cis, in his will filed in 1756. In Tyrone also was the Houston estate of Castlestewart previously mentioned. There was James Houston of Londonderry fame, who hailed from County Donegal. (Donegal, one of the counties of the old Ulster province, did not choose to join the present country of Northern Ireland in the separation of 1921 and is part of the Irish Republic.)

We have mentioned only a few of the Houstons who made their homes in Ulster during the century of migration and development. These seem fairly typical of the many who appear in public records and histories of the times.

It is understandable that the Ulster colonization was attractive to the Houstons and their neighbors in Scotland. The valley of the Clyde and the coast lands of Ayrshire were becoming crowded. Sons and grandsons of the Houston barons could not all be accommodated on the family estates. Even if there had been room, the younger generations were stirred to move out on their own to a wider horizon. The new lands beckoned to the west from across the narrow North Channel. In fact on a clear day, one could see the Irish shore. It was even close enough for the Houstons in Ireland to come back to visit their kin, attend communion and have their babies baptized.

Though less venturesome, the Ulster project was far more appealing than colonization which was being promoted by the Virginia Company in America at the same time. The new world was a strange wilderness, populated by fierce savages, beyond a wide and stormy ocean. It could be reached only by a perilous voyage, and once arrived there, one might never return to beloved old Scotland. In fact it was known that some of the first English colonists had been swallowed up in the wilderness, never to be seen again.

It was logical that most of the Houston emigrants during the 1600’s went to Northern Ireland rather than America. The great exodus from Scotland and Ulster to the American colonies was to come a century later. Woodburn estimates there were 50,000 colonists in Northern Ireland by 1620 when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in the New World.

Religious harmony was one of the contributing factors to the rapid development of Ulster in the early years of the "plantation." "The Protestant Church in Ireland was one and undivided," Woodburn writes. "Amongst its clergy were many not-