Northeastern Pennsylvania's Irish celebrate their heritage
Long before the interstate highway uprooted the American concept of travel and commerce, a region like Northeastern Pennsylvania was a densely forested hinterland that Native American tribes struggled to traverse.
The endlessly winding streams and waterfalls seemed unchanged by time, untouched by man. Patches of edible berries and mushrooms were never far from the springs which fed and sustained local fauna.
Designated St. Anthony's Wilderness, this mountainous region of Penn's Woods became the industrial center of America, a region that, in spite of its initial inaccessibility, would fuel the sprouting country thanks to the mineral found beneath its surface.
Mining for anthracite required labor, but the Welsh and English miners could not meet the demands for coal in New York and Philadelphia. It was at the squalid ports of these cities that Irish Catholic peasants - newly arrived from a blighted island where they were starved by landlords, oppressed by English colonialists and neglected by their church - would embrace the opportunities found in Northeastern Pennsylvania's mining patch towns.
The Irish were the largest immigrant group to settle in the coal region. Having no experience in coal mining, the Irish were cast to the bottom of the economic ladder and subjected to bigotry and indignities they thought they had escaped by fleeing Ireland. Historians have exhaustively and deservedly chronicled their struggle, resilience and assimilation.
The St. Patrick's Day festivities celebrated throughout the region annually testify to the unique culture they created, a culture spiritually linked to Ireland. The camaraderie of these immigrants' descendants seems unbreakable, but when the Irish immigrants first arrived in the early 19th century, they were divided by the cultural and regional differences in their homeland.
What resulted was a diaspora where Irish immigrants would settle in patches of their own kind. They quickly learned that the Welsh and English miners and operators, along with German farmers, didn't like them.
The first Irish immigrants to settle were actually pre-famine arrivals from the province of Connacht. They lived in Pottsville and its outskirts. These immigrants established St. Patrick's Church on Mahantongo Street in 1828.
Rich coal vein
Although extracting anthracite occurred as early as the late 1700s in parts of Schuylkill and northern Lebanon counties, it was during the mid-1820s that an Irish political fugitive discovered the region's richest vein.
John Charles (whose real name was Fitzgerald) fled his family of Irish nobility to escape arrest and settled as a blacksmith in the Conyngham Valley. In 1826, while digging out a groundhog in what became Hazleton, Charles came across "stone coal." Such small discoveries ignited the region and accelerated its growth, shaping towns that revolved around the four anthracite fields.
The Irish provided the labor supply and came to the region in increasing numbers after the 1830s. In just one instance, the population of Schuylkill County grew from 11,000 to 116,000 during the first five decades of coal production. Settlements like St. Clair and Beaver Meadows became enclaves of Irish peasants hailing from the country's four provinces.
An overwhelming number of Irish immigrants hailed from County Donegal, the last county partitioned to the Republic in 1921. Donegal lies at the northwestern tip of Ulster, an isolated region where the Catholic families subsisted as tenant farmers. Donegal was also one of the most religiously integrated parts of Ireland. Their estranged Presbyterian cousins were the original frontiersmen of Pennsylvania, having settled in hamlets along the Susquehanna River in Cumberland and Lancaster counties in the early 1700s.
Donegal's Catholics suffered through centuries of oppressive anti-Catholicism, abusive landlords and a hostile English regime. The Potato Famine of the 1840s forced their evacuation from Donegal. They followed the Ulster Presbyterians to the United States, only a century later and under devastating circumstances. Many Donegal immigrants stayed in the tenements of New York City and Philadelphia, but others embraced the potential opportunities found in burgeoning coal mining communities like Girardville, Mauch Chunk and Summit Hill, along with Tamaqua, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton's South Side.
Isolated in a region far removed from more populous areas of Ireland, most of these immigrants only spoke Gaelic. They were particularly close-knit, making their adaptation more difficult than many Irish arrivals.
The coal region also attracted large numbers of Irish from southern Munster and pockets of Leinster. Immigrants from Connacht mainly settled in Schuylkill, Lackawanna and eastern Northumberland counties. Droves of Connacht Irish settled in Centralia, while large pockets of immigrants from Mayo and Sligo lived in Scranton and surrounding patch towns. Immigrants from County Cork scattered throughout the region. The Irish of County Kilkenny mostly stayed in Schuylkill County communities like Shenandoah and Minersville. The differences among these Irish immigrants inflamed tensions already created by established Welsh and English operators and miners.
The tensions, however manufactured they seemed, were deep cultural differences more realized in America than Ireland. In Ireland, these immigrants never left their county, let alone their village or farm. Now they were exposed to purportedly fellow Irishmen in densely populated areas, which had only recently been desolate mountains.
To operators, no differences existed among these lowly immigrants. They were cruelly consigned to accept pitiful living conditions. Residing in miserable shanties, the immigrants often were reluctant to sign leases because of their ordeals with landlords in Ireland. Their frequent refusal added to their stigma, and it was as if all the injustices these immigrants suffered only enriched the people who hired them.
The injustices were driven not only by the money found in cheap labor, but by bigotry stemming from the very land the Irish just evacuated. The Irish were captives in their own country, agricultural serfs of the British Empire. Now they found themselves in a new feudal system, a system underground but with the same British bosses nursing centuries-old prejudices.
The Irish were expendable products on a never-ending assembly line. There was always a newly arrived immigrant willing to work in the shoddily constructed mines, however low the pay.
It wasn't long before the Irish began to protest work conditions through labor activism. Similar to rebellions and strikes in the Irish countryside, immigrants initially protested their medieval treatment in Minersville, St. Clair and Ashland. Collieries would shut down, but their threats and demands didn't result in any remedial changes.
Adding to their labor woes was the requirement to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War. The Irish miners were living in a despotic caste system, and now they suffered the injustice of the conscription law. The law didn't trigger the violent Irish response found in New York City, but the combination of abuse, neglect, and now compulsory service soon proved too much to bear.
The mix of labor activism and antiwar sentiment culminated in the first assassination attributed to the Molly Maguires in 1862. An alleged Irish terrorist organization that operated mostly in Schuylkill County, the Mollies were accused of using the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) as a front for their secret society. Historians have perpetually disputed their motives and structure, but the Mollies' vigilante tactics originated in Ireland. Most alleged Mollies immigrated from Donegal and were active in their local AOH chapters.
The first assassination was attributed to Jack Kehoe, who allegedly murdered a mine foreman when arguing over the Civil War. Kehoe was labeled the Mollies' ringleader, and a succession of murders and kidnappings paralyzed the region's aristocracy throughout the decade.
Interethnic tensions peaked during the years of Molly Maguire activity. In his influential study of the period, "Making Sense of the Molly Maguires," author Kevin Kenny notes that pockets of Schuylkill County became bastions of ethnic gang warfare.
The Molly Maguires particularly divided the Irish. The Irish "Sheet Iron Gang," for example, was opposed to the Mollies and often allied themselves with the Welsh "Modocs." The Sheet Iron Gang was mostly composed of skilled Irish miners from the Castlecomer region of Kilkenny, which had active anthracite mines. Although Irish Catholics, they arrived in the region in a favorable position, more equal to British fellow miners. Fellow Irishmen resented their treatment and refusal to join the AOH.
Kilkenny Irish were often called "soupers," a term of derision for Protestant converts. Many Kilkenny Irish were descendants of English Protestant miners. Having come from southeast Ireland, these skilled miners felt no allegiance to the unskilled Irish of Connacht and Ulster.
In addition to interethnic tensions, a powerful triumvirate - Franklin Gowen's Reading Railroad, Benjamin Bannon's Miner's Journal, and Philadelphia Archbishop James Wood - eventually crushed Molly Maguire activity and labor rebellions. Through a legal twist abetted by the state government, Gowen ended up owning most mining operations in Schuylkill County.
It was Gowen who hired a Pinkerton detective, Donegal-born James McParlan, to infiltrate and expose the Molly Maguires. Their unraveling was aided by Bannon, a fervent Whig Party member and Schuylkill County's conscription leader. Bannon's newspaper portrayed the region's Irish not only as criminally prone drunks, but also as Democrats who were politically motivated by the pope to destroy local Protestant power.
Archbishop Wood, meanwhile, demonized the accused Mollies and condemned all local Irish fraternal activity. Wood was a sad departure from his predecessor, St. John Neumann, who learned Gaelic to establish Irish parishes like St. Gabriel's in Hazleton and St. Kieran's in Heckscherville. It was his complicity which sealed the Mollies' fate, resulting in 20 men publicly hanged between 1877 and 1879.
The Molly Maguire episode was a major blow to the labor cause, but in the long term their experience solidified organized action against the powerful operators. Their protests culminated in the Coal Strike of 1902, which was led by the United Mine Workers' Johnny Mitchell. Through their tireless efforts, thousands of Irishmen and other immigrants finally received higher wages, reduced hours and humane treatment.
Throughout those decades of appalling living conditions, the Irish persevered by finding solace in their parishes, forming fraternal organizations and celebrating the culture they always struggled to preserve.
St. Patrick's Day parades were celebrated as early as the 1830s, the first being held in Carbondale. Irish-language organizations were organized in Wilkes-Barre, and taverns throughout the region were intimate portals to Ireland. Many Irishmen became card-carrying members of the AOH or Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.
As other European immigrants settled in the region, the Irish began to enjoy some upward social mobility. This was especially true in Scranton, where a large number of Irish families lived in neighborhoods like Bellevue and Providence. Scranton was the largest industrial city in the region, attracting Irish immigrants not just for mining, but also its iron, railroad and manufacturing industries.
The Irish sections of Scranton became a political foothold into municipal government, giving them access to county, state and federal positions. Scranton's overwhelmingly large Irish population empowered the local Democratic Party, and the region's first Irish Catholic mayor, Matthew Loftus, was elected in 1872. By the late 1880s, the city even had an institution of higher education, St. Thomas College, which is now known as the University of Scranton.
Before establishing themselves as equals in a region devoid of any equality, the Irish underwent years of humiliating and callous treatment. They eventually triumphed over cultural and religious barriers.
Ironically, their success has resulted in a collective amnesia regarding those early struggles. But one only needs to walk in St. Gabriel's Cemetery in Hazleton to be reminded of their toil. It's at the cemetery where one Irish miner's epitaph reads, "Forty years I worked with pick and drill, down in the mines against my will. The coal king's slave, but now it's passed. Thanks be to God I am free at last."
Hershey resident Charles McElwee works for a public relations firm in Harrisburg. He is active in the Greater Hazleton Historical Society.