Highlanders Return to Darien

By Michael P. Higgins

December 4, 1999, updated June 13, 2005

In December, 1999, I wrote that I am in the planning stages of a Highland event to be held in Darien, Georgia, USA, on the 25^th of March, 2000.   I hoped it would become an annual event.

And it did, for five years now, and a good time is always had by all!

I had the pleasure of visiting the Highlands and a number of years ago. I  can think of few environments more alien to the first Highland settlers than coastal Georgia, with its sultry sub-tropical climate, alligators (and sundry other reptiles), expansive marshland, palm trees, and Oak trees festooned with Spanish moss.  However, they did not merely endure, they prevailed.

The case can easily be made that what the Pilgrims were to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Highlanders were (even more so) to Georgia.  In an effort to recall the many contributions of the Highlanders to our region I have established an annual event featuring Scottish culture in Colonial Georgia.

In 1999, I was a new resident of Darien (county seat of McIntosh County), Georgia, USA.  Darien was settled on the 19^th of January, 1736, by a band of 160 or so Scottish Highlanders recruited by General James Oglethorpe from the area of Inverness and the Strathnaver (Sunderland), Scotland.  The original name of our town was, in fact, New Inverness, until it was later changed in memory of the ill-fated Scottish expedition to the Darien Isthmus, Panama; in 1697.

During the town's 250th Anniversary in 1987, it was noted that more than 200 descendants of the original Scottish Highland settlers still reside in McIntosh County.

It is my understanding that Darien has historical ties to a number of communities along the North Coast of Scotland -- Durness, Tongue, Farr, Betthil, Cromarty, and Dornoch to name but a few.  Accordingly, Darien would like to explore the possibility of a twin-city relationship with Durness - with cultural exchange as a goal.  Unfortunately, in the years since 1999, the twin-city plans fell through, but the cultural exchange was a great success.

Three middleschool students and a teacher from Kinlockbervie (in the Strathnaver) came over with pipes, fiddle, bodhran and dance....and blew the audience away at the festival.  That next summer, three American students and a teacher went to Kinlochbervie.

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