BRATTLEBORO — The Irish have a long history in America, but their story in Vermont often gets overshadowed by those of other ethnic groups.
Vincent E. Feeney, an adjunct professor of history at the University of Vermont and author of Finnigans, Slaters, and Stonepeggers: A History of the Irish in Vermont, has been doing his part to make the story more visible.
At the Brooks Memorial Library on Saturday, Feeney spoke about the various waves of immigration that brought the Irish to the Green Mountain State.
While the potato famine of the mid-1840s drove millions to set sail for a better life, Feeney said that the Irish had already been emigrating to North America since the 1700s.
In the 18th century, Feeney said, the first sizeable Irish settlement in Vermont was Londonderry, which was founded by Presbyterians seeking religious freedom.
But the first big wave of Irish men and women came with the collapse of the Irish agricultural economy after the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars. It prompted 800,000 to 1 million Irish to emigrate to North America between 1820 and 1840.
“Ireland was doing pretty well while those wars were going on,” said Feeney. “It supplied food to the armies, and there were a lot of Irishmen in Wellington's army. When the wars ended, the economy crashed, and when times got hard, people left for North America.”
A short trek
For many Irish in the early part of the 19th century, the first stops were Quebec and the Maritime provinces of Eastern Canada, since British tariffs made it more expensive to book passage on a boat bound for the United States.
From Quebec City or Montreal, it was but a short trek to Vermont. Burlington was the primary gateway to the United States for many Irish people, as it was a bustling port city and, during its boom years in the 1820s and 1830s, the center for a growing industrial economy, said Feeney.
“Lake Champlain was an Irish lake,” he said, “and the Irish just flooded into Burlington.”
The pre-famine Irish immigration helped Burlington become Vermont's largest city. In just a decade, it grew from 2,111 in 1820 to 3,526 in 1830, a 60 percent increase.
But the Irish also settled into the farming communities of northwest Vermont and the Champlain Valley, said Feeney. As Vermonters who had the means to do so abandoned their rocky hillside farms and moved to the flat, fertile soils of the Middle West, the Irish snapped up the available land.
Soon, there were Irish farmers in Fairfield, and Irish loggers in Underhill and Moretown, to join the Irish laborers on the docks of Burlington and in the textile mills of Winooski and Middlebury.
Feeney said it was this first wave of Irish men and women in the 1820s and 1830s that made it easier for the refugees fleeing the “Great Famine” of the late 1840s to settle in Vermont. The established families acted as guides and advisors for the new arrivals.
Also, Feeney pointed out, the Irish arriving in Vermont in the late 1840s were coming at the time they were needed the most.
Vermont was in the midst of a mini-industrial revolution, and the new wave of Irish immigration provided the manpower for the state's growing rail network, which, in turn, spurred the growth of the rapidly expanding slate and marble industries.
“These jobs didn't take a lot of skill - just a strong back,” said Feeney.
From 1845 to 1860, half of all immigrants coming to America were Irish. By 1850, the largest foreign-born group in Vermont was Irish, numbering more than 15,000 - slightly ahead of the equally sizeable French-Canadian population in the state.
Need for labor in Windham County
In the 1850s, Feeney said, the flow of Irish immigration to Vermont shifted from Burlington and Lake Champlain to southern Vermont.
With the coming of the railroad, Irish men and women coming north from Boston and New York were settling in Brattleboro and Bellows Falls. As this corner of Vermont turned into a rail and industrial center, the Irish filled the growing need for labor.
Feeney said that Vermonters were generally sympathetic to the first wave of Irish immigrants, because the memory of the Revolutionary War and the tales of the harsh treatment that the Irish received under British rule struck a chord.
“There wasn't a lot of sympathy for the British in Vermont in the 1820s,” said Feeney. “But those attitudes changes when the 'famine Irish' arrived.”
While the factories, quarries, and railroads welcomed the Irish influx in the 1850s, other Vermonters were fearful that the Irish would “take over,” he said.
The mostly Protestant population distrusted the Irish, mostly because of their Catholicism and the resulting fear that an Irishman's first allegiance was to the Pope.
The “Know-Nothings,” an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement that flourished in the 1850s, had more than 100 members in the Vermont House.
What helped to put a stop to the prejudice, Feeney said, was the Civil War, and the large numbers of Irishmen that fought for the Union in Vermont's regiments. He said their sacrifice broke down the stereotypes that Vermonters had of the Irish.
“Too many Irishmen had fought and died for them to be considered outsiders,” he said.
Moving to larger cities
After the Civil War, Feeney said the “Green Wave” in Vermont crested as the immigrants of the late 19th century gravitated toward cities like Boston and New York.
Also, from the 1880s to the 1920s, a surge of immigration from other European countries took place. For example, according to U.S. Census data, seven Italians lived in Vermont in 1850. By 1910, that figure grew to 4,594 Italians, who became the fourth largest ethnic group behind French-Canadians, English-Canadians, and Irish.
Other ethnic groups eventually overtook the Irish in number in Vermont - namely, the French-Canadians, who streamed into New England from Quebec in the latter part of the 19th century.
Today, nearly 1 in 4 Vermonters claims French-Canadian ancestry, about 24 percent. Those who claim English ancestry make up nearly 19 percent of Vermont's population, while the Irish have fallen to third at 18 percent.