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Question:

The Famine Ships The Irish Exodus to America 1846 to 1851 Edward Laxton. Could you provide a synopsis, the poverty of Irish people, the state of the ships, con men, sinking, running aground. Particularly the priest Fr Tom Hore who condemned the landlords organised people to emigrate to New Orleans and beyond also accompanying them. Also mention Vere Foster

Thought for 46s

Edward Laxton’s The Famine Ships (1996) is not a grand political history of the Great Hunger. It is a book of voyages: captains, passenger lists, tickets, wrecks, and the people who survived them. Between 1846 and 1851 more than a million Irish crossed the Atlantic. About a million others died at home. Laxton strings the crossings together as vignettes—Henry Ford’s father, Patrick Kennedy, Grosse Île, leaky barques, and one Wexford priest who tried to move a whole parish to America.

archive.orgPoverty at homeBy the 1840s a huge share of the rural poor lived on potatoes grown on tiny, subdivided plots. The rest of Irish agriculture was commercial. Grain, meat and butter still left the country while the blight (Phytophthora infestans) turned the cottier’s crop to slime. Mini-famines had already been common. When the harvest failed again and again, families ate seed potatoes, then grass, then nothing. Workhouses overflowed. Evictions rose. Some landlords calculated that a steerage ticket cost less than the poor-rate that paid for soup kitchens and indoor relief, and simply shipped tenants out. Lord Palmerston’s clearances from Sligo toward Canada in winter became a byword for that calculation.

latimes.comFather Thomas Hore (often spelled Hoare), parish priest of Killaveny and Annacurra on the Wexford–Wicklow border, put it in church language: the fields produced little, and what they produced landlords took. He told packed congregations that America offered land, independence from those landlords, and a chance to keep a Catholic community intact. About 400 families—roughly 1,200 people—spent nearly a year scraping together the $25 steerage fare.

nolanfamilies.orgThe shipsAnything that floated was pressed into the trade: old timber ships on the Canada run, converted coasters, American packets, British vessels allowed three passengers per five tons against America’s two. Bunks were often six feet square for four people. Legal rations were thin—breadstuffs, oatmeal, rice, a few quarts of water a day—and captains skimped. Cooking was done on brick hearths on deck when weather allowed. In storms people were shut below in the dark, seasick, wet, and without sanitation. Typhus (“ship fever”), carried by lice, tore through the holds, the Liverpool lodging houses, and the quarantine sheds. 1847 was the coffin-ship year, especially on the cheaper Canadian route: more than 100,000 sailed for British North America; tens of thousands sickened; conservative counts put deaths around 20,000 at sea and in Quebec and Montreal combined. Grosse Île became a mass grave and a graveyard for priests and doctors as well.

faroutliers.comNot every ship was a coffin. Some American packets were faster and better run. Many crossings were merely miserable rather than lethal. But the pattern was overcrowding, short water, spoiled food, and crews who treated steerage as cargo.Con menThe worst fraud was often on land, especially in Liverpool, the great jumping-off port. A million Irish passed through in the famine years. Dock-runners steered new arrivals to particular lodging houses and chandlers for a cut. Brokers sold space in blocks. Tickets were delayed, rooms overcrowded, luggage held hostage, exchange rates shaved. Medical inspection was a farce. Guides warned emigrants in print; many still arrived penniless before they ever saw the ocean. On board, some captains withheld the contracted rations unless bribed. Vere Foster later documented exactly that on the Washington.Sinking and running agroundLaxton’s chapter titles tell the weather: icebergs, miraculous escapes, scapegoats after wrecks. The era’s disasters match the book’s texture:

• The brig Exmouth, Londonderry for Quebec, April 1847, was driven onto Islay in a gale. About 240 died; three crew survived. Many of the dead were women and children going to join men already in Canada.
• The little brig Hannah (Laxton treats tiny vessels like her as “the smallest in the famine fleet”) struck ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in April 1849. The captain and officers took the only boat. Passengers were helped onto an ice floe; dozens died of cold and drowning.
• The Ocean Monarch burned off the Welsh coast in 1848 shortly after leaving Liverpool for Boston; well over 150 died.

Winter sailings, unseaworthy hulls, and captains who had never seen the ice made grounding and foundering ordinary risks, not freak accidents.

latimes.comFather Tom HoreHore had already lived in America. Ordained in Virginia in the 1820s, he returned to Ireland, then watched the famine hollow his parishes. He condemned the landlord system from the altar and organized a collective exit rather than a scatter of individuals.In October 1850 three ships left Liverpool for New Orleans:

• Ticonderoga (1,090 tons, New York registry) — Hore and about 450 people; about 40 days.
• Loodianah (915 tons) — about 450; nearly two months.
• Chasca (smaller, Boston registry) — about 300, eight days later; up to 70 days.

Steerage bought three quarts of water a day, scanty weekly food, and ten cubic feet of space. The plan was Arkansas, where Bishop Andrew Byrne of Little Rock had spoken of good land. Byrne was dead by the time they arrived; the best ground was gone. Some stayed in New Orleans or Arkansas. Others waited in St. Louis. Hore went north, found black soil in Allamakee County, Iowa that looked like home, and bought more than 2,000 acres of government land at $1.25 an acre.When he called the flock from St. Louis, only eighteen families could still come. The rest were broke, hired, sick, or headed to Texas. Those eighteen—and later arrivals from the other two ships—landed near what they called Wexford Creek, built log cabins and a log church, and named the place Wexford, Iowa. Hore farmed, rode circuit to scattered Catholics, and in 1857 went home to Ireland, where he died as parish priest of Cloughbawn in 1864. Descendants still live around the Iowa parish. That is the story Laxton flags in the publisher’s own summary: a Wexford priest, eighteen families, the Mississippi and Missouri, a second Wexford.

iagenweb.orgVere FosterVere Henry Louis Foster (1819–1900), younger son of an Anglo-Irish diplomatic family with an estate in County Louth, is the other moral counterweight of these years. Appalled by the roads full of starving people, he spent his own money on relief and on passages for poor girls. In October 1850 he disguised himself as a steerage passenger and boarded the Washington at Liverpool with some 900 others. Rations were withheld for days. Water was chaotic. Crew violence was routine. Children died of dysentery. Foster himself was beaten, caught the fever, and spent months in hospital after New York.He published the evidence, helped push tighter Passenger Acts, printed cheap guides for emigrants, and later poured his fortune into assisted female emigration and Irish national schools. Stephen de Vere had done a similar undercover passage to Canada in 1847; Foster did it to the United States in 1850. Laxton’s Liverpool chapters—runners, brokers, short rations—are the world Foster walked into on purpose.

en.wikipedia.orgThe book’s last impression is not only horror. Some ships were well found. Some captains were decent. Aid ships such as the USS Jamestown ran the other way, Boston to Cork, with food. Remittances soon flowed home. But the typical famine passenger left a cabin of rotting potatoes, paid runners in Liverpool, slept four to a bunk, and prayed the hull would hold until New Orleans, New York, or Quebec. Hore tried to turn that gamble into a parish. Foster tried to make the next ship less of a coffin.

6 web pages

Explore the Wexford Iowa community

Examine the USS Jamestown relief mission

Explore the Wexford Iowa community

Thought for 3s

I’ll look up the present-day community of Wexford, Iowa—the parish, landscape, and what remains of Father Hore’s settlement.Wexford, Iowa is not a town in the usual sense. It never incorporated. It is a valley, a creek, a cemetery, and a limestone church—the place Father Thomas Hore’s famine parish finally put down roots in 1851.

mississippivalleytraveler.comThe Great River Road drops into a bowl of hardwood hills about eight miles south of Lansing and five or six north of Harpers Ferry, in Allamakee County. Wexford Creek cuts the floor of the hollow. The church sits on a knoll above it, graves on three sides, timber on the fourth. The settlers said the folds of land reminded them of County Wexford. That is why the name stuck.https://artifacts.grokusercontent.com/third-party-image

icwexford.org

How the colony took

Hore bought more than 2,000 acres of government land in Lafayette and Taylor Townships at $1.25 an acre in February–April 1851. Of the hundreds who had sailed with him to New Orleans, only eighteen families boarded the steamer Franklin at St. Louis and came ashore at Lafayette Landing, near the mouth of what they called Priest Coulee or Wexford Creek. Others from the Loodianah and Chasca filtered in later. They cleared timber for cabins, planted wheat, corn, potatoes and cattle, and put up a log chapel dedicated to St. George on 23 April 1851—the saint’s feast, and the first Catholic church in this stretch of northeast Iowa.

icwexford.org The first baptism was Mary Ann Heatly, 25 May 1851. The first marriage was James Murphy and Mrs McNamara, January 1852. Hore was the only resident priest in the county until 1855. He rode to scattered Catholics as far as Minnesota. A frame church replaced the log one in the late 1850s. The stone church that still stands was raised in the 1860s under Father Hannon: Niagara limestone quarried from the hills and hauled by oxen, parish labor, Hugh Vincent Gildea directing. It was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception (often dated around 1868–70). A stained-glass window still reads IN MEMORY OF REV. THOMAS HOARE DONATED BY THE FIRST SETTLERS. Note the spelling on the glass—Hoare—one of several used in the records.

iagenweb.org By 1868 the parish had about a hundred families. Hore had already gone home to Ireland (1857–58 in most accounts) and died at Cloughbawn in 1864. Germans and Scandinavians moved into the same hills. The Irish core held. Early family names still turn up on stones and in county histories: Heatley, Murphy, Lamb, Nolan/Noland, Kelly, Kinsella, Brennan, Brophy, Bulger, Collins, Curran, Esmond, Fennel, Finn, Gavin, Joyce, McNamara, Mullins, O’Neil, Ryan, Stafford, Sullivan, Mooney, Madden, and others. A passenger list from the Ticonderoga hangs at the back of the church.

iagenweb.org What it is now

Wexford is still unincorporated. The community is the parish. Immaculate Conception sits at 1416 Great River Road, Lansing, IA 52151. It belongs to the Archdiocese of Dubuque and is clustered as Holy Family of the Bluffs with St. Ann–St. Joseph in Harpers Ferry, Immaculate Conception in Lansing, and St. Joseph in New Albin. The pastor lives in Lansing. Weekend Mass at Wexford is Saturday 5:30 p.m. The church is often open in daylight for prayer; hours shift with the season. Phone: (563) 538-4171. Sites: icwexford.org and the cluster site holyfamilyofthebluffs.org.

icwexford.org Irish Central has described a congregation of about a hundred—small, rural, and still self-consciously Irish. The parish lost its own resident pastor in November 2010 after more than a century and a half of having one. Additions over time: rectory 1905, belfry and vestibule 1919, parish hall 1952, Our Lady of the Wayside shrine 1965, blessed by Archbishop Byrne to “reign over the hills and valleys.” Seventeen women from the parish entered religious life over the generations; priest-sons came later (the Hawes brothers in the 1950s).

irishcentral.com The cemetery wraps the church. First burials in 1853 mixed Irish, French and English names. Farming here was never easy: sudden hills, dense hardwood, creeks. People stayed anyway. https://artifacts.grokusercontent.com/third-party-image

mississippivalleytraveler.com The valley around the church

This is Iowa’s Driftless country—never scraped flat by the last glaciers—so the Mississippi bluffs rise steep and the hollows stay wooded. Wexford Creek and the Great River Road (and the Driftless Area Scenic Byway) bring weekend traffic. Next to the church is Wexford Valley Campground (Great River Road / Wexford Hollow; 563-586-2005), a small waterside site whose reviews keep saying the same thing: beautiful valley, church next door. Lansing is eight miles north; Harpers Ferry about five and a half south. Effigy Mounds National Monument, Yellow River State Forest, and the river towns of McGregor and Marquette sit within an easy drive.

iowaroadtrip.net There is no Main Street. Services are in Lansing or Harpers Ferry. What Wexford offers is the original bargain Hore made with his people: land that looked like home, a church they built themselves, and graves that keep the passenger lists in the ground.If you go, the useful stop is the stone church and cemetery, then the valley road. The Ticonderoga list inside is the thread back to Liverpool, New Orleans, and the eighteen families who finished the journey when most of the 1,200 could not.

Explore Father Hore’s Irish origins

Visit Effigy Mounds National Monument

Last paragraph: Ireland famine poverty poor landlords numbers lost from typhus and other diseases

Thought for 10s

I’ll pull reliable famine mortality figures so the closing paragraph can sit on the poverty, landlords, and disease numbers you asked for.The valley church at Wexford only makes sense against the Ireland those families fled. Before the blight, some eight million people lived on the island; a third of them depended on the potato because the land system had squeezed cottiers onto scraps while grain, cattle and butter still left the country to pay rent. Absentee and resident landlords alike collected those rents; when the crop failed they evicted, consolidated holdings, and in the worst cases calculated that a cheap steerage ticket cost less than the poor-rate. Population fell from about 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.55 million in 1851. Excess deaths are usually put at about one million—roughly one person in eight—though the official returns undercounted whole families that vanished. Most did not die of empty stomachs alone. Weakened people packed into cabins, roads, workhouses and ship holds, and typhus, typhoid, relapsing fever and dysentery did the killing. Fever—lice-borne typhus above all—ran through lodging houses in Liverpool and the coffin ships of 1847. That year more than 100,000 sailed for Canada; thousands died at sea, thousands more at Grosse Île and in the fever sheds of Quebec, Montreal, Kingston and Toronto (Canada’s 1847–48 typhus dead are commonly put above 20,000). Passage deaths for the wider famine emigration are guessed in the tens of thousands. Of the twelve hundred who left with Father Hore, only eighteen families reached the Iowa hollow. The rest were lost to poverty, landlords, sickness, or the simple fact that America was farther than a fare.