Tag Archives: Tyrone

Ellis Island, Annie Moore and other Irish news of 1892

Happy New Year!  Today is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Ellis Island immigration center in New York. Cork teenager Annie Moore, joined by two younger brothers, was the first immigrant to enter this busy portal to America. She stepped off a steamship gangplank and into the massive building, where she was greeted by U.S. government officials.

The “rosy-cheeked Irish girl” was handed a $10 gold piece in a brief ceremony scaled back from earlier plans for a “pretentious opening,” The New York Times reported. Her arrival in America also was noted a few days later in a one-paragraph brief on page 2 of the Irish Examiner.

The attention didn’t last long.

“Annie may have stepped off the boat and into American legend—the first of 12 million to pass through Ellis Island in its 62 years of operation—but as an actual person she seemed to dissolve the minute she reached Manhattan,” Jesse Green wrote in this 2010 New York magazine piece that explores the fact and fiction of the popular immigration story.

The Times story that helped make Annie a legend also reported that Ellen King, “on her way from Waterford, Ireland, to a small town in Minnesota,” was the first to purchase a railroad ticket at Ellis Island. And it hinted ominously of detained immigrants placed “in a wire-screened inclosure (sic).”

The arrival of these immigrants at Ellis Island was not the only Ireland-related news reported by the Times in the first days of January 1892. Other stories included:

  • The  wreck of the schooner Catherine Richards off the coast of county Kerry on 29 December 1891, killing six crew.  The sailing vessel was carrying a cargo of grain from Africa to Limerick.
  • The 31 December 1891, explosion at Dublin Castle, two months after the death of Charles Stuart Parnell, which stirred “whisperings that the ‘physical force’ party were tired of their enforced inactivity and had given up all hope of Ireland gaining her independence through Parliamentary agitation.”
  • The pending U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn the Supreme Court of Nebraska and allow James E. Boyd to become governor of the state. Boyd was born county Tyrone in 1834 and emigrated to America 10 years later with his family. Boyd’s father applied for U.S. citizenship in Ohio but never completed the process, later moving the family to Nebraska, where his son become involved in business and politics. Once Boyd won the 1890 governor’s contest, outgoing Gov. John M. Thayer challenged his citizenship and refused to yield the office. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Boyd and other residents of Nebraska gained citizenship when the state joined the union in 1867.

Five years after opening, the Ellis Island center that welcomed Annie Moore burned to the ground in a massive fire that also consumed 40 year of federal and state immigration records. It is the replacement building opened in December 1900 that became the iconic symbol of U.S. immigration through 1954. This is where my Kerry-born maternal grandmother and grandfather arrived in 1912 and 1913, respectively. Today, it operates as the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.

The original immigration center at Ellis Island, top, opened New Year’s Day, 1892. It burned to the ground five years later. It was replaced by the iconic building, below, that is now a national museum of immigration.

All Irish towns within five miles of rail in 1890?

UPDATE: As mentioned below, I emailed Cathal Ó hÓisín so he could reply to this post. I got a response in less than 24 hours. He wrote:

I do accept that there were areas that may have been further than my assertion but the accusation that I had said that anything ‘was better under the British’ is at the core of my gripe with the IT (Irish Times) piece. It was also factually incorrect on a number of other issues, but thanks for your interest. GRMA (Go raibh maith agat, or Thank you) Cathal

ORIGINAL POST

A statement by Derry MLA Cathal Ó hÓisín at Sinn Féin‘s recent ardfheis caught my attention. He suggested that Ireland’s rail transport system had been better under the British, then added:

“…in 1890 no town or village in Ireland was more than five miles from a rail track. Many counties now, such as Tyrone, Fermanagh and Donegal have not heard or seen a train for over 60 years.”

In the spirit of PolitiFact.com, the U.S. politics fact-checking website edited by my wife, I decided to take a closer look at the two statements.

Surely the first statement couldn’t be true, I thought. The date is close to the 1888 opening of the Lartigue monorail in north Kerry. The unusual train linked the mainline railroad at the market town of Listowel to the seacoast village of Ballybunion.

The nearby village of Ballylongford, my maternal grandmother’s home, never got such a connection. It is seven miles from Listowel and almost nine miles from Ballybunion. Hardly within five miles of any “iron road.”

This map shows a robust Irish railways system in 1906. Yet many parts of the country were more than five miles from a rail line. I haven’t found any evidence of significant track loss in the 16 years from the 1890 date suggested by  Ó hÓisín.  (Click on the map for a larger version.)

Map_Rail_Ireland_Viceregal_Commission_1906

So what about the second part of the statement, that Tyrone, Fermanagh and Donegal lost train service more than 60 years ago? That’s 1954.

This linked list shows the opening and closing dates for dozens of Irish railway stations. Carrickmore in Tyrone closed 15 February 1965; Enniskillen in Fermanagh shuttered 1 October 1957; the first of January, 1960 was the end of the line for the station at Donegal.

(As for north Kerry, the Lartigue line closed 14 October 1924, and the last mainline train of the Great Southern Railway chugged away from the Listowel station on 6 November 1983.)

Ó hÓisín’s larger point was that “huge swathes of the west and particularly the northwest [of the island of Ireland] are devoid of any meaningful transport system on the road or any rail network,” which he further described as another “insidious form of partition.”

That could and should be argued at greater length by Irish politicians and their constituents. As for Ó hÓisín’s comments about no Irish town being more than five miles from rail in 1890, and the three northwest counties being without rail for more than 60 years, this fact-checker rates both statements as false.

(In the interest of fair comment I am emailing a copy of this published blog to  Ó hÓisín for any reply he cares to make. MH)