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Revisiting Scott's review of Albion Seed, I agree that homogeneous Puritan and Quaker settlements were probably very high trust. But that was only two of the four groups. The Borderers were always low trust, and the Cavaliers were nominally Anglicans, which is what you get when you take Catholicism and substitute the pope with the king of England.
The Quakers were already not the dominant religion in Pennsylvania by 1750, hard to blame Irish Catholic immigrants for that. I assume that it was kinda similar for the Puritans? First you have the Mayflower generation from 1620 on: people who were willing to life a life of hardship for their religious beliefs. It is basically impossible not to get a high-trust society from that (apart from these unfortunate witch trials). But I would imagine that there is some regression to the mean over time, which is of course accelerated by religious heterogeneity, with John Adams seeming a lot less hardcore Puritan than his earlier ancestors.
I am not saying that Irish or Scottish Catholics arriving in 1860 did not lower the trust level, but simply that it would not have been so different if the US had only let in Protestant Germans of various sects. Once your neighbor goes to a different church than you, the common knowledge that you have identical moral beliefs pitilessly enforced by your community will disappear.
Reading up on the history of SF, SF basically before the gold rush of 1849 was basically a village. Early SF was basically a hive of scum and villainy, not surprising if you select for "people who want to get rich finding gold" instead of "people who go to the New World to escape the godlessness of the Old World". Sure, things calmed down a bit, but I think SF was never high trust.
Puritan New England always had a substantial contingent of non puritans because it was structured to have a non-puritan and non-voting minority. Full membership in the puritan church was not guaranteed hereditarily, either, and was necessary for suffrage, so restricting membership concentrated political power, and it was probably unavoidable that New England wouldn’t remain majority puritan.
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