Ballykilcline Rising
From Famine Ireland to Immigrant America
University of Massachusetts Press
In 1847, in the third year of Ireland's Great Famine and the thirteenth year of their rent strike against the Crown, hundreds of tenant farmers in Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, were evicted by the Queen's agents and shipped to New York. Mary Lee Dunn tells their story in this meticulously researched book. Using numerous Irish and U.S. sources and with descendants' help, she traces dozens of the evictees to Rutland, Vermont, as railroads and marble quarries transformed the local economy. She follows the immigrants up to 1870 and learns not only what happened to them but also what light American experience and records cast on their Irish "rebellion."
Dunn begins with Ireland's pre-Famine social and political landscape as context for the Ballykilcline strike. The tenants had rented earlier from the Mahons of Strokestown, whose former property now houses Ireland's Famine Museum. In 1847, landlord Denis Mahon evicted and sent nearly a thousand tenants to Quebec, where half died before or just after reaching the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Mahon was gunned down months later. His murder provoked an international controversy involving the Vatican. An early suspect in the case was a man from Ballykilcline.
In the United States, many of the immigrants resettled in clusters in several locations, including Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, and New York. In Vermont they found jobs in the marble quarries, but some of them lost their homes again in quarry labor actions after 1859. Others prospered in their new lives. A number of Ballykilcline families who stopped in Rutland later moved west; one had a son kidnapped by Indians in Minnesota. Readers who have Irish Famine roots will gain a sense of their own "back story" from this account of Ireland and the native Irish, and scholars in the field of immigration studies will find it particularly useful.
Dunn begins with Ireland's pre-Famine social and political landscape as context for the Ballykilcline strike. The tenants had rented earlier from the Mahons of Strokestown, whose former property now houses Ireland's Famine Museum. In 1847, landlord Denis Mahon evicted and sent nearly a thousand tenants to Quebec, where half died before or just after reaching the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Mahon was gunned down months later. His murder provoked an international controversy involving the Vatican. An early suspect in the case was a man from Ballykilcline.
In the United States, many of the immigrants resettled in clusters in several locations, including Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, and New York. In Vermont they found jobs in the marble quarries, but some of them lost their homes again in quarry labor actions after 1859. Others prospered in their new lives. A number of Ballykilcline families who stopped in Rutland later moved west; one had a son kidnapped by Indians in Minnesota. Readers who have Irish Famine roots will gain a sense of their own "back story" from this account of Ireland and the native Irish, and scholars in the field of immigration studies will find it particularly useful.
A well-researched, compelling narrative. . . . Dunn has scrupulously examined the events leading up to and following the forced evictions . . . she has extended the knowledge of the evictees by investigating their lives in detail on both sides of the Atlantic . . . and she has added significantly to our knowledge, not only of these few hundred, but also of the million emigrants who fled Ireland during the Great Famine.'—Marie E. Daly, New England Historic Genealogical Society
'Dunn offers a wide-ranging study of Irish migrants who left Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, during the mid-19th century. Recent works have characterized these migrants as the victims of premodern isolation. But Dunn links the so-called 'hidden Irish' with British working-class protesters in their resistance to the increasingly dominant political economy. . . . Latter chapters follow these migrants to Rutland, Vermont, where Dunn contests another standard image of the pathetic, passive famine Irish. She points to relatively high rates of literacy among Ballykilcline-born residents of the US, as well as other indicators of rebuilt Irish communities on this side of the Atlantic. . . . Dunn uses genealogies and accounts of a quarry strike to demonstrate the way that Old World connections offered New World utility. Summing Up: Recommended.'—Choice
'Dunn has contributed a valuable, meticulously researched addition to Irish and Irish-American histories and their connections. She has set a strong example to other scholars on how to link specific places in Ireland and the United States and how numerous values and certain conduct transfer, persist, and modify across the Atlantic, an important enterprise.'—Irish Literary Supplement
'Mary Lee Dunn's study of Ballykilcline is a continuation of [Robert] Scally's seminal study The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration. . . . Dunn's tremendous contribution to our historical understanding of Irish emigration is her painstaking research in finding out what happened to the émigrés, who relocated to Rutland [VT]. . . . Evictions, emigrations, labor strikes and anti-Catholic prejudice of the mid-nineteenth century United States did not destroy the Ballykilcline Irish, and some even exchanged their Irish community for greater integration in the community of Americana. The migration of some Ballykilcline émigrés from Rutland, where they thrived eventually, to farming communities in Illinois and Minnesota is another fascinating part of this study, shining a light on the larger historical issues of industrial labor, landownership, and the gradual assimilation and acceptance of the Irish in the United States. Ballykilcline Rising is a fine and meticulously researched book and adds to our larger understanding of Irish identity amidst the overwhelming sense of hardship and antagonism from larger and more powerful forces.'—History
'Mary Lee Dunn, a resourceful genealogist and a descendant of Kilglass emigrants . . . successfully challenges [Robert] Scally's overemphasis [in The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, Emigration] on the people's debilitating ignorance of the ways of the broader world. . . . Dunn's title, Ballykilcline Rising, encapsulates her basic point—the Crown's minions destroyed the place, but not the people. . . . [Her] work makes a significant contribution because she demonstrates, unequivocally, that at least some Ballykilcline and Kilglass people had the resilience and the heart to establish clusters—the social networks of everyday life and community.'—Journal of American Ethnic History
Mary Lee Dunn is a writer and editor affiliated with the graduate Department of Work Environment at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
