Donlon lecture on Minnesota immigration from Galway

Genealogy, Archaeology, History, Heritage & Folklore

Moderators: Clare Support, Clare Past Mod

Post Reply
smcarberry
Posts: 1281
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 4:31 pm
Location: USA

Donlon lecture on Minnesota immigration from Galway

Post by smcarberry » Tue May 23, 2023 11:27 am

May 24 online event, requiring registration on a safe site

Not squarely a Co. Clare topic, but a great one for those of us who have dipped a toe into the vast lake of immigrants drawn to Minnesota in the 1800s. The Irish were some of the first there, suffering through Native American raids on settler homes in the early 1860s. It turns out that, with the U.S. Civil War ending 1865, the lure of the area increased. An English Quaker named Tuke devised an emigration scheme for the Connemara region of Co. Galway, starting in 1875 and apparently lasting through the early 1900s, aiding relocation to Minnesota. Those earlier Clare immigrants would have been employing and marrying members of this later wave of Irish. An Irish professor, Regina Donlon, took an interest in this, developing an academic study later published as a book (2014) and now the subject of a free online lecture presented in a migration studies series (scroll down to the last-listed one):

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/migratio ... 3872040607

For those of us in the Eastern time zone, the lecture will start at noon on May 24th (tomorrow as I post this). Eventbrite is a conventional, safe site for lectures; it is used widely in the academic community. I have been registering with that website for such events for years without any annoying post-event extraneous contacts from the site.

To register, use the above link and click on the red-area "Select a date" which will automatically result in the right registration page, without actually selecting a date (this lecture is the last in the series). You must input your identity and email address in 2 different places, so be sure to keep scrolling down the webpage, where you also must respond to various questions that sound like they expect you to be in an organized academic community. Don't worry about that - I have been registering for this type of event on this site, by clicking the "Other" category in such queries. You don't have to make up anything in order to be qualified and accepted.

Eventbrite will immediately send a confirming email to the address you provide, and then later it will send another email with the lecture link. No additional registration needed (unlike events on Zoom, which require more work to access Zoom itself). When the lecture time arrives, just click on the provided link within the email, preferably 5 to 10 minutes in advance of the lecture start time.

SMC

Sduddy
Posts: 1826
Joined: Sun Sep 26, 2010 10:07 am

Re: Donlon lecture on Minnesota immigration from Galway

Post by Sduddy » Thu May 25, 2023 10:51 am

Hi Sharon

I was away and only now see your posting, so have missed the lecture. In this reply, as so often, I am going off at a tangent from the main subject, and ask to be forgiven. It was your mention of the English Quaker, Tuke, that did it. I cannot resist taking the opportunity to say that James Hack Tuke came to stay in a hotel in Killaloe, in 1887, and tried using some of his negotiating skills in the hope of preventing the evictions in Bodyke. An article in The Other Clare Vol 43 (2019), “Letters of James Hack Tute and the Bodyke Evictions”, by Gerard Moran, gives a good succinct historical background, which is valuable in itself, and which fills in the gap left in so many accounts of the Land War, i.e. the years between Gladstone’s second Land Act (1881) and the Plan of Campaign (1886-1888). The 1881 Land Act had established a system of deciding rents, which many farmers availed of as it usually meant a reduction in rents. Moran says,
While the rent reductions were based on the economic conditions of the early 1880s, they did not take account of the volatility of agricultural price structures. By the mid-1880s, prices for dairy and beef products were on the decline, while severe weather conditions in the west of Ireland in 1885-1886 led to near famine conditions when the potato crop failed. Once again farmers had difficulty paying their rent, and while in the past they could appeal to the landlord for rent abatement, with the establishment of judicial rents landowners were no longer receptive to the tenants’ appeals for a reduction. Failure to pay the rent meant that tenants lost the security of tenure of the 1881 Land Act, and the landlords could evict the tenants for the non-payment of rents.

Moran goes on to say that when James Tuke visited the west of Ireland in February 1880, he found that conditions among those living on the western seaboard had not improved from the conditions he had witnessed during the famine. It was then that he set up the Tuke Fund, which paid the passage fares for 10,000 people from Connemara (Co. Galway) and from north Mayo. He returned to Ireland in 1885 and during his stay he wrote some letters to his daughters in England. The letters are held by University of Limerick library and a number of them deal with his involvement in the Plan of Campaign in Bodyke. He came to Clare in 1887 and tried to bring about a settlement between Colonel John O’Callaghan and his tenants, but his intervention failed. When he was writing to his daughter Meta on 30 May 1887, he was staying in the Grand Hotel in Killaloe. He writes, “We are spending the Sunday at a most quiet and decent little hotel in this place perhaps hardly known in England except to the anglers who resort here in summer and the clergy who may look upon being Bishop of Killaloe as one of the possible fits in the church”. He goes on the write of how difficult it is to avert the calamity in Bodyke (the evictions). He finishes by saying he’d had no idea that Lough Derg was so “fine and romantic a sheet of water”.

The lecture on the Donlon immigration to Minnesota during the famine sounds interesting and I hope it will be available to read sometime.

Sheila

smcarberry
Posts: 1281
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 4:31 pm
Location: USA

Re: Donlon lecture on Minnesota immigration from Galway

Post by smcarberry » Fri May 26, 2023 1:46 pm

Sheila, this is a much shorter reply than the long one that evaporated when I clicked to post it.

My description of the Donlon lecture was lifted from the migration series' webpages, that it would cover Tuke's assisted migrations from 1875 into the early 1900s. The lecture's focus instead was on 1882 through 1884, the main effort for which Tuke had spent years in advance, to determine the right communities for immigrants from Galway and West Mayo, Then, as time passed post-1884 and there were continuing pleas from such immigrants, additional money was raised and some further effort was made. Overall, this Galway webpage contains a broader description than the Donlon lecture:

https://heritage.galwaycommunityheritag ... ara-1882-4

The Donlon lecture (which I joined late due to technical difficulties) had on screen several publication citations for further reading on the subject of Irish immigration to North America, including this one which I wrote down: "Beyond the American Pale: the Irish in the West, 1845 - 1910" a 2010 book by David M. Emmons, for which its WorldCat description is that it examines Irish settlements in California, Colorado, Montana, and Nevada, with details on Melrose, Iowa, as well as Butte, Montana, and San Francisco CA.

The online lecture during the hour that I was able to experience, was extemporaneously shortened in length, as Dr. Donlon had many more notes to include but some time was needed to explain to the listening audience her academic terms, such as "mutative settlement." What did come across strongly was Tuke's fundamental acceptance criteria for his aided immigrants -- families only, so that nearly-adult and adult children, in addition to a father, were available to immediately procure employment in their new communities, thus arriving at economic stability much faster than with other schemes allowing individuals to travel ahead and set up chain migration. Also, while farming communities were used in other schemes, Tuke concentrated on cities, where unskilled labor was more in demand. In fact, a mid-point drop-off for some of his immigrants was in Cleveland, Ohio (mentioned, not discussed). Most of the lecture contrasted the Minnesota experience, where Tuke immigrants spread more around their cities, different from the "Connemara Patch" Irish settlement in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the same general time period.

Rushing to post this. Sorry, this is such a great topic. I will try to post future ones with more advance notice, but the Claire Santry announcement was just that day when I did my posting.

Sduddy
Posts: 1826
Joined: Sun Sep 26, 2010 10:07 am

Re: Donlon lecture on Minnesota immigration from Galway

Post by Sduddy » Sun May 28, 2023 4:26 pm

Hi Sharon
Thank you for that report on the lecture. The book by David E. Emmons, "Beyond the American Pale: the Irish in the West, 1845 - 1910", sounds interesting.
Sheila

Post Reply