The Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls

Maureen Murphy writes about the Mission girls.

In fact, O’Brien opposed assisted emigration, but she would do her best for those who were sent to her. While she worked through 1883, Bishop Ireland raised support for her proposal at the May 1883 meeting of the Irish Catholic Colonization Society. The Society voted to endorse the plan and to establish an information bureau at Castle Garden, the New York State immigration depot. (When the federal government assumed the jurisdiction for emigration, Ellis Island replaced Castle Garden as the immigration reception site.)
Bishop Ireland contacted Cardinal John McCloskey in New York about providing services for Irish immigrant girls. The Irish Emigrant Society’s agent Daniel O’Connell assured the cardinal that there was indeed work for a priest in Castle Garden. Father John Riordan, the first chaplain at Castle Garden, officially established the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls on October 1, 1883. 

The Mission had three goals: a Catholic Bureau at Castle Garden to provide information and counseling to immigrants, a temporary home or boarding house where immigrants could be safely sheltered while in transit or while waiting for work, and an immigrants’ chapel. The Mission opened on January 1, 1884. Immigrant girls needing accommodation were placed in local boarding houses until May 1st when a Home for Immigrant Girls was opened at 7 Broadway with a Mrs. Boyle, a matron from the Labor Bureau, hired to look after the residents. The following year, Father Riordan purchased 7 State Street for the Mission home from Isabella Wallace for $70,000. 

Patrick McCoole joined the Mission early in 1906 as its first agent at Castle Garden and then at Ellis Island. He interviewed arriving girls, assisted them with meeting family or friends, advised them about traveling on to destinations outside New York, and escorted those unmet girls or girls without sponsors to the Home. McCoole’s experience with the arriving Irish girls gave him insights that he passed along to immigration and to shipping officials. After McCoole’s death in 1906, Sligo-born Patrick McDonough became the Mission’s agent at Ellis Island, where he met Helen Healy when she landed in 1908; he married her the following year. In addition to his administrative work for the Mission, McDonough edited its quarterly Old Castle Garden (1931-1940). Its pages demonstrate the way that immigrant benevolent societies and programs like those of the Mission helped to acculturate new arrivals. Articles in Old Castle Garden offered sensible advice about education and employment, cautionary tales like “Bridget’s Night Out,” and immigrant literature that helped articulate their sense of loss and displacement.

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Nster.com