Kerry Pickens

What does it mean that the cedar choppers had their origins in Appalachia? It identifies them with immigrants whose roots are the borderlands of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales. They are often called Scots-Irish (or Scotch-Irish, as my father said of his ancestors), and they certainly include the lowland Scots resettled in Northern Ireland by the British. David Hackett Fischer called them “a double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.”1