Wondering About the Irish
Wondering About the Irish
By Dr. Paul J. Loatman Jr., City Historian
Discovering my Dutch ancestors who were wandering through these parts in the 1680s proved fascinating; but the slim traces I found of the O’Neils, Heenans, and Ryans on the other side of my family tree haunt me. I’ve got "Irish" on the brain. You get it by looking at local census records, spare and minimalist in their few details. I wonder about so many of these faceless immigrants who, here in the handwritten census returns, are identified by little more than name and age. What was life like for them, only a few months, or at most, a few years landed from a distant shore? Many of them hit Mechanicville in 1853 escaping Ireland on the heels of the "potato blight" which caused a famine so grotesque that human beings were reduced to eating grass in their unsuccessful efforts to survive. Ironically, they arrived in America amidst a horrible cholera epidemic which decimated the population, especially the poor. To make matters worse, local yields of grain, apples, and dairy products were reduced by 50% due to a severe drought in upstate New York in 1854 which raised the cost of precious food. What stories these survivors could tell-but did they? Probably not, for they had to wage a mighty struggle to keep body and soul together. Mostly illiterate, they left virtually no records behind, and were it not for the first state census taken here in 1855, they would be shrouded in even more historical darkness than they are.
Certainly, most of their good neighbors hereabouts who were third or fourth generation "Americans" (technically, Anglo-Americans, because it had been only seventy years since they shook off British rule) were less than thrilled to see them arrive. True, some Irish had been coming here in relatively small numbers for about twenty years, but after midcentury, famine survivors flooded our shores. In 1850, few local residents listed their place of birth as "Ireland" in the federal census returns; however, five years later, the children of Erin made up a large proportion of the emerging village of Mechanicville, almost 40% of whom were first and second generation Irish immigrants. A significant number of the adults were illiterate (this information was recorded only for those over 21); without a public school in the area and unable to afford enrolling their children in Mechanicville’s private Ames Academy, we can assume that most Irish households contained two generations unfamiliar with the rubrics of reading and writing.
How did they survive? Few of the Irish listed in the 1855 census records owned any property and many adult immigrants had their occupation recorded as "none" by the enumerator. Did they live on the kindness of strangers? Take the Golden family, for instance, headed by the illiterate, recently widowed Catherine, age 33, mother of four boys ranging in ages from 8 to 1. How her husband died is a mystery. Two months prior to the census taker’s calling, she took in a boarder, a female Irish immigrant, to share the cost of renting a framed dwelling valued at $25. Inflation has changed the value of a dollar, but one’s historical imagination is numbed by trying to conjure up a picture of a house whose value in dollars wouldn’t be enough to pay for half a tank of gas for one of today’s SUVs.
Another family by the same name lived with their seven minor children and three boarders in the relative lap of luxury in a nearby framed building valued at $100. Or, how about Catherine Tobey, 45-year-old single parent of two minor children who lived with thirty-three other "paddies," a roll-call of whom reads like a list of "most typical Irish surnames:" Whalen, Ryan, Bailey, Riley, O’Neil, Driscoll, Dailey, McMahon, Sullivan, Eagen, Sheehan, etc.; immigrants all, employment unknown (or at least unlisted), residing in a humble abode valued at $100.
Beyond their desire to flee Ireland, the famine, and rapacious English landlords, these nineteenth century refugees may have been drawn here by the promise of work at the American Linen Thread Co., a firm founded at the beginning of the 1850s which employed Irish immigrants and their children almost exclusively in its thirty-plus year tenure here. We can infer what their working conditions were like from a couple of sources. John Ronaldson was a Scottish immigrant who tried his hand "flax hackling" hereabouts for a few years in the 1850s before returning home. He wrote his wife, "there is no going ahead here." He objected to the "Arctic winters" and Mechanicville’s "being nothing but colony of the Irish." Yet, most of all, he complained that "the wages given to factory hands is not in proportion to the work performed," especially since they were expected to work six days a week, sun-up to sun-down.
What could these immigrants expect to earn? Not much, even by the standards of the day, based upon the evidence in the census records. The Linen Thread Co. employed over 100 workers, a sizable workforce for its time. Like all such factories, female employees outnumbered males by a margin of better than two to one, and 25% of the workers were children. Average monthly wages were $23 for men and boys; for women and girls, a little more than $9. Or, to put it another way, men and boys earned $1.05 a day; women and girls, 41 cents. These are the lowest wage rates recorded for any local industrial workers in the census. Things did not improve rapidly for the Irish. In 1870, the census enumerator left blank the value of most dwellings in which they lived, and as late as 1882, the editor of the Mechanicville Golden Era, one of a number of short-lived weeklies, reported that planned ethnic social activities failed to materialize because the Irish were "persons in humble circumstances."
Whatever they may have lacked in worldly goods, the Irish apparently made up for with a rich spiritual life. The estimated value of the local Catholic Church – built largely through the efforts of Irish immigrant grocer and hotel keeper, John Short, in 1852 – surpassed that of all local churches mentioned in the census, while the number of weekly communicants was more than double that of the next most active congregation.
Somewhat isolated from the rest of the community in an area disparagingly called "the Devil’s Half Acre," Irish shanties surrounded the Linen Thread Co. mill situated near the mouth of the Tenendehowa Creek. Prominent citizen, J. Frank Terry – lawyer, politician, and newspaper editor – never seemed to tire of taking pot-shots at "the Dubliners" in his weekly Mechanicville Times, and for years, the Irish were black-balled by the local volunteer fire department. But, railroad expansion here in the 1890s brought such an influx of sons of Erin that they quickly became a political force strong enough to elect one of their own, John Garland, in 1892, even though he was not a citizen. Naturally, Garland was forced to resign, but twelve years later, Village President, T.J. Finnegan, ended the blackballing of Irish fire-fighters by threatening to form an entire Irish brigade if the practice were continued. By this time, a local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians had been established, and St. Patrick’s Day parades had become annual events here. At the turn of the century, Mercury editor, Farrington L. Mead, might occasionally complain about the influence of "the Irish gang" in politics, but he did so because of his policy disagreements with the group, not because he rejected its ethnicity or religious practices. And, despite any protests from Mead, Irish political and social prominence continued to grow in the community.
For a lot of people, it’s almost too easy to be Irish now: for them, all that’s required is to get sappy-eyed watching a St. Patrick’s Day Parade (probably on TV because it’s too cold to march) and drink some green beer while munching on a corned beef sandwich. True, there are no more Know Nothings seeking to outlaw Irish immigration as there once were; no, public school teachers wouldn’t think of compelling Catholic students to read an unacceptable version of the Bible as they commonly did in the nineteenth century; and, of course, I haven’t heard of anyone getting hysterical about the Pope sleeping in the White House since J.F.K. ran in 1960. In other words, it seems so safe being Irish that you hardly notice it anymore.
Does it make any difference? Aren’t we "Americans, all?" True as that may be, we might do well to reflect on the experiences of the widows Golden, Tobey, and the thirty-three other poor immigrants crowded into their little hovel next to the Tenendehowa Creek in 1855. Facing the terrors, sufferings, and indignities that they did, they probably needed few reminders that if you’re Irish, someday the world is going to break your heart; for them, the experience was probably a daily one. Now, while enjoying the wealth, ease, and freedom that we take for granted, at least once a year, we ought to recognize the debt that we owe to our forebears because we are standing on the shoulders of all of those "Micks" who came before us.