Highland Games Abroad: Grandfather Mountain, Pleasanton and the Circuit

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Several games claim to be the oldest or largest, depending on definitions such as "continuous" and how attendance is counted. This card reports such claims as claims. Harper's 1819 date for the first Canadian games is given without a named venue in her book. Grant Jarvie, in Transatlantic Scots (2005), supplies one: the Glengarry Highland Society in Ontario, organised in 1819 to hold a Highland gathering. Jarvie does not say how long those early gatherings ran, so the modern Glengarry games are dated here from 1948.

Jarvie also writes that the Antigonish Highland Society was founded in 1816, three years before St Fillans. The Society's page on the ScotsCanada website gives 22 April 1861, two years before the first games; 1816 looks like a transposition of 1861. This card uses 1861.

Taking the games abroad

established Highland games in their modern form grew in Scotland in the early nineteenth century. Emigrants took them abroad, organised by Caledonian societies and clubs in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. In nineteenth-century North America, Caledonian games were popular sporting events that helped shape modern track and field athletics.

shared The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), qualifies the idea of export: she writes that the first Highland games in Canada and in Scotland took place in the same year, 1819, and that the games "rapidly became part of the invented Scottish identity overseas". Games sat alongside other imported pastimes. In 1842 Highland exiles at Montevideo played shinty from morning until four, then danced the Highland Fling and Gille Callum to the pipes, as the Inverness Courier reported. The New York Highlanders' Shinty Club, founded in 1903, wanted to keep alive the game that had given its members "grit and pluck". A Scottish magazine, the Celtic Monthly, reported approvingly of a Canadian gathering in 1893 that "the national sentiment is stimulated" by keeping the old games alive.

established Interest was not steady. Harper notes that by the 1920s the once thriving Scottish immigrant press in the United States had disappeared and only two Highland games remained there. The great American games of today, such as Grandfather Mountain, belong to a later revival fed by the late twentieth-century boom in genealogy, and Harper calls Grandfather Mountain the biggest and "most Disneyfied" gathering on the international circuit.

Caledonian games and American track and field

established The earliest recorded Highland games in the United States predate the Canadian games below. The historian David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed (1989), following Gerald Redmond, records that the New York Highland Society held a "sportive meeting" at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, across the Hudson, in 1836. Antigonish's claim is to the oldest games held continuously, which is a different thing.

shared Fischer argues that these Caledonian games became the ancestor of American track and field. Their programmes mixed the shot, hammer, jumps, pole vault, hurdles, a mile race and a walking match with the caber and Highland dancing. As the games opened to non-Scots, athletic clubs and colleges adopted them, dropping the caber, the sack race and men's dancing. Fischer names McGill University in Montreal as the first college to sponsor them formally, and Princeton, under the Scottish president James McCosh (from 1868) and the Scottish gymnastics instructor George Goldie, as the American leader. He gives a figure of 125 American cities holding Caledonian games "by the mid-nineteenth century"; given the Princeton connection, the figure fits the 1860s–1870s better.

Canada

established The Antigonish Highland Games in Nova Scotia, first held in 1863 by a Highland Society founded in 1861, are often described as the oldest continuously held Highland games in North America. The Glengarry Highland Games at Maxville, Ontario, first held in 1948, host the North American Pipe Band Championships.

established Glengarry's roots are much older. The sports historian Grant Jarvie, in his chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), notes that the Glengarry Highland Society was organised in 1819 to promote traditional sports through a Highland gathering. The county was heavily Highland: a writer of 1829 warned would-be emigrants, "Go not to Glengarry if you be not a Highlander". Of its 8,500 or so people then, about three-quarters were of Highland descent and many still spoke Gaelic, and twenty years later one resident in six was named MacDonnell or Macdonald.

established In the growing cities the games were run by Scottish societies close to the colonial establishment. The historian Michael Vance, in his chapter on organised Scottishness in Canada in the same book, describes the Caledonian games held in Toronto on 14 and 15 September 1859 by the Canadian Highland Society, whose members included legislators, senior civil servants, officers, lawyers and the mayor, Adam Wilson. Events included dancing, Highland dress, piping and stone and hammer throwing, with a broadsword exercise. Prizes went to the best Gaelic poem on "The Achievements of the Highland Brigade" and the best poem in broad Scots on "The Emigrant". The next year the gathering was moved to coincide with the Prince of Wales's tour, and in 1881 Winnipeg's St Andrew's Society held its games to mark the visit of the Governor General, the Marquis of Lorne. A semi-professional circuit grew up, but, Vance writes, its imperial associations were never lost. Crowds could be large: the folklorist Margaret Bennett, citing Gerald Redmond, notes that at least 12,000 people packed Toronto's Caledonian Gathering at the Crystal Palace grounds in 1870.

The United States

established The Caledonian Club of San Francisco, founded in 1866, has held games every year since, now at Pleasanton, California, attracting very large crowds. The Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in North Carolina, founded in 1956, are held each July in a mountain meadow and attract tens of thousands; Jarvie gives up to 30,000 over four days, and notes that the programme traces such contests to the eleventh century. Games are now held in almost every US state.

established Jarvie describes the national infrastructure. The American-Scottish Foundation was founded in 1956 by Lord and Lady Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton to build social and commercial links between Scotland and the United States. The Association of Scottish Games and Festivals, founded in 1981, lists only the games it has approved; its calendar runs from January, with the Central Florida Highland Games, to November, longer than the season in Scotland. Alongside piping, dancing and heavy events, American programmes may include newer inventions such as a "bonny knees" contest, a haggis toss and the kirkin' of the tartan.

established Jarvie visited the games at Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1995. The town was founded by Major John Gorin on a land grant for Revolutionary War service; its high school band is called the "Scotties" and parades in tartan. The games, in Barren River State Resort Park, offered caber tossing, country dancing, soccer and rugby sevens, genealogy seminars and meetings with clan chiefs. The guest chief that year, Malcolm Forbes of Castle Forbes in Aberdeenshire, lived mainly in Surrey. The man running the Clan Kennedy tent, Donald Cannaday of Ohio, had discovered in 1986 that his surname was a variant of Kennedy and now led a society of 545 members.

What is different

shared Games abroad include the same core events as in Scotland, such as caber, hammer and stone throwing, piping, drumming and dancing. But they also emphasise clan tents, where visitors can find their clan and tartan, genealogy research, Celtic markets and heritage displays. Scholars such as Celeste Ray have described them as places where heritage is celebrated and sometimes romanticised.

What is being celebrated?

shared Grant Jarvie, whose Highland Games: The Making of the Myth (1991) studied the games in Scotland, asks in Transatlantic Scots whether the émigrés of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought a Highland games culture to North America, and answers that he thinks not. In Scotland, he points out, the sport of the Gael was shinty, not "Highland athletics". At Glengarry he sees a celebration shaped as much by the Loyalist exodus from the Mohawk Valley and by generations turning forest into farmland as by Scotland: it honours being a North American Scottish Highlander, which he calls a crucial distinction. He also criticises the "self-gratifying" Scottish assumption that such communities wish their ancestors had never left.

shared Jarvie nonetheless defends the games. Drawing on the political scientist Robert Putnam's work on declining civic life in America, he argues that organising a games builds networks, trust and mutual obligation, and can help hold communities and generations together. He warns that they can also be divisive, foster stereotypes and push aside local identities, and that games, festivals and sport cannot by themselves sustain a community whose economy is failing.

shared Jarvie is also blunt about darker uses of Scottish symbols in America. He writes that a Confederate flag was modelled on the Saltire and that the Ku Klux Klan took a name echoing the Highland clans. He names the "Bonnie Blue Flag", which was in fact a single white star on blue; the Saltire link is usually claimed for the Confederate battle flag's diagonal cross, and even that is debated. These are his remarks on the wider émigré culture of the American South, not claims about the games themselves.

A global circuit

established Highland games are held in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and across Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, many organised by people with no Scottish ancestry. Professional heavy athletes travel the circuit and compete internationally.

• The Antigonish games date from 1863.
• San Francisco's Caledonian Club has held games since 1866.
• Grandfather Mountain's games began in 1956.
• Caledonian games helped shape modern athletics in North America.
• Highland games are now held in Germany and Scandinavia.
• The first recorded US Highland games, in 1836, were held at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey.
• When American colleges adopted the games, they dropped the caber as too strenuous for undergraduates.
• In 1842 Scots in Montevideo marked a holiday with shinty, the Highland Fling and a Gaelic toast.
• By the 1920s only two Highland games survived in the United States.
• Toronto's 1859 games gave a prize for a Gaelic poem on the achievements of the Highland Brigade.
• The American games calendar runs from January to November, longer than Scotland's season.
• In 1829 a writer warned would-be settlers not to go to Glengarry, Ontario, unless they were Highlanders.

• Disputed: Which games are the oldest or largest. Several games claim these titles, depending on how "continuous" is defined and how attendance is counted. Antigonish (1863) claims the oldest continuously held games in North America, but it was not the first: New York held a "sportive meeting" in 1836, and Marjory Harper dates the first Canadian games to 1819.
• Myth: Highland games and clan tents are traditional features exported from Scotland. Grant Jarvie thinks emigrants did not bring a Highland games culture with them, and notes that the Gaelic sport was shinty. Clan tents and genealogy are more prominent abroad than in Scotland, and games such as Glengarry celebrate being a North American Scottish Highlander.
• Myth: The American games are an unbroken nineteenth-century tradition. By the 1920s only two Highland games survived in the United States, and most of today's games date from after 1945.
• Disputed: David Hackett Fischer's "125 American cities". He dates this figure to "the mid-nineteenth century", but given the Princeton connection it fits the 1860s and 1870s better.
• Disputed: When the Antigonish Highland Society was founded. Jarvie gives 1816, but the Society's own page gives 22 April 1861, two years before the first games. 1816 looks like a transposition.
• Disputed: The eleventh-century origin of Highland athletics. Jarvie notes that the Grandfather Mountain programme traces such contests to the eleventh century. That is the games' own claim.