Iowa Irish to the Fore

IRISH SETTLEMENT, IOWA - The Famine Irish came to this forsaken land in their thousands. They were lured from their East Coast hovels by promises of 160 acres of land, which they could homestead if they stayed longer than five years. For men and women who had endured unimaginable suffering, Iowa must have sounded like El Dorado.

It was an extraordinary promise and thousands came west. The life they left behind was hard, but the land they came to conquer was vast and difficult. The treeless plains stretched to the horizon, the winters were harsh and extreme, the summers full of heat, tornados and occasionally plagues of locusts like in biblical times.

A local historian tells their tale. "Irish farmers settled first south and west of Des Moines in Polk County. Then, in 1853, Reverend Timothy N. Mullen brought a number of Irish families 15 miles southwest of Des Moines to form the 'Irish Settlement' and 'Churchville.' The first group came from Wisconsin in covered wagons drawn by ox-teams. Good land was the attraction.

"Among the early arrivals was Felix McManus, who operated a general variety store in Bevington. He came from County Down. Patrick Dowd was a native of County Roscommon; James Gillespie and William Kennedy were from County Derry and Patrick Smith from County Cavan. All arrived in 1856."

Somehow the Irish arrivals endured, and their legacy is everywhere in this state today. In the little church and graveyard of St. Patrick's, high on a windswept hill overlooking the settlement, the Irish of the period met, married and were buried.

In June of 1979 Pope John Paul II came to this spot, and a crowd of over 250,000 greeted him in the same pastures where the Irish immigrants had toiled so long and hard. They would no doubt have been speechless that the Pope himself had come to see their final resting place.

Their graves are well tended even today. Most died young, having endured lives of hardship and hardscrabble existence. What they endured we can only imagine.

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Nster.com