OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 54A ************************************************************************ USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. http://www.usgenwebarchives.org ************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 June 7, 2005 ************************************************************************** Historical Collections of Ohio. And Then They Went West Know Your Ohio Tid Bits - part 54 A notes by S. Kelly ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Tid Bits - part 54 A. Irish Emigrants to Ohio Although Irish immigration to this country started after the Mayflower landed in 1620, the entry upon Cleveland began only in the 1820's. Although reports there were a few stragglers who appeared earlier, but their stay was considered only temporary and they left no record of settlement. We know of the trader and frontiersman, George Coghan came to the Western Reserve in about 1747, but as you know, traders never stayed put very long. Again another report that the American schooner " American Eagle" arrived in Cleveland from Buffalo on June 22, 1818, bringing six families of Irish, 47 passengers, who were just three months away from Ireland. Where they settled is unknown, as they arrived when Cleveland was just emerging from the log cabin state, and the town square was still dominated by stumps, and the population of Cleveland then was around 600. It is guessed that they may have made their way to work on the Erie Canal. The advent of the Irish in Cleveland in 1825, was probably introduced from the Eastern seaboard and Pennsylvania, when the construction of the Ohio Canal began. Ground breaking for this undertaking began July 4, 1825 in Cleveland. By 1826, there were enough Irish in Cleveland that a Catholic Priest from Perry County came to hold services for them in private homes. His name was Rev. Fr. Thomas Martin. The Irish were not well received in the early day by the Clevelanders. Their reaction to the Irish immigrant followed several stages. First the native America born withdrew altogether from any part of which the Irish settled. Thus he consigned to the Irish, territory in which had previously considered uninhabitable. On the West side he gave them the territory near the Cuyahoga River, including a peninsula running along the shore of Lake Erie which the Indians a half century earlier had abandoned because of its fever breeding swamps. This was called Whiskey Island, and it soon became a major shantytown. Next the Irish were given the west side of the Cuyahoga River bluffs and there built a ghetto of tar paper shacks. This was called Irishtown Bend. On the East side of the river, where the mercantile city was beginning to bloom,; they were forced into ghettos along the shore of the lake or in the swampland north of what is today the financial center of the city. This at the time was considered unhealthy. All the lands were mostly swamp. Whiskey Island When Moses Cleaveland came upon Whiskey Island, it was a delta and he had some difficulty finding the main channel to the river itself. The fact that he had to come upriver three quarters of a mile before reaching solid ground enough to stand on, gives one a clue as to its composition. Joshua Stow later when writng about it reveiled a nice touch of humor. " I could not help but reflect that history was repeating itself," he wrote, "Moses, like his namesake, was caught in the bullrushes." The land around the river's mouth and for half a mile south of it was pure swamp, with the exception of a ridge that had been formed by the Cuyahoga's current as it curved westward on its way to empting into Lake Erie at a point just east of present day Edgewater Park. It would not be until 1827 that the federal funding and engineering expertise allowed local citizens to dig a channel, creating the river's mouth as we now know it. The Irish did the digging. Since that knoll was the only habitable land anywhere about, the irish took possession of it and began erecting tarpaper shanties on it. Amusing enough, that stretch of slightly elevaed land was once the farm of Lorenzo Carter, the city's first resident, who had built a still on its easternmost end. The land that the Irish had already been named Whiskey Island for years before they arrived. The Irish who squatted there, gave a new meaning to the island's name-- they made it a real island of whiskey. In its hey day it boasted of having 12 or 13 saloons, a considerable achivement since the island was only a mile long and a third of a mile across at its widest point. It was from the first and for any years remained the wildest, brawliest section of Cleveland. Actually Whiskey Island was not an actual island, but rather a peninsula. Not even when its first inhabitants, the " irrinons " or Erie Indians, had a permanent camp there in the middle of the 17th century. It is amusing that the French called the Eries " The Cat People." while two centuries later, the Irish dock workers would become known as " Iron Ore Terriers" or " The Dog People." Those two tribes, the Eries and Irish, would have had a rolicking good time, for they were both mercurial temperment, intemperate and amazingly stubborn, especially when it came to admitting the odds were against them. Be that as it may, when Mose's made his way through Cuyahoga's bullrushes, Whiskey Island was a peninsula jutting westward from where the River's present day mouth is to about West 54th Street. When the river was straigtened to allow nature to assist in the clearing of the sandbars which clogged its mouth, the original entrance to the Lake was filled in and the peninsula then became anchored on its western end. It is now difficult to imagine what a beehive of humanity Whiskey Island was from the 1830's to the turn of the century. The only traces of humanity left on the Island are remnants of Riverbed Road and footers from a number of houses and business establishments. Oh what a hey day of the early Irish settlers! Whiskey Island was triangular in shape, almost an isosceles but not quite, with its northern boundary as its base. The land now north of there resulted both from action of the lake and the action of men, who carted fill there faster than the lake could reclaim it. It is even more difficult for one looking over the Island today to imagine that all told, it had 22 streets crisscrssing it. These streets were laid out by a group of ill-fated investors who purchased the land from Lorenzo Carter. The longest thoroughfare was Bennet Street, which ran the length of the island along its northernmost boundary. It was often said, with some justification, " that most nights on Whiskey Island were lively ones and when the police answered a riot call, the horses would automatically head in that direction." The Irish who inhabited the Island were, indeed, hard-drinking, brawling, and often lawless men, but then, they had plenty of reasons to be all three. They were rootless outcasts of society, a shunned and largely despised group of men, who despite their crude ways, were not insensitive to the injustices that had been heaped upon them from the moment they first set foot on American soil. They had to take out their frustrations on someone and since no one else was available, they took it out on each other. Many of them had aspirations that went beyond three squares. a place to flop and a bottle of whiskey, and they were to prove that in relatively short order, despite being caught up in a mentality common oppressed people. The Irish of early-day Cleveland fluctuated between rage ad despair and needed their bottles and brawls to stave off madness on a epidemic scale. If it weren't for the fact that they were able to retain a collective sense of humor, none of them would have made it, for then they didn't even have consoling words of a priest to get them through their worst moments. Whiskey Island was well within the fever and ague line. It was, in fact, the very heart of the swamplands in which resided the dread malaria carrying mosquito which certainly left its mark upon them who dwelled there. The only question that remained which would get the inhabitants body first, malaria or diarrhea. Living there took a heap of suviving in the 1820's. The early Cleveland Irish and their families working in various places were also plagued by the two legged variety of creature, called man. They were often swindled by hucksters an even more often were victims of a more direct form of thievery. The Cleveland Leader, dated June 6, 1826, wrote an article stating the fact that the Irish were being afforded unfair treatment, as subcontractors and employers were cheating them out of their pay, meager as it was. It was the old game, no matter how long or hard he might labor, he found himself in position of owing the company money at the end of each month. No matter what choice he had, things had to be squared away on the ledger, such as lodging, food, and etc, on the job sites, since jail terms for debtors were still the law of the land. But it did get better for them after the typhoid fever epidemic which originated in the canal areas. +++++++++++++++++++ Moving West In order to understand the plight of the early Ohio Irish, we need to go back to the earlier days when the Irish from the Eastern seaboard cities became to realize that circumstances of poverty was to be no longer tolerated, and they had no future in places where a dozen men applied for every job that opened up. The Irishman's first chance to escape the poverty that existed was provided by a man by the name of DeWitt Clinton, who at the time was Governor of New York, who was championed the cause of the Erie Canal and turned the first shovelful of dirt himself in 1817. The Erie Canal, was 368 miles long, stretching from Rome, New York, on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake Erie, a stretch of water that would join the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes. The Irish in New York and far away as Boston and Baltimore came pouring out of their homes at the first sign up call for work. So many an irishman, 3,000 signees, signed up to dig the big ditch that made it a Paddy affair. The work was back breaking, the pay low and the living conditions poor. But a job was a job, and the Irish could not afford to be choosey. Just clearing the adjoining towpaths was difficult enough, but the digging of the canal was harder work. The Erie was a well planned ditch. It was to be 40 feet wide at surface level, stopping to a width of 26 feet at the bottom of its four foot depth. Megatons of dirt had to be moved from a ditch of 368 miles long. In return for their labor, the canal diggers received $. 30 a day for 12 hours on the job, plus board and lodging. The board consisted of coffee and hardtack, with a little bacon ( sowbelly ) for breakfast, a lunch of bacon, bread and beans, and a dinner of stew, in which the potatoes outweighed the meat. While meat was often maggoty, the potatoes were always good and the beans always filling. A jigger of whiskey was supplied at the days end. Whiskey was, of course, part of any labor contract involving Irishmen, even those negotiated in the cities. The lodging the diggers were provided were army tents, circa War of 1812. They were of good size, but hardly comfortable, especially when a dozen men were crammed into each one. The canvas abodes were suffocating in summer; icebox cold in winter, wet in spring that one could drown in one; but lovely in the the autumn. The westward ho irishmen soon discovered it was not only the wear and tear on their back muscles that were dangerous, but the wear and tear on their insides by creatures they knew nothing about. Those invisible creatures came to be highly respected, if not feared, for they disabled more irishmen than all the back spasms ever suffered by men the world over. It is said that one worker, wrote his family in Ireland, telling about his life and job in the brave new world, " I don'y know dear ones, if any of us will survive, but God willing, we will live to see a better day. Six of my tentmates, died this very day and were stacked like cordwood until they could be taken away. Otherwse I am fine." This gentleman evidently had some upbringing, as although most of the canal diggers were largely illiterate, they provided those who could write a steady souce of added income, for many letters, were sent across the Atlantic. Though an inordinate number of irishmen died beside that 368 mile stretch of water, their passing was no more than a ripple in the construction that was the Erie Canal. No sooner would a irishman be buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, than two would show up and apply for his job. While it might be a tear for some, it was equally a stream of hope and ambition for others. It was that during the two years before the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, the main topic of conversation among the Irish who labored on it was that a new canal was rumored to be in the making. Best of all, it was to be in the nearby Ohio country and almost as long as the Erie, which meant at least eight years work with steady pay and no questions asked about one's ancestry. Things were lookng up for the survivors of the first big ditch. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ To be continued in Tid Bits - part 54B