A Little Bit of the Emerald Isle in the Bluegrass:

Irish Immigrants of 19th Century Harrison County

Reportedly, the first St. Patrick's Day publicly celebrated in America was in 1737, and that party took place in Boston.  Word had not yet reached the frontier or natives within the boundaries of Harrison County, which didn’t even exist then, and so this day must have passed like any other in the county this time of year, probably a little overcast with some drizzle.  No doubt the residents of Boston were all the happier for keeping the party to themselves, as they didn't have to share a drop of their precious brews with anybody in Kentucky!

In this season of all that is Irish, especially during St. Patrick’s Day when everybody claims to be at least a little Irish in spirit if not in their supply of DNA, it seems a good time to take a little look at the first of those from the Emerald Isle to settle in the Bluegrass of Kentucky, especially in Harrison County, a topic which has largely been ignored by the many local historical accounts available to the researcher.

For instance, the Harrison County chapters of the Collins histories of Kentucky published in 1847 and 1874 mention nothing of Harrison’s Irish, and even later, in 1882 when W.H. Perrin’s history of the county or in 1894 when Chronicles of Cynthiana by Boyd was published, little was said about them except for when individual pedigrees were cited in the biographical sketches of notable citizens.

Neither do the 1896 and 1905 special editions of the Cynthiana Democrat and Log Cabin offer any insights into the early history of the Irish in the county.

Even the articles included in the anthology of the “Cromwell’s Comments” columns, which were originally published in the 1920s and through to the 1940s, had little to say about the county’s Irish, except for an interesting article entitled “The McKees of Paddy’s Run,” but again, that amounted to little more than a biographical sketch of the McKee family which was of Irish descent, but who were not Irish immigrants in Harrison County themselves.

The Earliest Irish

Perhaps the first Irish immigrants whose presence can be documented using Harrison County resources are two teachers in Cynthiana’s early history.  In his chapter on the county’s schools Perrin refers to “William Garmany, an Irishman . . . known as a teacher of languages, who kept his school at intervals in the stone house on the old cemetery ground, from about 1817 till 1830.  He came here from the South, and became a classical teacher of reputation, but though of good habits, it is remembered that he saved no money, and about 1838-39 he concluded to return.”  Perrin makes reference to another early Irishman who was in the county in 1837.  He was “Rev. Charles Crowe, a graduate of Dublin University, Ireland [who] held school in the academy building” but Perrin noted that Mr. Crowe, too, returned to Ireland in 1844 and was still there in 1882 when the Perrin history was published.  Maybe their examples serve to show why so little has been written about the Irish in the old histories of the county; it was just that the earliest Irish immigrants didn’t stay all that long!

A review of statistics to be found in the biographical sketches published in the Harrison County chapters of W.H. Perrin’s History of Bourbon, Scott, Harrison, and Nicholas Counties, Kentucky is about as close as one can get to an accounting of the early presence of any Irish in the county.  Of the 252 distinct sketches published only fifteen document the Irish heritage of their subjects, and only one of the featured subjects, husband or wife, was noted to be an Irish immigrant herself.  That person was Mrs. Sarah Ann (Lang) Douglas (1817~1894), wife of John R. Douglas (1814~1893); her mother, Sarah Ross Lang (ca. 1786~1875), also mentioned in the sketch of John R. Douglas, was also an Irish immigrant from County Fermanagh living in Harrison.  All of the other fourteen published sketches were only for the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of immigrants who were originally from the counties of Antrim, Tyrone, and Donegal, all counties which are a part of the historic province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland.

It has been said that “the Irish emigrant arriving at New York, or going to cities in the interior of the United States--Albany, Utica, Cincinnati, Louisville--went straight to the Irish quarter, called ‘Irish town’, ‘Paddy town’ or ‘The Irish Channel’, where he associated exclusively with his fellow-countrymen and had no contact with American culture or American ideas.”  Lexington, Kentucky has one such “Irishtown,” but it is not known by the author if Cynthiana ever had what might be labeled an Irish quarter.  However, it does appear that many favored the city life.  One snapshot of this is provided by W.H. Perrin when he writes of the history of Catholics in Cynthiana:

The Catholic communion in Cynthiana now comprises about one hundred and twenty families, and thus contains about six hundred souls.  Those families are principally of German and Irish nationality, not very unequal in number, though quite a number of them reside beyond the city limits.  Thus, by census, there are at present in town only thirty-five German voters, and twenty-four Irish voters, and the German population is estimated at one hundred and forty-four, the Irish at one hundred and twenty, within the city limits.

One small area in Harrison County which most visibly exhibits the predominance of Protestant Irish immigrants in Harrison County’s early history is the area between Conrey and Boyd, along Snake Lick in the northern parts of the county.  William Lang (1813~1899), wife Isabelle (Allen) Lang (1816~1894), and their four children journeyed from County Fermanagh and sailed to America aboard the Chippewa in 1848, arriving in New Orleans.  Working their way north they settled along Snake Lick with others who were also Protestants from Ireland, namely their own Lang relations who had preceded them in stages years before, along with William H. Gardiner (1810~1892) and his nephew, the Reverend George W. Gardiner, Sr. (1833~1922), who all eventually settled in that area between the 1830s and 1850s, along with the author’s great-great-grandfather, Beresford Fitzgerald Aylmer (1825~1880).  It might have been called “Little Ulster” for the presence of so many Protestant Irishmen in one locality.  Why Snake Lick?  An insight was provided to the author when Kelat resident Anna Jean Lyons was interviewed about the Lang family in 1994.  She recalled that one reason the Lang family chose the Conrey area as they could let their hogs run loose in the wild and forage for themselves, as was their custom in County Fermanagh.

The sparse evidence to be found in the historical record locally confirms, however, what is known to be the case at the national level, that most of the nation’s first Irish immigrants were Protestant and from the northern counties of Ireland, in Ulster, who are referred to as the “Scotch-Irish” in America, those who originally settled in Northern Ireland from Scotland or their descendants, beginning during the middle decades of the 1600s and continuing at a good pace from there.  While the number of actual Irish immigrants to the Bluegrass was small, a good portion of them were descendants of the first Scotch-Irish who originally settled in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.  It is reported that “perhaps half or more of the settlers beyond the Appalachians . . . were of Scotch-Irish descent,” nearly 300,000 by 1800.  “Bearers of Irish and Scotch-Irish names such as Clark, Brown, Breckinridge, Butler, Campbell, Bullitt, Wallace, Robertson, Preston, Todd, Rice, McKee and others reached greater prominence in the Bluegrass than they ever achieved in their natives lands” according to author R. Gerald Alvey.

The Famine Immigrants

What many refer to as the Irish Potato Famine of the mid- to late-1840s was really just the most prolonged of a long series of famines caused over the preceding decades by a failure of the potato crop in Ireland.  As the health and economic crises grew year after year, the result was a massive Irish exodus headed for the United States, Canada, and Australia.  Of all immigrants in the decade of 1841-1850 there were 780,719 Irish out of the total of 1,713,251 immigrants; during the next decade the numbers fleeing Ireland had grown even more, when the Irish accounted for 914,119 of 2,598,214 immigrants who came to America.  Once they arrived at ports all along the eastern seaboard the news of potential employment with the numerous canal, railroad, and road construction projects in trans-Appalachian, filled the air and enticed them to the interior.  The construction of the Covington & Lexington Railroad, the first to and through Harrison County, along with the construction of Kentucky’s many “pikes” in the region brought many of the Irish to Harrison County in the 1840’s, 1850’s and 1860’s (my own great-great-grandfather among them; he came with the railroad).

By 1850 enough time had passed for the earliest of the Irish Famine immigrants to have worked their way to Cincinnati and up the Licking River Valley.  The 1850 U.S. Census was the first to record the birthplace of each individual, and it lists 56 Irish-born men, women, and children out of a total population in Harrison County of 13,779.

Among these Clanceys, Fitzpatricks, Flinns, Foleys, Joyces, Murphys and O’Haras, to name a few, occupations for twenty-seven of them were recorded for the adults among this group.  Nearly a third were “stonemasons,” six were “laborers,” five were farmers, and among the rest were a couple of blacksmiths and tailors, a wagonmaker and a weaver, a carpenter, and even a “distiller.”

The chart to the right breaks down the Irish immigrants recorded by the 1850 and 1860 censuses by age.  What is most striking is tremendous increase of those between 20- and 49-years-of-age.

The 1850 and 1860 U.S. Censuses bracket the construction of the Covington & Lexington Railroad to Harrison County, and so only a very few were recorded as having been in the employ of the railroad by the census, but local newspapers do record some of the Irish experience in the county.  The Cynthiana News (Dec. 21, 1851) reported on one of the Irish workcrews’ stereotypical entertainments:

Since our last number, there have been several more knock downs, drag outs, blackening of eyes, and breaking of heads among our Irish friends - all traceable, directly or indirectly to the too liberal use of that article called in their own country, ‘the creature’ and sometimes ‘mountain dew’ but known here as ‘old Bourbon.’  It is, however, to the credit of our Irish friends that, although so many of them do get so gloriously drunk when they come to town, yet in no instance has any of them been known to molest any of our citizens.  Their fighting is all among themselves, except when assailed by others.  Their civility does not appear to forsake them however, badly ‘corned’ they become.

The Cynthiana News faithfully reported the progress of the construction of the Covington & Lexington Railroad, which commenced in 1852 and was completed through the county in 1854.  The June 29, 1852 issue broke the news of a cholera outbreak among the Irish workcrews:

We are informed that the cholera has broken out among the hands at several points on the railroad between this place and Covington, we have not yet ascertained an particulars, only that there have been but few deaths as yet.  By way of precaution, the hands have dispersed for a time from the points where the disease has shown itself.  A fisherman, who had just arrived from Falmouth, died of Cholera, on Friday night last, at Major Kimbrough’s near this place.

It is difficult to say exactly how many of these may have been Irish Famine victims fleeing the disaster and disease in Ireland.  By 1860 their number had increased by nearly fivefold in the county, when there were 260 Irish-born citizens living in Harrison County, when the county’s total population was 12,993.  This increased number of Irish no doubt reflects the effect of a decade of famine and disease upon the population of Ireland, and the economic and political stresses which made staying there unbearable for many.

Of the occupations recorded for 190 of the 260 Irish immigrants in 1860, 49 were “turnpikers,” “pike hands,” or “contractors on pike,” 21 were “stone masons” or “stone cutters.”  No doubt many of these were the Irish who had worked their way through Kentucky with the construction of the railroad and who had stayed in the area, taking up jobs which were natural fits for the talents many had brought with them from Ireland, their capacity for hard work and their ability to work with stone, which rated as something of an ancient folk craft in Ireland.  As the unskilled Irish worked on paving the roads, the masons and stone cutters among them were hired to build the stone fences or walls which paralleled their course.  Slaves from nearby estates assisted in their construction, the experience of which proved beneficial in later years as African Americans took over the craft after the Civil War.

Actually, the total number of Irish-born inhabitants of Harrison County is not accurate as recorded by the censuses.  In 1850 there were at least a half-dozen more Irish in the county, but not enumerated as Irish-born, based on my own personal knowledge, and they probably weren’t the only ones; also several Irish-born immigrants researched by the author and who were known to have been in the county in 1860 were not counted or enumerated as Irish-born.  The author’s own great-great-grandfather, Beresford F. Aylmer, was in the county in 1860 (as proven by the annual tax lists of Harrison County for 1860).  Immigrant William Lang and his family (six altogether) of County Fermanagh were enumerated, but the census forms were left blank regarding their places of birth.  Given this detailed knowledge of only two Irish immigrant families, the actual numbers of Irish-born in the county were probably a bit higher overall.

Many, if not most, of Harrison County’s Irish Famine immigrants were Catholic, as were a majority of the Irish who came to America during the famine years, and the most visible proof of their presence in Harrison County and origins are their graves located in the Catholic St. Edward Cemetery near Cynthiana.   These men and women, many of them single, some already married when they left Ireland, came to Kentucky from various counties in the south of Ireland; some tombstones even record the hometowns from which many must have made a sad parting.  The names on the tombstones such as A’Hearn, Brice, Cleary, Fitzpatrick, Keller, Linehan, Long, Moore, Murphy, O’Hearn, O’Sullivan, Ready, and Williams, many clearly of Irish derivation, bear witness to the wide-ranging impact of the Famine in Ireland.  In particular their tombstones record birthplaces and homes in County Waterford, Tipperary, Cork, Kerry, Kilkenny, Waterford, Clare, and Limerick.  No doubt there are representatives in the cemetery from other counties as well.

The 1850s and 1860s represented the highpoint of Irish immigration to the county, with 268 Irish natives in the county by 1870.  The U.S. Censuses from 1870 through 1940 show a steady decline of Irish natives in the county, as the statistics to the right demonstrate:

Although little has been written or recorded about the Irish of Harrison County, their monuments exist all around us in the cemeteries which dot the county.  However, the most important monuments weren’t built in their honor, but were built by them.  True, most are a bit worn and or even covered over by the progress of later generations.  The railroads tracks they laid are still there, but the railroads aren’t what they used to be, the roads they originally constructed have been since repaved and covered over time and again, and the stone fences they built have long been crumbling with age or have entirely disappeared.  It can be said of the Irish that they literally paved the way for future generations of immigrants to travel upon.  But their ultimate legacy, as with those of any immigrant group, is in the culture and sense of family they brought with them and in the descendants who now call Harrison County home.

If you have any information on the immigrant story of Harrison County, whether you can help to fill in a little more of the Irish story, or have any to tell of the other immigrant groups who settled in Harrison County, please contact the author at harrisoncountykyus@gmail.com or write to him at 4716 Andover Square, Indianapolis, Indiana 46226.  New pages will soon be added to tell the story of immigrants to Harrison County at www.harrisoncountyky.us/immigrants/.

This article was originally published in the March 2008 issue of the Harrison Heritage News, the monthly newsletter of the Harrison County (Ky.) Historical Society.  To obtain a PDF version of the texts above just click on the link.