Irish Roots Run Deep In St. Lawrence County

CANTON - It's no lucky coincidence that five towns in St. Lawrence County have Irish Settlement Roads: Canton, Heuvelton, Oswegatchie, Waddington and Pierrepont.

There's also an Ireland Road in the towns of Potsdam, Hammond and Morristown. The town of Fine has an Irish Hill Road.

The names may not be very original, but their presence makes sense considering the county's connection with Irish immigrants, according to Ronald J. Semple, Canton.

Mr. Semple, a descendant of Irish immigrants, has done extensive research about the arrival of Irish in Northern New York.

"Nowadays it seems that everyone in America is Irish on St. Patrick's Day. It wasn't always so," Mr. Semple said. "The Irish were despised, mostly because of their religion. The anti-Catholicism was imported here from Great Britain."

The 75-year-old was also raised in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Jersey City, N.J., and lived with his grandmother, Katherine Crehan, who emigrated to America from Galway, Ireland in 1911.

His great-great grandfather, John J. Kenny, was a native of Ireland who moved to the United States and served in the 164th New York Infantry during the Civil War.

At noon Thursday, Mr. Semple is scheduled to present, "A Study in Green: The Irish in Our Midst" at the Silas Wright House, 3 East Main St.

The program is part of the St. Lawrence County Historical Society's Brown Bag lunch series.

Mr. Semple is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and publisher who moved to Canton seven years ago with his wife, Jane T. Semple.

Irish immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics, did not receive a warm welcome when they fled their country by the thousands in the mid 1840's to escape starvation and death from the potato famine, he said.

Fast forward to the 2000 Census, when 16 percent of St. Lawrence County residents identified themselves as Irish compared to the 11 percent national statistic.

Many of the first Irish who settled in upstate New York were men who worked as laborers to building the Eric Canal in the early 1820s.

The second wave came between 1845 and 1850 when more than half a million Irish people arrived in America trying to escape the potato famine that killed more than a million of the poorest Irish.

"For millions, the choice was to either starve, to die of disease or emigrate," Mr. Semple said.

Most of the Irish who settled in Northern New York, either came up from New York City or down from Montreal after being shipped to Canada by their Protestant English landlords.

It was less expensive to travel to Quebec than New York City because Great Britain subsidized the trips to Canada, Mr. Semple said.

"Coming up with the fare to America was extremely difficult for most and it wasn't the poorest Irish who came. They stayed in Ireland and starved," he said.

Although anti-Irish sentiment was widespread in America, St. Lawrence County citizens donated 367 barrels of food to the Irish and the Scottish people who were also experiencing a potato crop loss.

"The food was valued at more than $3,000. For that time, you're talking big-time money," Mr. Semple said.

Most Irish Catholic immigrants settled close to each other, preferring to create their own communities, whether they were in urban areas or rural places like the north country, he said.

"They were very communal people," Mr. Semple said "They really didn't care about assimilating in with the rest of Americans."

Protestant Irishmen coming to America quickly assimilated and faded into the general population. They generally did not identify closely with their Catholic compatriots, Mr. Semple said. In the 19th century, they took to identifying themselves as Scotch-Irish, a term virtually inknown in Ireland at the time.

But in many communities, Irish Catholics established their own churches, parochial schools, hospitals and orphanages.

It wasn't until after World War II that Irish families started to fully assimilate with American culture, Mr. Semple said.

"Things changed very abruptly after World War II," he said. "Guys came home from the war. They went to college, got good jobs and moved from the cities out to the suburbs."