Edward Brice came over from Stirlingshire. He preached at the old Templecorran Church, the ruins of which still stand at the edge of the village. The 1613 congregation was Presbyterian in everything but its formal recognition, a Scottish Reformed church planted on Irish soil in the wake of the Plantation. Within a generation Brice was one of several Scottish clergymen forbidden from preaching by the Established Church authorities of the 1630s, which only deepened the dissenting roots his people had brought with them. The present Ballycarry Presbyterian Church, the direct successor to that 1613 foundation, was built in 1830. A second congregation, the Old Presbyterian Non-Subscribing Church on the main street, also traces back to 1613 and was the larger of the two at the time of the 1829 Subscription Controversy, when the Presbyterian Church in Ireland split over whether ministers had to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Non-Subscribers, who refused, kept their hold on the older identity. Both buildings stand today, a quarter-mile apart, a marker of how Scottish Presbyterian dissent has always been comfortable with disagreement among kin.

James Orr was a weaver, like most of the literate working men of Ulster in his time, and he wrote poetry in the same Ulster Scots his looms spoke around him. He is the foremost of the Ulster Weaver Poets, the group of Presbyterian artisans who were writing in the dialect at the same moment Robert Burns was doing the same in Ayrshire. The two traditions are kin. Orr and the United Irishmen of his generation believed the Enlightenment values that had carried French revolutionaries to Paris should carry Ulster Presbyterians to political emancipation, and in 1798 they rose. After the rising failed Orr fled to America under the cloud of an arrest warrant, then returned home under a general amnesty and lived quietly in Ballycarry until his death in 1816. The Freemasons of the village put up a monument to him in the Templecorran cemetery in 1831, a tall pillar standing among the older stones, and in 2011 the Weaver's Trail was opened in his honour with backing from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The radicalism that drove Orr was not what later Irish history would label sectarian. It was the dissent of a Scottish-descended Presbyterian working class who read the Bible for themselves and believed politics could be read the same way.

William Nelson was sixteen years old. In 1798, when the United Irishmen called out the men of Antrim, William went along with a party from Ballycarry to the house of a local landlord to search for muskets. He took a horse and was sent to Islandmagee to tell the men there to come over for the rising. He went on to Donegore Hill, where the rebels gathered before the Battle of Antrim. The rebellion was defeated. Nelson was arrested and taken to Carrickfergus, where the authorities offered him a deal: testify against the older men of Ballycarry who had been out with him, and his life would be spared. He refused. His mother pleaded for clemency and was refused. They brought him back to the village and hanged him from a tree on the green. He was a boy, by any modern measure. The Ulster Scots remembered him. He is still called the Ballycarry Martyr, and the Broadisland Gathering held each first Saturday in September keeps the Ulster Scots culture from which the 1798 men came, the dancing and pipe bands and re-enactment and the Aul Kinntra Fair, alive in the village he died for.

Ballycarry has produced a long line of figures whose careers ran far beyond the village. General Sir James Steele, born here, was the British Army officer who signed the mobilisation order that took the United Kingdom into the Second World War in 1939. He was involved in the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 and the Normandy landings in 1944, and a memorial on the village green records his attachment to the Royal Ulster Rifles and to Ballycarry itself. Robbie Millar, the Michelin-starred chef, also came from the village. The Norman settlement at Redhall, where an early Christian stone coffin lid carved with a cross was uncovered in the eighteenth century, sits at the older end of the parish, and Neolithic finds suggest people have lived along this stretch of country for far longer than the documented record. The village holds its Broadisland Gathering each September, and the railway station, opened on 1 October 1862, still serves the line a mile from the village green where Nelson once hung.