrived safely, we asking that their funds follow them. It would have taken several months for the business to be transacted and the transactions to cross the Atlantic in both directions, and the families did not wait in Philadelphia, so they must have made arrangements for the money to follow them to Ohio. Andrew Harvie had the largest amount on account, but he may have been acting as banker for the larger Harvie family which had gone ahead of him. We have already seen that 50 pounds was a year's rent for the Flemings Scottish farm, and was a traditional year's pension for a pensioned elderly servant. The Pound was remarkably stable all during the 19th Century, and the exchange rater for the Dollar was $4.80 up until the end of World War II, so L200 or about $1000 in 1821 money was a substantial sum.

The latest date that a transaction is indicated is 16 July, so the ship left Campbeltown after that date. The transactions were made in Greenock, which is the port for Glasgow. One cannot tell from the letter whether the men went to Greenock to transact the business, or it was transacted for them by agents of Mr. Colvin [a variation of the name Colville]

Whatever the case, the band of immigrants stayed in Philadelphia long enough to transact their financial business and purchase wagons to transport whatever household goods they brought with them. Presumably they brought what they could, because furniture would have been expensive to purchase in Ohio. According to family tradition, the frailer members of the party road in one of the wagons, while the more fit walked. The journey to Pittsburgh was about 300 miles and at about 20 miles a day would have taken 2 ½ weeks. Apparently nobody kept a journal or made a memorial of the trip. All we know is that the more able walked and the weaker road in the wagons. If they waited for the Fullertons, who arrived at about the same time, the company numbered at least 60. One can assume that the road form Philadelphia was so well traveled by 1821 that there was plenty of accommodation. But it seem likely that they would have broken up into smaller units for the trek west.

We do not have a report from them, but a fellow Kintyrite who made the same journey the year before reported his own journey in a letter home which has survived. Click here to read it. . The author was impressed by the many bridges on the road, particularly the one over the broad Susquehannah, which was a mile long and wide enough to accommodate two wagons passing plus a walkway on each side. He also said there were plenty of taverns which offered food, lodging, and entertainment.

When the company arrived in Pittsburgh, they purchased a flatboat for the trip down the Ohio. A flatboat was a one-way craft that was too cumbersome to take upstream against the current.

Return to Table of Contents Return to Home On the Chapter 4 McWeb Software - WYSIWYG HTML Web page editor, Javascript effects and DHTML scripts