CELTIC CORNER:
The Irish Builders of Canals and Pubs of Old
Some Irish came to New Jersey as unknowns and
remained so, the forgotten chosen ones. They began arriving as early as the
1600’s, landing in South Jersey to escape two vicious wars in that century in
their homeland. They were small groups searching perhaps for the Land of the
Young, Tir na Og, where, in their dreams, they might find a place where sorrow,
decay and death are gone. But they left us no memory of their Irish myths and
no record of their presence, save a rare place name. Others came in the 1700’s,
this time often as single men hired as teachers or indentured servants. But the
largest group of unknown Irish immigrants to New Jersey came to build two
canals, first the Morris and then the Delaware & Raritan (D&R).
The Morris Canal came first, with digging starting
in 1825. The 102 mile canal from Phillipsburg to Jersey City was completed to
Newark in 1831 and then to Jersey City in 1836. When it was finished, the
incredibly successful Morris overcame more elevation changes than any canal in
the world. At its peak, in 1866, the Morris Canal carried almost a million
tons, including half a million tons of coal. When the railroad leased the canal
land in 1871 (for ninety-nine years) along the waterfront, the Morris was soon
doomed, and by 1924 it had become totally obsolete and was drained. The
majority of the canal became sewers, water lines and even the Newark City
Subway. Today, there are small parks in seven localities, but not much else
marks its existence.
All experts, without exception, agree that it was
the Irish who built the canal. They were most often recruited by subscription
in Ireland and often in gangs in America. Newark’s Irish population soared for
the first, but not the last, time with workers looking for work on the Morris.
The work itself was, as the late, great, Irish American historian Dennis Clark
said, “arduous beyond belief…so grueling and dangerous was the work that
Irishmen, considered less valuable than Negro slaves, were used at times in
preference to and investment of black labor.” This adds credence to the famous
black slave quote from Jamaica a century earlier: ‘If there were no Negroes,
Irish would be Negroes of the world.” How many left homes and families in
Newark(or Dublin) for months or years for less than a dollar a day is forever
unknown, but there are plenty of small cemeteries like the one on Old Mine Road
in Netcong that silently testify to the presence and death of the Irish along
the route.
The D&R soon followed, with merchants eager to
emulate the Morris but with goods traveling between the Philadelphia market,
through Trenton and New Brunswick to New York. The D&R was forty four miles
and digging began in 1830 before it opened in 1834. As with the Morris, 1866
was a big year, with the canal carrying more weight in goods than the more
famous Erie Canal ever carried in any year. But the railroad again intruded and
by 1893 the D&R had stopped being profitable. It officially closed in 1932.
Once again, it was the Irish navies who dug the
canal. Though early Americans were no strangers to hard work, the digging of
the canals by hand with axe, pick and shovel was a different ballgame. It was
so brutal that workers were often recruited from Ireland; even the hardy
Americans and Irish Americans wanted little of the opportunity. It was, as the
Irish born Philadelphia newspaperman Matthew Carey said in 1831, “ungodly and
unholy employment.” Hundreds more died, all lost to history, from cholera,
typhus and broken hearts. Especially in 1832, when a cholera epidemic struck
the D&R-in particular, the Princeton area-few of the hundreds of dead
Irishmen had family in this country, and they were silently buried in or at the
edge of the canal itself. Bull Island, just north of Stockton on the Delaware
has a reputed large mass grave of Irish. In Griggstown, there is wonderful
remembrance to twelve Irish canal workers’ graves, discovered only a decade ago
and kept up by a local AOH. In New Orleans, the number of twenty thousand canal
dead, mostly Irish, is seldom disputed.
In the encyclopedia of New Jersey, there is not a
mention of the Irish in entries of either canal, and in the entry for the
Irish, there is the following one sentence notation: “Irish labor was largely
responsible for the building of the Morris Canal in the 1820’s and the D&R
in the 1830’s.” The wonderful encyclopedia, long awaited, ended with the
patronizing statement, “Precisely as industrialization gathered speed in New
Jersey, a ready supply of Irish brawn-and sometimes brain-arrived to help it
along.”
Today, though there is not much left of the canals,
a day tripper can still follow the terrain carefully and glean an awful lot of
lost New Jersey memories. The Morris is more difficult because of roads and
construction, but the Morris Canal Society has done wonderful work reconstruction
its history. The D&R is shorter, more flat and bucolic as it wends its way
through a much less populated area of central New Jersey. Speckled throughout
both canal routes, from Phillipsburg to Jersey City and Trenton to New
Brunswick, are remnants of places the Irish are famous for- pubs.
It was in such places that the navies, pole men,
lock supervisors and their families would congregate as they have for
centuries, both here and in Ireland. In Irish conclaves, both past and present,
the visitor can find along the route of the canal pubs where known and unknown
Irish spent precious time. Wharton, Paterson, Newark and Jersey City all had
Irish pubs along the Morris Canal, and Trenton, Princeton and New Brunswick
pulled many a pint. These are not “plastic paddy” pubs, with green beer in
plastic cups or cold Guinness and “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” on the box;
there are no Notre Dame banners either. Pubs that don’t have to scream out
“Irish!” just are.
We’re talking about an old time Irish pub. A bit
dark and dusty, with country or local athletic banners, a pool table and a
cacophony of conversations. Drowning out the TV-if there is a TV. A bartender
without cufflinks, an occasional crooked table and a like pol sitting at it and
history, with framed newspaper articles and black and white photos with stories
to match. There are not many left, and soon they will go the way, not of the
buffalo, but of the canal. But finding such a place is as joyful as walking
along the D&R in Rocky Hill on a spring morning or resting along the Morris
Canal at Waterloo Village in summer.
Jersey City has Dorian’s and Brennan’s in Grenville;
tiny Wharton has the Irish Rose and the Trinity Pub, New Brunswick has
McCormick’s; Elizabeth, Nugent’s and Newark, the indomitable McGovern’s. But
the one with a feel for the most history is arguable Billy Brigg’s Tir Na Og in
Trenton. One corner in a back alcove gives an idea of how much Billy
understands about Irish and Irish New Jersey history. Sure, it has the
obligatory 1916 proclamation, pictures of Pearse and Collins (not too many
Irish American pubs are Dev fans) and other wonderful items, but in one small
corner are eight Irishmen with New Jersey ties.
Wolfe Tone is there and for two years this
unforgettable nationalist lived in Princeton. Tone left New Jersey in 1796 but
he left behind his wife, who was just as committed to his ideals as anyone in
Ireland. Wolfe Tone, buried in Bodenstown, County Kildare, also left a son in
New Jersey, William, who was born in 1791.
James Connolly is there too. Connolly and his
poverty stricken family lived for several years in Newark while he worked at
the Singer Sewing Machine factory in Elizabeth. In September 1903, Connolly
immigrated to America, where he worked as an insurance collector. Later he
would be fired from Singer’s as a communist agitator.
James Turner is below Connolly, but not because he
was less a patriot. Turner was an attorney from Jersey City, who arrived in the
United States in 1849 and became a lawyer in 1859, just prior to the Civil War.
Turner, as did many Jersey guys, joined the Eighty- eight Regiment, which
became part of the Fighting Sixty- ninth Irish Brigade. In addition to being a
fighting soldier, turner, son of a County Louth man, was also a renowned writer
during the war. Turner became a captain with the Irish Brigade in 1864. He was
shot in the head and killed at the Battle of the Wilderness. He was buried in
Jersey City and left a wife and child.
John Devoy was a Billy Briggs type guy. Devoy spent
much time in New Jersey and died in Atlantic City. It was September 29, 1928
and the grand old fighter was eighty seven. After a funeral mass in New York,
he was interred back in the mother country. A recent biography of Devoy by
Terry Golway, Irish Rebel, proves him
to be one of the most indomitable figures of his age and though he was not a
major New Jersey figure, he belongs on Billy Brigg’s wall and every other one
that claims to be Irish.
Even when they
have nothing,
The Irish emit a
kind of happiness and joy
Correspondence
Secretary President
Frank
Darcy Ken
Egan
