Irish High Roads

Irish High Roads Irish history from famine to Fifth Avenue. Stories of migration and identity

A woman in a Lowell mill town counted out fifty cents she could not spare and paid a Boston newspaper to print four line...
09/02/2026

A woman in a Lowell mill town counted out fifty cents she could not spare and paid a Boston newspaper to print four lines about a brother she had last seen on a quay in Cork.

The column was called Missing Friends, and it ran in the Boston Pilot from October 1831 until 1921. 📰 For ninety years it was the closest thing the Irish in America had to a national register of the lost. The notices are terribly plain and they are all built the same way. A name, a townland, a parish, a county. The ship and the year of landing. The last place he was heard of, which is usually a canal cutting or a railroad camp or a mill town two states over. Then the address of whoever is looking, and a line asking any priest or any person who knows anything to write. Sisters looking for brothers, mothers looking for sons who went to dig the Erie and the Illinois canals, wives looking for husbands gone ahead to send for them. Priests all over America read the column out from the altar on a Sunday, which is how a fair number of them were actually found. 🕯️

More than forty one thousand of those advertisements ran before the column closed. Boston College put the whole archive online, and people still open it looking for one name and come out the other side with a townland, a parish and a county they never knew their family had.

The man who actually made the crossing was often the least Irish person in the family.He had to be. 🇮🇪 An accent was a l...
09/02/2026

The man who actually made the crossing was often the least Irish person in the family.

He had to be. 🇮🇪 An accent was a liability at a hiring gate, a saint's name on a form was a reason to be passed over, and the whole business of getting a footing in America ran on being unremarkable. So the emigrant kept his head down, dropped the O off the front of the name, sent his children to school in shoes he could not afford, and did not go on about home. His American-born son took the lesson further and became simply an American, with a suburban lawn and a company job and an Irishness that amounted to a Mass card and a first name. And then the grandson, secure in a way neither of them had ever been, went looking for every single thing the other two had spent their lives putting down. He learned to spell the townland. He paid a records office in Dublin. He put the O back on. 📜

A historian named Marcus Lee Hansen described exactly this in 1938 and it has been known ever since as Hansen's Law, in the form that what the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember. He was writing about Scandinavians in the Midwest, and he did not live to see the Irish-American generation that would prove him right down to the last detail.

They were told to work the British ship, and they put their hooks over their shoulders and walked off the pier instead.I...
09/02/2026

They were told to work the British ship, and they put their hooks over their shoulders and walked off the pier instead.

In late August 1920 the Irish-American longshoremen of New York stopped handling British vessels. ⚓ It began on the Chelsea piers over a Cunard liner and spread down the North River within days, and the men who started it were not union officials but gangs of dockers, most of them born in Ireland or one generation out of it. Their reason was two men. Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne, born in Cork, had been taken off a liner by a British destroyer and prevented from landing in Ireland. And Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, was in Brixton Prison on hunger strike. The dockers refused to touch British cargo, coal or mail, and where they were ordered back they stayed out. Irish-American women picketed the piers alongside them. The stoppage held for about three and a half weeks and cost the men wages they could not spare, and it spread to Boston before it ended. 🕊️

Terence MacSwiney died in Brixton on 25 October 1920, on the seventy fourth day of his hunger strike. His body was refused a passage through Dublin by the British authorities and landed at Cork instead, and the coffin was carried through the city by men who had never held a rifle.

The raiding party took the duplicating machine, and then they took the mailing list, and the mailing list was the part t...
09/02/2026

The raiding party took the duplicating machine, and then they took the mailing list, and the mailing list was the part that mattered.

The Irish Bulletin was a small typed sheet, four or five pages, run off in a series of borrowed Dublin rooms and posted every weekday of the war to journalists, politicians and sympathisers in Britain, Europe and America. 📰 It printed what the censored newspapers could not, the burnings and the shootings and the raids, with dates and places and names attached to every one, and it was believed abroad precisely because it was so dry and so specific. In March 1921 the office on Molesworth Street was raided and the machine and the subscriber list were carried away. What Dublin Castle did next was stranger than suppression. It printed its own version of the Bulletin, under the same masthead, in the same format, with its own material inside, and posted it out to the Bulletin's own readers as though nothing had changed hands at all. 🖨️

The forgery was spotted almost immediately, and what gave it away was quality. The Castle's copies were too clean, the typing too even, the paper too good. The real Bulletin was back in print within days and did not miss a single issue for the rest of the war.

He was the quietest man in any room he walked into, and for twenty two years he ran New York.Charles Francis Murphy was ...
09/02/2026

He was the quietest man in any room he walked into, and for twenty two years he ran New York.

Charles Francis Murphy was born on the East Side in 1858 to Irish immigrant parents, drove a horsecar for a living, and opened a saloon on Nineteenth Street where the house rule was that no man discussed his business at the bar. 🍺 He took Tammany Hall in 1902 and held it until he died in 1924, longer than any boss before or since. He almost never made a speech and almost never gave a quotation, and there is a story told of him standing silent through the national anthem at a Fourth of July picnic, with an aide remarking that he might not have wanted to commit himself. What Murphy did instead of talking was pick people. After the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire killed 146 workers in 1911, most of them young immigrant women who could not get out of a locked stairwell, he put two of his own men onto the state commission set up to investigate it. One was an assemblyman out of the Fulton Fish Market named Alfred Smith. The other was a young lawyer named Robert Wagner. 🕯️

That commission sent thirty six bills up to Albany on fire escapes, factory inspection, working hours and child labour, and almost every one of them became law inside four years. Two decades later Robert Wagner was in the United States Senate writing the labour law of the New Deal, and he had learned the trade in Charlie Murphy's Tammany Hall.

There was one piece of paper in that coat that mattered more than the ticket did.It was a name and a street, copied out ...
09/02/2026

There was one piece of paper in that coat that mattered more than the ticket did.

It was a name and a street, copied out in somebody else's handwriting, folded small and pinned into the lining where it could not fall out. A cousin in Lawrence. An aunt on Third Avenue. A man from the same parish who had gone out four years earlier and was said to be doing well. 📨 That scrap was the entire plan. Not a job, not a lodging, not one word about what the city would actually be like, just an address and the flat certainty that whoever was at it would not turn her away, because turning her away was not a thing that was done. This is how the Irish went to America for the best part of a century, one person hauling the next one across, and it is why whole townlands ended up on the same few streets of the same few cities. Families out of one corner of Mayo landed in one corner of Cleveland and were still there three generations later. 🏘️

From 1893 the American arrival manifests required every passenger to name the relative or friend they were going to and to give the address, so those private scraps of paper became the official record. Genealogists open those pages now and find the earlier emigrant, the one nobody in the family remembered at all, sitting there on the line below.

He was a Dublin tea and coffee merchant, and in the winter of 1846 he put his own business down and never really picked ...
09/02/2026

He was a Dublin tea and coffee merchant, and in the winter of 1846 he put his own business down and never really picked it up again.

Joseph Bewley and Jonathan Pim founded the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends in Dublin that November, and the Quakers went straight into the west while the government was still arguing about political economy. 🕯️ They sent their own men to look with their own eyes, because they would not fund anything they had not seen. They built soup boilers and shipped them out to be set up in villages, they handed out seed so that the next harvest would exist at all, they gave nets and lines back to fishing families who had pawned their gear, and they sent stirabout into schools. Money came from Friends in England and from Philadelphia and New York, and a great deal of it came from Americans who were not Quakers at all. What set the Friends apart is what they refused to do. There was no test, no attendance at anyone's service, no soup on condition of a change of church. A hungry family was fed and nobody asked what they believed. 🤝

The Friends wound the work up in 1849 with a statement that the need had passed beyond the reach of private charity and belonged to a government. Joseph Bewley died two years later at fifty six, his health broken by the winters he had spent on the roads, and the family name is still over a coffee house on Grafton Street.

Ask an Irish-American of a certain generation where they grew up and you would not get a street name. You would get a sa...
09/01/2026

Ask an Irish-American of a certain generation where they grew up and you would not get a street name. You would get a saint. 🇮🇪

St. Sabina. St. Barnabas. Visitation. Nobody needed a map, because everyone already knew which blocks belonged to which steeple. The parish was the school, the hall, the basketball team, the wedding, the funeral, and the place your mother knew exactly who you had been standing outside with on Friday night. Old country habits travelled well. Back home a parish had done that same job for centuries, so the crossing changed the address and not the instinct. ⛪

Cities were laid out in wards and blocks. The Irish who filled them went on living in parishes anyway.

A historian named Eileen McMahon studied Chicago's Irish Catholics and found that answer so universal she used it for the title of the entire book. 📖

09/01/2026

Nicholas Devereux was born in County Wexford in 1791, into a farming family at the Leap. His older brother John went to America first, and Nicholas followed in 1806 at fifteen years of age, to a clerk's desk in a merchant house in Albany.

By 1814 he was in Utica in business with his brother, and the firm they built became one of the largest in western New York. From trade he moved into land and into banking, and bought four hundred thousand acres in Allegany and Cattaraugus counties from the Holland Land Company.

He set about settling Irish families on that ground. Farms went in, villages followed, and near the end of his life he paid to bring Franciscan teachers out from Italy. He died in 1855. The college they opened is Saint Bonaventure.

09/01/2026

John Siney was born in Queen's County in 1831, the son of tenant farmers. The potato failed, the family went to Wigan in Lancashire, and he was working in a cotton mill at seven years old.

He sailed for America in 1863 and settled in Saint Clair, in the anthracite coal country of Pennsylvania. In 1868 the miners around him built the Workingmen's Benevolent Association and made him president. It grew to twenty thousand members across twenty two districts.

It won the first written contract in American coal and pushed the state into passing mine safety laws. He argued for arbitration ahead of strikes and would not allow violence. He died in 1880 and was buried in the coal town he had organised.

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