Tartan Roots?: Part 2

With Kincardine's town founders being half Scottish (i.e. Cameron but not Withers), did the ethnicity of the village follow suit? One of the town's most notable early settlers - businessman, politician and innkeeper Francis "Paddy" Walker - arrived in Kincardine in 1850 with his large Irish Protestant family, and I've always wondered how large Kincardine's Irish population was in the beginning.

The 1851 census of Kincardine village and township noted 352 settlers stating their place of birth as Scotland, and a mere 140 settlers born in Ireland. After reading that unlike the English and Scots, many Irish immigrants in the early 19th century took paying jobs rather than working the land as farmers [1], I wondered if Kincardine's Irish population was concentrated in the village, where Walker and his family built their Inn [above], while Scottish farmers dominated the township's farmland.

The non-farming population revealed on the 1851 census disproved this theory: only 32 of the 140 Irish settlers weren't farmers (23%), while 139 of the 352 Scots had non-farming jobs (40%). While Scots made up a large proportion of farmers in the township, it seems that they dominated the village population as well.

[1]Peter Toner, "Ethnic Groups: Irish" The Canadian Encyclopedia