Preserving Irish heritage: support the living Irish Village project in the Catskills

On Memorial Day weekend, East Durham in the Catskill Mountains of New York is teeming with Irish and Irish Americans celebrating their Irish heritage at the town’s annual Irish Festival.

But the Michael J. Quill Irish Cultural & Sports Centre and its supporters aim to sustain this vibrant, family-friendly, Irish roots celebration in East Durham all year round with their Irish Village project.

The project mission, which was announced in March 2001, is “to build an Irish village that recreates exactly how a 19th century Irish Village looked, and teach visitors what happened in the lives of the people that lived there on a regular day.”

The Centre’s president, Ken Dudley, who was conducting tours of the grounds for the Irish Village during the East Durham Irish Festival, spoke to IrishCentral about the roject.

“The village will be called Ballygreene, and will depict life as it was in Ireland between 1860 and 1870,” Dudley said.

The Donegal cottage

The organization chose that specific time period in Irish history because it is a “positive time,” according to Dudley, when people in the U.S. were sending money back to Ireland, and the country was “really starting to get its freedoms.”

The first building of the Irish Village, the Donegal Cottage, is already built, and stands on the 120-acre grounds of East Durham’s Irish Cultural Centre. Every piece of the thatched roof cottage was shipped from Ireland, and is authentically “Irish.”

The Donegal Cottage is just the beginning – East Durham’s Irish Village aims to be the largest Irish museum in the U.S. The finished product will feature buildings representing each county in Ireland, all of which will come to life on a daily basis with Irish villagers going about a typical day in the mid 19^th century.

“Nothing like this exists in the States or in Ireland,” said Dudley. “I envision that schoolchildren will come and get first-hand education about what life was like in Ireland.”

Red brick map of Ireland

All nationalities will be welcome to the Village to enjoy and learn about Irish traditions.

Already built within the Michael J. Quill Cultural Centre grounds is the Irish Park, a 1-acre life-size map of Ireland made out of red bricks. All the Irish counties are represented, are marked with county flags and are measured to scale.

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Nster.com