ten pounds and two shillings quit-rents per hundred acres in 1719
to fifteen pounds ten shillings per hundred acres with a
quit-rent of a halfpenny per acre in 1732, soon turned the eyes
of the thrifty Scotch-Irish settlers southward and southwestward.
In Maryland in 1738 lands were offered at five pounds sterling
per hundred acres. Simultaneously, in the Valley of Virginia free
grants of a thousand acres per family were being made. In the
North Carolina piedmont region the proprietary, Lord Granville,
through his agents was disposing of the most desirable lands to
settlers at the rate of three shillings proclamation money for
six hundred and forty acres, the unit of land-division; and was
also making large free grants on the condition of seating a
certain proportion of settlers. "Lord Carteret's land in
Carolina," says North Carolina's first American historian, "where
the soil was cheap, presented a tempting residence to people of
every denomination. Emigrants from the north of Ireland, by the
way of Pennsylvania, flocked to that country; and a considerable
part of North Carolina . . . is inhabited by those people or
their descendants." From 1740 onward, attracted by the rich lure
of cheap and even free lands in Virginia and North Carolina, a
tide of immigration swept ceaselessly into the valleys of the
Shenandoah, the Yadkin, and the Catawba. The immensity of this
mobile, drifting mass, which sometimes brought "more than 400
families with horse waggons and cattle" into North Carolina in a
single year (1752-3), is attested by the fact that from 1732 to
1754, mainly as the result of the Scotch-Irish inundation, the
population of North Carolina more than doubled.

The second important racial stream of population in the
settlement of the same region was composed of Germans, attracted