The contribution of Irish labor following the Great Famine

Between 1845 and 1855, some 1.8 million left Ireland for Canada and the United States. Those who were lucky enough to survive the brutal journey to the New World were motivated by the hope of new possibilities, including the promise of employment.

Mills also began to hire more Irish during the influx of Famine immigration. “No Irish Need Apply” signs were prevalent through the 1830s, and some Irish women were segregated when first hired in mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, where Yankee Prostestants called “Lowell Girls” had previously held the majority of the jobs. However, by the 1850s mills were hiring the Irish regularly because they would work for less money and did not make the same demands for reasonable working conditions that Yankee mill girls were beginning to stand for in their historically famous strikes. Between 1828 and 1850, Lowell’s population grew from 3,500 to 35,000. In 1860, approximately 62 percent of Lowell’s textile workers were immigrants, half of whom were Irish.

The Connecticut River Valley saw a large number of Irish immigrants in the wake of the Great Famine, and many settled in Hadley Falls, Massachusetts, the upcoming industrial center upriver from Springfield which was renamed Holyoke in 1850 to fight negative attitudes towards “the Irish Parish.” Some 5,000 Irish settled there by 1855 and built a dam and a series of canals that would provide water power to mills and factories, primarily for textiles and paper. Local Catholic churches played a vital role in forming a sense of community and pride to the Irish in Holyoke, a legacy that continues to this day in the Holyoke St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Some Irish immigrants went west towards California, especially San Francisco, to seek their fortune in the Gold Rush of 1848-1855. San Francisco’s Irish population grew to 4,200 by 1852 and 30,000 by 1880, and the Irish were the largest group of foreign-born workers in the city by that year. There was no easy way to travel to California, either by ship or the treacherous 2,200 mile journey by land from trail heads in Missouri or Iowa that could easily take three or four months. Gold mining was difficult and time-consuming work, and one bucket of soil might turn out only ten cents’ worth of gold. One estimate is that one in five miners to arrive in California in 1849 died within six months of disease, hunger, accidents and injury, or violence.

In 1859, two Irishmen named Peter O’Reily and Patrick McLaughlin found silver in what is now Virginia City, Nevada, in the famous Comstock Lode of silver ore. Their discovery brought thousands of Irish to Nevada, and Virginia City was one-third Irish by the mid-1870s. The “Bonanza Kings” or “Irish Four,” John Mackay, James Flood, James Fair and William O’Brien, made their fortunes organizing the Consolidated Virginia Silver Mine near Virginia City, Nevada.

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