In the 1840s, Irish immigrants to the
Town of Porter in the Wisconsin Territory brought their skills, determination,
and hopes for a better life to the new, fifty-some year-old America. Others from
Ireland followed, along with various European immigrants and settlers from the American
East Coast, attracted by the available, fertile, cheap land.
An Irish village
Irish new-comers settled on newly-purchased
farmlands or began work as hired farm-workers or as merchants in the Village of
Cooksville. The village was formally established in 1842 and then expanded in 1846 by
the next-door village of “Waucoma” founded by the Porter family. (The township in
which the villages are located is named after the Porter family.)
The new-comers—the Irish, Dutch,
English, New Englanders, New Yorkers and, eventually, Norwegians— found prosperous
lives for themselves, or, in a few cases, soon moved further west to Iowa or the
Dakotas to seek their fortunes.
St. Michael's Church
Irish immigrants built the first church in the Cooksville
area. Located on nearby Caledonia Road, it was named St. Michael’s Catholic Church,
or more formally St. Michael the Holy Archangel Church. The church was a log
structure erected about 1843, destroyed by fire in 1867, and replaced by
a small clapboarded church. It was dismantled 1955 and sold for
salvage for $800. But St. Michael’s Cemetery
with headstones engraved with Irish names—Sweeneys, O’Briens, Sullivans,
Boyles, McBride, and many, many McCarthys—remains on the property. The nearby handsome
McCarthy House on old Caledonia Road built about 1850 by skillful stone
masons also remains.
McCarthy House
The McCarthy family recalled the
early days when deer, bears and wolves roamed the area—at times, fire brands
had to be lit in the house windows to drive away the howling wolves. And
fishing was too easy to be a sport: just put a gunny-sack over a barrel hoop,
place it into the Caledonia Springs Creek and beat the water with branches to
net a sack-full of white bass. Eventually a stone bridge would be built nearby over
Caledonia Springs Creek in 1857 in an attempt to lure a proposed railroad to
the Cooksville area, but the railroad company went bankrupt and later decided
to lay the new railroad along another route.
The produce local farmers that McCarthy produced was often transported by an ox team to Milwaukee, which took
two days to get there and one-and-a-half to return—about twice the time it took
for a man just to walk there, which occasionally happened if a man was in a
hurry to get to the land office to claim his small part of the American dream
in the early1840s, as Dennis J. McCarthy did in 1843.
The Irish immigrants to America wrote
letters home proclaiming their happiness and success in their new-found land.
And for many years, on into the 20th century, they sent money back home
to relatives in a troubled Ireland.
One grateful person in Ireland sent
a thank-you letter to his immigrant cousin for money he had sent from America,
and that letter ended up in the Cooksville Archives. The letter is only
identified as from a cousin “Dennis” in Queenstown, Ireland, to “His Dear
Cousin” (unnamed) who was probably living near Cooksville. The one-page letter expresses
envy and happiness for the success of his Catholic cousin and relates a bit of
local news—and reveals very strong anti-British feelings and the on-going
antagonism between Irish Catholics and Protestants.
Whether or not the writer meant it,
the letter is also darkly humorous in parts. The brief, neatly typed letter
reads as follows:
“Dear
Cousin:
“Your welcome letter received, and me
and your Aunt Bridget thank you kindly for the money you sent. May God bless
you. We had seven masses said for your grandfather and grandmother. God rest
their souls.
“You have gone high places in America,
God bless you. I hope you’ll not be putting on airs and forgetting your native
land.
“Your cousin McSweeney was hung in
market place last week for killing a policeman. May God rest his soul. And may
God’s curse be on Jimmy Rogers, the informer, and may he burn in hell, God
forgive me.
“Times are not as bad as they might be. The herring is back, and nearly everyone has a heart in making ends meet, and the price of fish is good, thanks be to God.
“We had a grand time at Paul Muldoon’s
wake. He was an old Blatherskite, and it looked good to see him stretched out
with his big mouth shut. He is better off dead, and he’ll burn till the damned
place freezes over. He had too many friends among the Orangemen, God curse the
lot of them.
“Bless your heart, I almost forgot to
tell you about your Uncle Dinny. He took a pot shot at a turncoat from in back
of a hedge, but he had too much to drink in him, and missed. God’s curse on the
whiskey.
“I hope this letter finds you in good
health and may God keep reminding you to keep sending the money.
“The Brennans are 100% strong around
here since they stopped going to America. They have kids running all over the
country.
“Father O’Flatherty who baptized you,
is now feeble minded, and sends you his blessing.
"Mollie O’Brien, the brat you used to
go to school with, married an Englishman. She’ll have no luck.
“May God take care of the lot of you
and keep you from sudden death.
Your devoted cousin,
Dennis.
“P.S.
Things look bright again. Every police barracks and every Protestant church has
been burned to the ground, and thanks be to God.
“P.P.S.
Keep sending money.”
The strong feelings of Dennis' letter could have been written in the 1840s---in the "Potato Famine" time of troubles and the Catholic-Protestant conflicts---but the neatly-typed letter is dated "December
10, 1940." The letter expresses in a deeply-felt way the on-going struggles as Ireland attempted to gain its independence and to achieve
religious tolerance. And the struggle continues today.
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| Wisconsin Historical Marker |
And the letter could not have been typed in the 1840s because the typewriter was not invented until 1869, in Milwaukee.
[This letter is contained in materials about the Sweeny, McCarthy and Roherty Irish families donated to the Cooksville Archives by descendent Roger Chapman of Fitchburg, Wisconsin, great-grandson of Miles Sweeney. The letter’s writer and its recipient may have been a McCarthy or a Sweeney.
The Cooksville Archives welcomes copies of letters and other documents that tell the story of the settlers in and near the historic Village of Cooksville (established in 1842) in southern Wisconsin. Send items to: Historic Cooksville Trust, 12035 W. State Road 59, Evansville WI 53536.]
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