Chapter 1: “From Dumfries to the New World – The Journey of a Scottish Son”

The Carruthers name carried weight in southwest Scotland. They were a Border Reiver family—riders, warriors, landowners—who had long held territory near the Solway Firth, where the River Annan poured into the sea. But by the late 17th century, the reiving days were long gone. The clans had been pacified, the crowns of Scotland and England unified, and the old Highland order was shifting into uncertainty.

The year of John’s birth fell in the reign of William and Mary, just after the Glorious Revolution. Scotland was Protestant now, officially. But tensions still simmered between Presbyterians and Episcopalians, Highlanders and Lowlanders, the gentry and the landless poor. For boys like John—born into a name, but not necessarily into wealth—the future was a question with no clear answer.

As a child, John would have wandered the heathered hills around Howmains, barefoot in summer, wrapped in wool in winter. He may have learned to read from a minister or a schoolmaster. At home, Gaelic curses mixed with Low Scots and the cadence of English prayer. His world was small but proud—rooted in the rhythms of farming, church, and clan history.

But Scotland, for all its history, had grown hard for young men.

By the early 1700s, economic depression and limited land inheritance were driving many Scots to look west. The Americas—particularly the Carolinas—were being promoted by colonial agents as fertile and free. The promise of land, religious liberty, and personal advancement echoed through the countryside like a call. Letters from across the Atlantic told of pine forests, warm winters, and vast tracts of unclaimed land.

John must have heard the whisper. And sometime between 1710 and 1713, when he was barely out of his teens, he made the decision that would change everything.

He left.

No record tells us whether he traveled alone or with kin, whether his parents blessed his journey or wept at the port. But we know what the journey entailed: a rough Atlantic crossing, cramped aboard a wooden ship crowded with other Scots, Germans, and Englishmen hoping for new lives. Rats ran along the beams. Salt air crusted every corner. Disease took some before they saw land. John Carruthers survived.

He landed in North Carolina, perhaps first in Bath or Albemarle Sound, before making his way to the lower Neuse River basin. There, amid the marshy banks and towering longleaf pines, he found a frontier still raw and largely unsettled. The Tuscarora War had just ended. Indigenous tribes had been violently pushed aside. The colony was rebuilding—and it needed settlers.

John became one.

By 1713, the same year his ship likely touched the Carolina coast, he married a woman named Content Bange. The name alone hints at Puritan or Dutch-English roots—a woman of New England or Mid-Atlantic birth perhaps, who had also come south chasing land or marriage. Together, they began building a family.

The boy from Howmains was now a landholder in a strange, hot, beautiful place. He would clear trees, build fences, and father children who would never hear the wind of Dumfries or walk among its ruined towers. They would be Americans—but they would bear a Scottish name, rooted in stone and carried across the sea.

John Carruthers had done what few in his line had done: he left the land of his fathers not to escape it, but to plant it somewhere new.

He never returned to Scotland. But Scotland, in its way, never left him.

Chapter 2: “Inland Empire – Family, Land, and the Founding of a Carolina Legacy”

In the still air of a Carolina dawn, you could hear the crows in the pines, the grunt of a hog in the yard, and the rhythmic creak of a cartwheel as it rolled down the dirt path into town.

John Carruthers had lived in North Carolina for nearly forty years by the time the colony truly began to resemble a nation in the making. He arrived as a young man from Dumfriesshire—carrying little more than a name and a will to build—and by the 1740s, he was a patriarch: a landholder, father, and survivor.

The first decades of his life in the colony were hard ones. With Content Bange, his first wife, he had built a homestead—likely in the coastal flatlands near what would become Craven County. Their lives followed the rhythms of the land: planting, harvesting, preserving, worshipping. They may have attended a simple frame church with a dirt floor, sharing pews with other settlers and hearing the Scriptures read in a cadence half-Scots, half-American. They raised livestock, weathered storms, and brought children into a dangerous and beautiful world.

Children came in steady succession: Frances, John Jr., Joseph, Rocksolannah, Sarah, William, and perhaps others now lost to record. Some would help in the fields. Others tended goats, made candles, or hauled water from the creek. One by one, they learned to read the sky, to fear yellow fever, to thank God for every safe return.

And when Content died—we do not know when, but the loss must have cut deep—John continued on. In 1745, well into his fifties, he remarried. His second wife was Elizabeth Wilkins, a woman of English descent whose presence in his home brought fresh energy—and perhaps, new children or stepchildren—to the Carruthers hearth. That same year, the world outside was changing. The colony was expanding inland. The pressure of population, trade, and tension with Native peoples all pressed against the boundaries of the known world.

Through it all, John endured. He was no longer a newcomer. He was the root.

By the 1750s, New Bern—where John spent his final years—had become one of the largest towns in the colony. Nestled at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse Rivers, it was a place of commerce and conversation, where ships from Charleston and Boston arrived with sugar, cloth, nails, and rumor. For a Scottish farmer-turned-settler, New Bern represented what was possible: a foothold in a land once unknown.

And it was there, in 1751, that John Carruthers died.

He was around fifty-six years old—a respectable age in a world where fevers, war, and childbirth claimed lives early. His death did not go unnoticed. In 1752, the Probate Court of Craven County recorded his will: a document that did more than list his property—it named his world.

"To my beloved wife Elizabeth… to my sons John, Joseph, and William… to my daughters Rocksolannah, Sarah, Frances…"

His words were simple, likely dictated rather than written by his own hand, but they carried weight. The will named land, possessions, and heirs—but more importantly, it preserved a structure. In an era before birth certificates or photographs, the will was a kind of family portrait in ink.

To leave a will was to claim authority. It meant that a man had something to pass down—not just in goods, but in legacy. And for John Carruthers, who had left Howmains in search of something he could call his own, this was the measure of a life well lived.

He died a British subject. But his children would live to become Americans. They would see the colonies edge toward rebellion, they would hear whispers of revolution. And in the bloodlines of farmers, soldiers, and mothers, the name Carruthers would carry on.

His grave is unmarked, or long lost to time. But his life remains. In records. In land. In you.