Above: Mill district panorama, circa 1910. Lawrence, Mass. (Source: Lawrence History Center)

A LONG READ
(sidebars about related topics are in blue font)

In 1912, the city of Lawrence, Mass., population 85,000, was the worsted woolen capital of the world. Founded in 1845 as a planned industrial city, by the time of the strike, it employed 37,000 mill workers.  Most were employed by the American Woolen Company, the country’s preeminent manufacturer of worsted woolen cloth. Over 7,000 workers toiled in the Wood Mill and Ayer Mill, that company’s main facilities. Other major mills of other manufacturing companies included the Washington Mill (5,000 employees) and the Arlington Mill (7,000 employees).  Other mills also employed substantial numbers of workers.

Not all hands were equal.  Workers in skilled jobs – loom fixers and mechanics – were paid one rate, while “operatives” who tediously watched over automatic looms, were paid the lowest.  A subsequent Congressional investigation into the strike said the average weekly pay for all workers was $8.76.  For the most skilled workers, average pay was $11.39 a week. 

For Italians, the average was only $6.81, not enough to pay for food and rent in most cases. Whole families worked to make ends meet. (Source: Congressional Report on the Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912)
​
Below: Mary Tomacchio, age 15, Ayer Mill (photo by Louis Hine). Louis Hine did portraits of over a dozen Italian immigrant children laborers in Lawrence.

​A decade earlier, there hardly were any Italians in Lawrence.  In 1890, Lawrence had only 263 people born in Italy. Apparently, in 1891, around forty of them were brought in by people-smugglers known as padrone to work as strikebreakers (source: Immigrant City by Donald Cole).

Sidebar about the padrone labor system:
"Approximately 35 million immigrants entered the United States between 1820 and 1924, including 4 million Italians. They came largely from southern Italy, where an increasing population strained already meager resources. It became common practice for construction managers in Massachusetts and other states to hire labor agents (or padroni) to provide labor gangs for projects such as digging, laying railroad tracks, and supplying builders with materials. The padrone received a fee for each laborer he provided, and the laborer was provided with a steady income and a place to live in exchange for his labor.
The padrone would provide housing, food, medical care, transportation, and, at times, liquor, charging most of the laborer’s wages. In many cases, the accommodations provided by the padrone were inadequate and sometimes nonexistent. After spending several months in backbreaking, dangerous work, the laborer would often be in debt to the padrone. These conditions led to sudden strikes, causing disruptions in various commercial construction ventures. For example, in the 1893, on the construction of the Wachusett Water project near Clinton, Italian laborers struck six times during the first four years of work.
By 1900, there were approximately three thousand Italian laborers in Boston and some seven thousand in Massachusetts. Over the next few years, thousands more arrived in the Commonwealth in search of work. In 1904, a few Italian workers joined the building trades unions, but the vast majority of Italians on job sites remained unorganized and in bondage to the padroni.
The Italian consul in Boston, Baron Gustavo Tosti, believed the only way that Italian laborers could erase the stigma of “cheap labor” that attached to them would be to organize their own union. An immigrant banker from Boston’s North End named Domenic D’Alessandro became a close ally of Tosti. D’Alessandro used his organizing talents to create the Italian Laborers Union (ILU) in April 1904, which became a key weapon in the attack on the padroni system. With the help of the Italian consul and the American Federation of Labor, the ILU in Massachusetts eventually encouraged the enactment of laws that put many padroni out of business and alleviated many injustices experienced by Italian immigrants." (Source: Commonwealth of Toil- History of Massachusetts Workers and their Unions, by Juravich et al 1996) 

At that early time, most Italian workers were transient men who came to work and then intended to go back home again.  In 1900, there were 963 Italian-born persons, still most of them men.  But by 1915, there were almost 9,000 Italian born persons and their American-born children. 
​
“The exodus of southern Italians from their villages at the turn of the twentieth century has no parallel history,” said one writer. “Of total population of fourteen million in the South at the time of national unification 1860, least five million – more than third of the population – had left to seek work overseas by the outbreak of World War. The land literally hemorrhaged peasants.” (Source: From Italy to Boston's North End: Italian Immigration and Settlement, 1890-1910 by Stephen Puleo, master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts Boston.)
 
Italian workers, as newcomers, were mostly likely to be overcrowded into overpriced tenements near the mills of Lawrence. Many lived with, or were, borders to make ends meet.  The Italian immigrants were clustered around the eastern end of Common Street (if they were from Sicily) or Oak and Elm Streets (if they were Neapolitan).  They had higher rates of mortality, despite a better diet, and high rates of child labor.  In other similar nearby enclaves lived other recent immigrant groups, Lithuanians, Poles and Syrians. These groups comprised most of the rest of the lowest paid laborers in the mills besides the Italians…and the bulk of the non-Italian strikers. In contrast, the Irish, now established three generations, and French Canadians, one or two generations, were generally not big participants in the strike. 
​
1911 photo of alleyway in Lawrence tenement district (source: White Fund)

How did the strike come about? Thanks to progressive political activism by well-meaning socialites from Boston, the Massachusetts legislature mandated a reduction in the work-week from 56 hours to 54 hours, effective January 1, 1912.  The mill owners resolved to reduce pay by two hours because of fewer hours worked.

None of the Lawrence mill workers seemed to mind that they were dismissed twenty minutes earlier each day.  However, when the first pay packets came on Friday, January 12, there was going to be hell to pay.  Workers said they could not afford to lose the few pennies represented by those two hours.

The Lawrence Sun of Thursday, January 11, 1912, carried the following news item with large head lines across two columns:

A mass meeting of almost all the Italian mill workers of this city was held Wednesday evening in Ford’s Hall. The object of the meeting was to discuss the new 54-hour law and to hear the reports of the different committees which had interviewed their respective mill agents. The reports were unfavorable to the 900 people who jammed the hall. It was decided that all Italians of all the mills strike on next Friday evening. They claim that the wages which they now receive because of the 54-hour law are not sufficient for them to live on, and that they want their pay raised to the amount which they formerly received. The meeting was presided over by Angeline Rocco.

​Who was this Angeline (or Angelo) Rocco? Rocco was a twenty-eight-year-old junior at Lawrence High School, a summer mill worker, and secretary of the Italian branch of Local 20 IWW, the International Workers of the World, which had only around 400 members in Lawrence.  As I explained in my blog post about the 1919 Strike, the IWW was the union of the unskilled workers. It called for class warfare.  Their charter read “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life."
​
You can see Angelo Rocco talking about the strike in this video taken in 1977: 

The Strike

Here is how the 1912 strike went down.   According to the Congressional strike report, “On the Friday morning succeeding the strike, at the Everett mill it was evident that the employees expected their pay envelopes to show reduced earnings and that they determined upon resistance to a reduction in earnings. In one of the large departments the non-English-speaking employees by 9 o’clock had begun to leave their work, to congregate in groups, and to show signs of excitement. Word to this effect reached the pay department and fearing an outbreak the distribution of the pay envelopes was delayed.

A short time afterwards word came from the mill that rioting had begun in some departments and that employees were stopping machinery and driving other employees from their work. A call was sent to the mill office for police, and a small number of police responded. They failed to get the employees creating the disturbance out of the mill, and a call was sent in for more policemen.

Shortly after the arrival of the second group, the strikers—a small number at a time—began to come out of the mill and congregate just outside the mill gates. Those taking part in this demonstration and who formed the crowd outside the mill gates were principally Italian workers. As the crowd at the gate was increased by accessions from those within the mill, some of the leaders began to make speeches, and after a short time the entire crowd, carrying an Italian flag and a large number of United States flags, started on a march toward the Wood mill of the American Woolen Co. The Wood mill is several squares below the Washington mill, and the striking Italians reached there in a short time, and rushed the gates and secured entrance to the mills, the gatekeepers and watchmen being unable to stop the inrush. The strikers then rushed into the different rooms of the Wood mill, shutting off the power from the machines and calling upon the workers of the Wood mill to join with them in the strike. After about one-half hour of disorder in the Wood mill the strikers withdrew, accompanied by a considerable number of the employees of the Wood mill in the departments which the strikers had been able to reach. In connection with the morning of disorder, the strikers in marching past one of the smaller mills destroyed a number of windows by throwing ice through them. Shortly afterwards a collision occurred between the strikers and the police, in which the police brought their clubs into use.”

A committee, led by Angelo Rocco, was formed and they telegraphed the general executive board of the IWW in New York to send someone to lead the strike.

On Saturday, January 13, Joseph (Giuseppe) Ettor of the IWW executive board arrived in Lawrence from New Jersey. Described by one critic as having "the cunning of the Syrian and the eloquence of the Italian," Ettor’s parents were from Italy and he spoke fluent Italian. Ettor was soon joined by Arturo Giovannitti, an Italian born poet and orator who was director of Il Proletario, a radical workers’ newspaper.
​
Below: Italian-American strike leaders Ettor and Giovannitti arrive in Lawrence, January 13, 1912

SIDEBAR: Who were Ettor and Giovannitti? Here is a description of them from a book about Italian radicals in America in the early 20th century:
“Only twenty-six years old, with a shock of curly black hair and a cherubic smile, Ettor looked more like a mischievous street urchin than a fiery labor agitator and the IWW’s principal organizer for its eastern branches. Born to Italian parents in Brooklyn, in 1886, Ettor grew up in Chicago and California and joined the SPA while still a teenager, working as an iron worker in a San Francisco shipyard. He joined the IWW in 1905 and served as an organizer among West Coast lumbermen, miners, railroad workers, and construction gangs. Elected to the IWW’s general executive council in 1908, Ettor moved East the following year.
His proficiency with foreign languages (he was fluent in English and Italian, and understood Polish, Yiddish, and Hungarian) proved invaluable when dealing with immigrant workers such as those in Lawrence. The strike would prove to be the greatest triumph of his career in the labor movement.
Ettor perceived at the outset that Italians mill workers, by virtue of their superior numbers and militancy, would constitute the backbone of the strike. To join him as co-leader of the Italians, Ettor invited Arturo Giovannitti, the director of Il Proletario, who arrived on January 20. At twenty-eight, Giovannitti was an elegant figure, taller and thinner than his stocky comrade, with handsome features and brooding eyes. Giovannitti had an unusual background for a sowersivo [“subversive”]. As a rebellious and melancholy youth from the middle class in Campobasso (Molise), Giovannitti rejected the prospect of life among the provincial bourgeoisie and migrated to Canada at age sixteen, supporting himself briefly as a mine worker and railroad laborer. Well educated but guided by religious and mystical tendencies, Giovannitti found work at a Presbyterian mission for Italians in Montreal, and studied English and theology at McGill University. He continued his religious studies at Columbia University’s Union Theological Seminary in 1904, while working at a Presbyterian mission in Brooklyn. After another stint at a mission in Pittsburgh, Giovannitti’s flirtation with Protestantism ended, and he embraced syndicalism under the influence of Carlo Tresca, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Back in New York and unemployed, Giovannitti spent many a winter’s night sleeping on a bench in Little Italy’s Mulbury Park until he found work as a bookkeeper and joined the editorial staff of Il Proletario. Thereafter, his rise to prominence in the Italian syndicalist movement was rapid, becoming the director of the newspaper and FSI secretary in 1911. By that time, Giovannitti had also distinguished himself as the leading poet of the Italian immigrant Left, although much of his best poetry (in English) would soon be inspired by the ordeal that awaited him in Lawrence.  Giovannitti’s role in the strike was that of the charismatic orator; his “Sermon on the Common” (in English), echoing Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount,” uplifted strikers’ spirits and strengthened their resolve to fight." (Source: Carlo Tresca, Portrait of a Rebel, by Nunzio Pernicone, AK Press 2010)

For a few weeks, things looked like a stalemate, or war of attrition.  Then there was a twist in the plot.  During a clash between strikers and the police on Monday evening, January 29, Anna Lo Pizza, an Italian woman, was shot and killed.

As a result of the disturbance of the day, the city council gave control of the city to the officer in command of the militia, Major Sweetser. Parading and assembling in the streets or on the common was ordered discontinued. The mayor also requested additional protection, and the governor ordered twelve companies of infantry, two troops of cavalry, and fifty police officers from the metropolitan police force to report at once in Lawrence.
 Below: Photo of one of the militia companies on duty in Lawrence during the 1912 strike

On January 20, dynamite was found in three spots around the city, claimed to have been planted by anarchists among the strikers. Strike representatives claimed the dynamite had been planted by agents of the mills.
​
Relief efforts were established. According to the congressional strike report, two soup kitchens were maintained by the Italians (on account of being the largest group presumably), one by the Syrians, one by the Polish, one by the Armenians, and one at the Franco-Belgian Hall for all nationalities not provided for elsewhere.
​
“The strike relief committee investigated the cases of applicants for help to determine whether or not they were strikers, although the investigation was largely omitted in the case of the Italians, of which race practically everyone employed in the textile mills was on strike.” (emphasis added – it shows the overwhelming Italian participation in the strike.)

Below: relief provided to children of strikers

Despite the sidelining of Ettor and Giovannitti (who were later acquitted – see epilogue), the strike continued. 
By this time, the Catholic church leaders of Lawrence had gotten involved. The church in Lawrence was dominated by the Irish clergy who had built the Catholic Church in New England.  There was also a large French-Canadian contingent, who had emigrated in the 1870s and 1880s.
​
Among the Irish establishment, support was strong for the captains of order. Father Timothy J. Regan, an Irish priest at St Laurence O’Toole, served as chaplain for the militia (in part because most of the members of the militia were Irish). He would celebrate Sunday mass in the armory for the troops and their heavy-handed commander, Colonel E. Leroy Sweetser, who had led the attack on women and children when they were leaving the city on February 24.

Regan praised the soldiers for “making it possible for every citizen willing and able to work to do so.” On the other hand, he did preach that owners had an obligation to ensure operators were paid adequately. This was the official posture of the Catholic church, set forth in the Rerum Novarum.  (The Rerum Novarum was a papal edict from 1891 setting forth the proper relationship between labor – to work and obey – and capital – to provide.)

In gratitude for his service, two military companies presented Father Regan with a "handsome and costly pair of gloves" and a shaving set.

And at French-Canadian St. Anne’s, an unidentified priest told the press, "we have done everything to educate the people to obey the laws and customs of this country ... we knew nothing of the strike until it was upon us. Our congregation will go back to work."  And Father Joseph W. Dreyer, a priest at the church, after reading portions of Rerum Novarum in his Sunday sermon, exhorted his parishioners to return to the mills.
Contrast these pro-management responses of local Catholic priests with the response of the head priest of the Italian parish, Holy Rosary, named Mariano Milanese. His role in the history of Holy Rosary church is covered in another blog post.

“The priest whose pro-strike comments and policies seemed to garner the most attention was Mariano Milanese. The Italian-born pastor of Holy Rosary parish had come to Lawrence in 1902 specifically to establish a church for Italians. Possibly more attention was paid to him than other priests because Italians, the largest immigrant group, were the backbone of the strike and provided local leadership. In addition, his church was located opposite the Everett Mill in the center of the turmoil. When Milanese was unsuccessful in persuading mill agents to raise wages, he read a letter to his congregation from William M. Wood, president of American Woolen, the city's largest mill. Although Wood asked the operators to return to work with the understanding he would increase wages when he could afford to do so, Milanese told his congregation their stand was correct. He would support them to the full extent of his powers and he then began to solicit funds for relief.” (James J. Kenneally, Catholic Clerical Quandary: The Lawrence Strike of 1912 in American Catholic Studies Vol. 117, No. 4 (Winter 2006))

Below: Father Mariano Milanese of Holy Rosary Church, the Italian congregation founded in 1904.  Of the Catholic clergy, he was most sympathetic to the strikers, who were mostly Italian.

By mid-February 1912, a more official Catholic response in Lawrence had been formulated by its Irish leadership.  It was decidedly anti-strike. 

​Father James O'Reilly, head of St. Mary’s and de facto head of all the Catholic churches in Lawrence, organized a public campaign against the dangers of socialism which nearly everyone equated with the IWW. On Sunday, February 25, pastors of three of the Irish churches criticized that doctrine. In a coordinated exercise, at different masses at St. Laurence, Regan asserted, "socialism, anarchy, agnosticism, and atheism are at our very door and must be fought". Meanwhile, Father McDonald at Immaculate Conception denounced socialism as the greatest enemy of the church and the world, and called upon Catholics to do their utmost against it.  Then Father O'Reilly, at St. Mary’s, in a widely publicized sermon, asserted that the evils of socialism transcended the labor issues.
​
Below: Father James O'Reilly, head priest of St. Mary's and head of the Augustinian order in Lawrence 

Despite these official church messages, however, Father Milanese continued his citywide appeal for strike funds, stating he was helping two hundred people a day. Father Milanese’s relief efforts, along with other church relief programs, had the effect of undermining reliance on IWW assistance. As Milanese observed, many parishioners were ashamed to go to the IWW strike committee for food and money; they certainly were not encouraged to do so by him. Other churches also held special collections and solicited contributions to the St. Vincent de Paul Society to assist strikers. Cardinal O'Connell contributed two hundred dollars to Milanese's fund. 

Yet Italians, often led by Rocco, had to go to the basement of St. Anthony's, the Syrian church, to meetings where they heard Ettor address them in their native language.  He and any other Italian strike leaders were barred from Holy Rosary. Nevertheless, Rocco, never criticized Milanese.  Milanese also often visited strike leaders Ettor and Giovannitti when they were jailed in the shooting death of Italian striker Anna LoPizza and supplied them with literature during the months they were incarcerated.

Outcome of the 1912 Strike

Upon the arrest of Ettor and Giovannitti, the IWW replaced them with Big Bill Haywood and other leaders, who worked with the multi-ethnic strike committee in Lawrence.  As a result of the political backlash caused by reports of police attacking unarmed women and children, politicians in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. began to clamor for some kind of settlement of the strike.  Victory for the strikers was achieved on March 12, 1912, when all their demands were met.

Below: Strikers voting to accept the strike terms, Lawrence Common, March 14, 1912

Epilogue - Continued IWW Struggle for Justice in Lawrence, Led by Italians for Italians

​Until Ettor and Giovannitti were set free, organizers had unfinished business. From April to October 1912, an unprecedented amount of activism occurred in Lawrence. Massive street marches, counter marches (the God and Country parade), violence, funerals. Much of this post-strike history seems to be forgotten in Greater Lawrence these days.

Labor activist Carlo Tresca – who apparently did not speak English – was sent to Lawrence to address workers on May 1, so-called May Day, the international day of the worker. Tresca was a leader not only in the I.W.W. but also in the Federazione Socialista Italiana del Nord America (the FSI). His young Irish-American lover, Helen Gurley Flynn, had already been working in Lawrence for a number of months organizing workers.
​
The activism was as much about Italian national pride as it was about worker solidarity. For this reason, the IWW were careful to choose an Italian organizer.

“Although they never appealed to nationalist sentiments, FSI leaders understood that the agitation to liberate Ettor and Giovannitti was as much an ethnic conflict as a labor/political struggle. Leadership of the Italians therefore had to be entrusted to someone who commanded great respect among Italian workers, and who possessed exceptional talent as a strategist, agitator, and organizer. The man best qualified for the task, the FSI knew, was Tresca.” (Pernicone book on Tresca)

“The Lawrence May Day parade attracted…5,000 members of the IWW, mostly Italians, including many women carrying infants and pushing baby carriages. A large rally was also held at the Essex County Jail on Hampshire Street, where the prisoners [Ettor and Giovannitti] were held, and later than evening Italian members of Local 20 conducted their own procession.” (Source: Pernicone)

Below: Italian organizer and orator, Carlo Tresca. He arrived in Lawrence a month after the strike to try to maintain the revolutionary momentum of the strike to further organize the workers. He spoke no English, only Italian.

To prevent further disturbance, the City prohibited demonstrations by the I.W.W. on public property. Tresca was not thwarted.

• “Tresca circumvented this ruling by renting a large, privately owned space on the corner of Short and Chestnut Streets known as “The Lots.” On Saturday, September 14, around 7,000 Italians, Poles, Franco-Belgians, and others assembled there to hear Tresca, [Helen Gurley] Flynn, and other speakers address them in seventeen languages. Not satisfied with speeches, Tresca exhorted the workers to defy the police ban and march to the Lawrence Common, where Giovannitti had delivered his now famous ‘Sermon.’ Occupying the Common would constitute a moral victory for the defense campaign, so with Tresca in the lead carrying a red banner, several thousand marchers singing the Internationale brushed passed police and occupied the coveted ground without interference.
• “Here, on the battle ground, sacred to your birth and your victories,” Tresca declared, “you must renew your oath which you took when the strike was concluded. You must swear, as a man, every one of you, to fight every day, every minute of your lives, without truce or repose, for the liberation of Ettor and Giovannitti.” A thousand voices, most of them Italian, roared: “We swear!”—“Giuriamo!” (Source: Pernicone)

Tresca then approached prominent Italian-American banker Fabrizio Pitocchelli for money to support future demonstrations. “Reminding Pitocchelli that many of his Italian clients were IWW members, Tresca offered him a choice: provide money or face a boycott of his bank. A promise of money was immediately forthcoming.” (Source: Pernicone) On Sunday, September 24, a large rally of workers from Haverhill, Lynn, Lowell, New Bedford, Fall River and other industrial towns converged on Boston Common – 20,000 to 35,000 in all. (ibid). There, Bill Haywood called for a General Strike. However the next day, Ettor and Giovannitti sent letters urging workers not to engage in a general strike, because “the risk of failure was too great on the one hand and the temper of the workers, particularly the Italians, too explosive on the other.”

In the meantime, the followers of Lynn-based anarchist, Luigi Galleani began to jockey to take control of the situation from Tosca. Rejecting even syndicalist unions as instruments of social struggle, Galleani placed his faith in all methods of revolutionary violence, including bombs and assassination. Thus, despite the call from Ettor and Giovannitti not to hold a general strike, on September 26, the anarchist leaders took up positions outside the mills and urged Italian workers to strike later that day.

“By 3:15 p.m. on September 26, 1912, the Italians began streaming out of the mill, soon to be joined by Italians from the Washington Mill. At a large meeting at Lexington Hall that evening, the IWW and the Italian anarchists vied for leadership of the assembled crowd. Spurred by the exhortations of the anarchists, the Italian workers en masse voiced their desire for a general strike. The following morning, September 27, several thousand angry Italians abandoned the mills. Their belligerent mood quickly proved infectious, and some 10,000–12,000 workers went on strike the next day.”

Below: Luigi Galleani, Italian anarchist and rival to the IWW, His followers also worked to agitate the Italian workers of Lawrence in the months after the strike

SIDEBAR: Who were the Galleanists? They were a radical anarchist group that followed the teachings of Luigi Galleani, based in Lynn, Mass. Starting in 1917 when they came under increased government supression, they followed a path of violence.
​"It was in April of [1917] that the United States entered Word War I, to which Galleani and his followers were uncompromisingly opposed. This brought down upon them the full panoply of government repression. Throughout the country their Clubhouses were raided, men and women beaten, equipment smashed, libraries and files seized and destroyed. Their lectures and recitals were disrupted, and their newspapers and journals suppressed, among them Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva (the Subversive Chronicle), in which he denounced conscription and the war.
The Galleanists viewed these developments with mounting indignation. Men of energy and determination, they could not stand idly by while their comrades were being imprisoned, their presses silenced, their meetings disrupted and dispersed. An overwhelming desire to retaliate, to strike back at the state that was stifling and crushing their movement, took possession of them. So it was that between 1917 and 1919, the height of the Red Scare, a group of anarchists came into being whose function was to carry out bombings. Sacco and Vanzetti were among them. They refused to turn the other cheek. Uncompromising militants, they rejected docile submission to the state. They were determined, on the contrary, to answer force with force, not only as a matter of self/defense but of principle and honor.
The climax was reached in 1919, following a rash of anarchist deportations. Among those evicted from the country was Galleani himself. This proved the last straw. The Galleanists issued a leaflet threatening retaliation. “You have shown no pity to us,” it declared. “We will do likewise. And deport us! We will dynamite you! ” An enemies’ list was drawn up, to whom package bombs were sent in the mail. This occurred on the First of May, the premier working class and anarchist holiday. The list consisted of 30 names, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Commissioner General of Immigration Anthony Caminetti, and US. District Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, as well as John D. Rockefeller, and P. Morgan, among others. Each of the intended victims had antagonized the Galleanists in some unforgivable way: arrested their comrades, closed down their newspapers, deported them to Italy, and the like. Additional bombs were delivered by hand to the doors of intended recipients. None of them was hurt, although the house! maid of one had her hands blown off and an elderly security guard was killed.
To men of the bombers’ stamp, the use of violence was not a crime; it was a justifiable response to persecution. They considered themselves at war with the forces of government, and if they resorted to bombs it was as the government used bombs, for the purpose of war. Violence, in any event, was one of the few weapons at their disposal, a necessary means of self—defense. How else were they to retaliate against their tormentors?"

Above: The Scandalous Protest Sign Declaring No God, No Master - Lawrence, Mass. Sept. 1912
​
To regain the upper hand against the followers of Galleani, the IWW organized another memorial parade on Sunday, September 29.  That afternoon, “in defiance of the police and a torrential rain, 4,000 workers—most of them Italians—marched silently to the [St. Mary Immaculate] cemetery, with Tresca at the head, standing backward in a one-horse buggy. Tresca remembered that “one big banner, when all the others had given away to the force of the persistent downpour, remained intact. On it was a red, challenging motto, ‘No God, No Master.’

Above: Lawrence's Mayor, Michael A. Scanlon

This message proved to be the last straw for business and church leaders in Lawrence. “Major Michael A. Scanlon called upon all the “patriotic and law abiding citizens” to wear American flag buttons in their lapels as a rebuke to the advocates of anarchy and atheism who had invaded their God-fearing city.” At a meeting in City Hall, Father James O’Reilly, the Catholic priest who was the most powerful man in Lawrence, shouted: “Those who do not want to work better take a hint and go. We will drive the demons of anarchism and socialism from our midst.”

More than 100 private detective and thugs were hired, and were put to use during the 24-hour hour protest strike that took place on Monday, September 30 involving 10,000 workers. It became dangerous to wear an IWW pin.

Below: An IWW pin of the kind that got Jonas Smolskas killed in October 1912

“To demonstrate that neither he nor the IWW could be intimidated, [Tresca] planned an act of defiance…on October 5. With his friend Bertrando Spada, one of the FSI’s foremost leaders, armed and walking behind to cover his back, Tresca strolled conspicuously up and down Essex Street wearing an IWW button in his lapel and secreting a revolver in his pocket, almost daring the detectives he encountered along the way to start trouble. None stepped forward to challenge the “Bull of Lawrence,” as he had come to be known.”
​
However, on October 19, 1912 Lithuanian immigrant Jonas Smolskas was assaulted for wearing an IWW pin, and died three days later from his injuries.

Below: Alleged photo of Jonas Smolksas.  By the way, in this blog post, I'm not saying other ethnicities did not participate in the strike.  The most noteworthy aspect of the strike was that over forty nationalities, the members of which spoke little English, coordinated their efforts so successfully.  Rather, in this blog entry I point out that the strike was "Italian" insofar as (1) the significant majority of strikers were Italian immigrants, (2) and so were the majority of the strike leaders.  I would suggest that one reason for this participation and leadership was the prevalence, at least at that time, of radicalism in the Italian immigrant community.

Above: Map printed during strike showing locations of ethnic neighborhoods - Italians, Poles and Syrians concentrated in most densely populated area of tenement housing
​
A few days before the death of Smokskas, on Columbus Day, October 14, 1912, “around 30,000 people assembled for the “God and Country” parade. A celebration of American patriotism and antiradicalism, the parade had no place for the hated IWW, and any marcher sporting an IWW button or banner was to be arrested. No manifestation of ethnic loyalty other than American was tolerated, a reflection of the Anglo-Saxon and Irish hostility to “foreigners,” which had been evidenced throughout the strike and defense campaign.

Below: Scenes from Lawrence's anti-radical anti-IWW flag parade, held Columbus Day 1912.  Source: Louise Sandberg's Queen City archive blog.

In the end, pro-American, pro-church, pro-establishment sentiments were victorious over radicalism in Lawrence.  The acquittal of Ettor and Giovannitti on November 26, 1912 removed a cause for the radicals, and calmed a lot of people down.  Momentum was lost and the IWW failed to organize workers into a permanent union in Lawrence.  The history of the IWW in Lawrence is covered in my blog post about the 1919 strike, which everyone in Lawrence seems to have forgotten about but which was just as important as the 1912 strike.  By that time, however, the IWW had become unpopular for its opposition to World War I.

Also, the more radical Italian leaders, such as the followers of Galleani, scared the bejesus out of most Americans after they launched their terrorism campaign in 1917.  Italian activism subsided just as new immigration rules took off, which led both to the deportation of a lot of the Italian radicals and the end of Italian immigration by 1924.  Also, the experience of World War I had made many Italians more patriotic and focused on nationalistic issues rather than class issues, at least on the international political stage.  Furthermore, the longer Italian immigrants stayed, the more economically successful they generally became.  Because of these trends, from the mid-1920s onward, the story of Italians in Greater Lawrence largely became one of making a place for themselves and making the area a better place.
​
Below: Italian-American fraternal organization, Lawrence, Mass. 1925

The first St. Laurence O'Toole church, which became Holy Rosary in 1905.  Top photo: When it was still St. Laurence O'Toole around 1900 before that parish moved to East Haverhill Street.  Bottom: Contemporary photo of the church. Today it is Corpus Christi parish following the 2004 merger of the four parishes in the area.  Milanese's changes to the facade and steeple (described below) are apparent.

Accordingly, when the old St. Laurence O'Toole church, built on the corner of Union Street and Essex Street in 1873, planned to move to a new structure on East Haverhill Street, its building became available. Milanese was already a pastor there, ministering to Italians in the so-called basement chapel where homilies could be given in Italian.  He had replaced Father Guglielmo Repetti, who gave the first masses there in Italian in 1899 and who had died suddenly.  Milanese seemed to be the perfect leader for the new parish, which he named Holy Rosary.  He was a young, energetic institution builder, in the mold of the young Irish priests who had founded the first Catholic churches in Lawrence two generations earlier.

However,  by these years, the Catholic hierarchy did not necessarily want a pragmatist who got things done for the benefit of his flock.  They forgot their own roots bootstrapping the Church in the USA up from nothing in the 1850s.  Instead, they wanted someone who towed the line, especially Cardinal O'Connell, archbishop of the Boston diocese. Under his authoritarian leadership, he centralized all decision-making and drastically reduced the autonomy of individual parishes.  The conflict between Milanese and O'Connell over finances was eventually the Italian priest's undoing.

​The story of Milanese's pastorate - from which he was forcibly removed in 1935 - is one of trying to do what was best for his flock of recent Italian immigrants, despite limitations placed on him by his community and the Irish-dominated local Catholic hierarchy.

Photo below (1925): Father Mariano and boys of the Holy Rosary School, which he established in 1919 (courtesy of the Lawrence History Center)

One Italian writer described the scene as peasants departed from a rural town in Sicily, bound for Palermo and then America:

“The locomotive whistled fitfully with a laboring hiss, but the disorder was so great that the engineer did not move the train. Despite the requests and the reprimands of the police, the crowd still clutched the train, embraced the final grasps of good-bye. When the train moved, there was heartbreaking cry like the anguished roar that bursts from crowd at the instant of a great calamity. All the people raised their arms and waved handkerchiefs. From the windows of the cars the leaning figures of the young men and women strained; they seemed suspended in air and kissed the hands of old people as the train departed.” That scene, repeated again and again in small villages and towns throughout Southern Italy, represented a decision of epic proportions by tens of thousands of Italian peasants, most of whom had never traveled more than a few miles from home. (From Italy to Boston's North End: Italian Immigration and Settlement, 1890-1910, by Stephen Puleo. Master's thesis, University of Massachusetts Boston)

Migrants brought with them their family-centered peasant cultures and their fiercely local identifications, or campanilismo.  In this first phase of immigration, they typically viewed themselves more as residents of particular villages or regions, and not so much as 'Italians.' The organizational and residential life of early communities reflected these facts, as people limited their associations largely to kin and paesani (fellow villagers). The proliferation of narrowly based mutual aid societies and festas (feste, or feast days) honoring local patron saints were manifestations of these tendencies.  
(Source: https://www.everyculture.com/multi/Ha-La/Italian-Americans.html)

Indeed, in Lawrence, mutual aid societies sprang up, each focused on residents from a very specific region.  By 1915, the following mutual aid societies were in existence,  each with a local connotation:

• Most Holy Pompeii Society of Catholic Workers for Mutual Aid of Lawrence Mass. [Pompeii is outside of Naples];
• Teano [a town near Naples] Benefit Society, Luigi Tansillo Branch [named after Neapolitan - from Naples - poet Luigi Tansillo];
• Mutual Aid Society of Maria S. S. of the Graces [Madonna delle Grazie], of Buccheri [in Syracuse, Sicily] and
• The Mutual Benefit Society of Saint Mary of the Annunciation of Pedara, Incorporated [Pedara is in Sicily on the slope of Mount Etna].

(Source: 1915 Annual Report of the Massachusetts Insurance Commission.)

In Lawrence, immigrants from different regions stuck together.  “Immigrants from Sicily and the far southern region of Calabria formed a four-block neighborhood, bounded by Essex, Union, Summer and Jackson streets. The newcomers from the Naples area settled in a smaller, adjacent colony on Chestnut, Elm and Oak Streets” (Source: The Education of an Italian Priest in America: Father Mariano Milanese and the Holy Rosary Church, Lawrence, Mass. 1902-1935 by Christopher Sterba in The Italian American Review Volume 7 Number 2 Winter 2000).

"The enclave offered Italians a chance to make the transition from the Old World to the New. For those who were coming to America only temporarily, the enclave provided a secure, familiar setting without requiring returning Italians to make a heavy investment in assimilation. For those Italians who eventually decided to stay, enclaves provided a buffer against a harsh and strange American society. Enclaves helped ensure the survival of la via vecchza, “the old way”, which dictated a host of Italian family mores and social customs." (Source: Puleo)

Below: A sheet from the Federal Census of 1910, showing a section of Oak Street.  Note that every adult resident was born in Italy and all had arrived after 1894.

Within these highly localized enclaves, local customs of the old villages continued, such as festas. Lawrence's Feast of Three Saints, devoted to three martyred brothers from Trecastagni in Sicily, is actually the newest of the street festivals, each catering to the particular traditions of a particular village. 

​The first festival to be organized, the Feast of the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii, began in October 1903 when the Italian church was still the basement of then-St. Laurence O’Toole’s.  Pompeii is village outside of Naples.  According to the Lawrence Tribune, which reported the day after the Pompeii Virgin festival: “The stores and residences in the Italian section were appropriately decorated with American and Italian flags and gay bunting. Over 1500 lanterns were strung on Common street from Jackson to Union streets and they made a brilliant illumination when lighted at night.”  Other festivals included St. Anthony, St. Joseph and St. Parade. (Source: Sterba)

Below: Procession during the Feast of Three Saints, Lawrence, Mass. 2018 (video by the author). It is held next to the church.

​Father Milanese sets about making the ideal parish

Father Mariano found himself in this world of campinalismo, local village loyalties and saints feasts - as well as a time of disintegration of traditional values and the rise of competing value systems, such as anarchism and communism, which had more than a few adherents among Italian workers of this time. 

In 1904, he purchased the old St. Laurence Church at the corner of Union Street and Essex Street, for about $31,000 using a loan from the diocese, and renamed it Holy Rosary as a church for Italian immigrants. 

The Italian population of Lawrence was growing exponentially, from 263 in 1890 to 963 Italian-born persons in 1900, still most of them men.  By 1915, there were almost 9,000 Italian born persons and their American-born children.  Father Mariano had to make sure they became churchgoers by providing them with impressive institutions that met their needs.

However, because of challenges such as historically low levels of Italian participation in weekly Mass, anticlericism, competing value systems including communism and Protestant denominations, and an apparent preference for folk customs such as street festivals, it was far from guaranteed that all or most of the immigrants would be part of his church.  This is why Father Milanese seems to have insisted on providing the best of the best in everything he did, regardless of expense.
​
"For Milanese, the survival of an Italian parish in America and the Christian values it espoused depended on a physically impressive church worthy of city-wide respect. The parish had to symbolize prosperity and dignity; a well-defined path to security and welfare that would make secular and socialistic alternatives appear wholly inadequate in comparison." (Source:  Sterba)

Below: The interior of Holy Rosary (now Corpus Christi). Photo taken 1951.

​The challenges facing Father Mariano

In contrast to immigrant groups such as the Irish and the Poles, for whom their Catholicism was central to their identity – perhaps as an institution of resistance against foreign subjugation – immigrants of the mezzogiorno often negatively associated the Catholic church as an institution with dominant and distant powers such as landlords, or tax collectors from Rome. Also, there was a deep seated anticlericism in parts of the population, in which priests were perceived as being motivated by little more than greed and corruption.

Also, given that, in Italy, the state paid for the church there was no tradition of ordinary Italian parishioners supporting their local church with donations, the way there was among the Irish or Poles. Recall that St. Mary's Church, built in 1871, was essentially funded by thousands of tiny contributions from ordinary Irish parishioners, assisted by the "St. Mary's Bank", in which the church operated a deposit-taking savings bank.

Instead, “The Italian Catholic church was considered a source of charity, not an institution that depended on its parishioners' low incomes. To make matters worse, Italian…parishioners came to them only for the ritualistic ceremonies they considered most important, the major sacraments--baptism, matrimony and last rites.” (Source: Sterba)

Because churches largely had to be financially self-sustaining, these tendencies -- that existed at least initially among the immigrant population -- created enormous challenges for any priest trying to build and sustain a parish and all its institutions.

Further, as Sterba noted, saint veneration societies actually competed with the parish for funds: "The societies were not parish organizations. They operated without the pastor's direction and, what was especially galling to the immigrant clergy, their collections were greeted with much more enthusiasm than parish fund-raising campaigns."

Finally, the turn of the twentieth century was a time of great political and social change, especially in Italy. The country underwent a tremendous shift toward modernization, with the corresponding disruptions of a new industrial workforce. Many of the population were susceptible to the promises of Communism, or the intoxicating power of Anarchism in which the average man could violently assert himself against an oppressive system using bombings and assassinations. These tendencies reached their height at the time of the 1919 Lawrence Strike, but were also a big part of the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike, which was mainly comprised of recent Italian immigrants (my blog post on Italians and the 1912 strike is here).

Father Mariano wanted to counter these challenges with a strong, impressive parish, saying so in a letter to the Archbishop: "The people were clamoring for a decent church and the congregation was getting bigger and bigger as time went on. Socialists, Anarchists and Communists were doing their best to influence my people and I wished this church as a means of welding my people together."

His accomplishments
​
“During the decade that followed the establishment of Holy Rosary Parish in May 1905, Father Milanese's responsibilities as pastor grew exponentially. The rise in the volume of normal priestly duties conducted by Milanese reflected this growth. In 1903, his first full year in Lawrence, the young priest performed baptisms for 137 Italian immigrant children; by 1915 he and his assistants at Holy Rosary recorded 765 baptisms. Milanese gave First Holy Communion to 20 Italian children in 1903; twelve years later Holy Rosary performed the sacrament for nearly 200. He also created a number of parish organizations, among them the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Christian Mother Society, and Italian branches of the Young Men's Catholic Association and Holy Name Society.

The religious and educational needs of his parishioners meanwhile demanded a dramatic expansion of Milanese's financial and administrative responsibilities. He was able to raise substantial funds for church repairs in 1906, and in 1910 spent over $20,000 to construct and furnish a parish house, office, and sacristy, and to build a gallery extension to the church and install a new organ. He spent $10,000 to refurbish the basement of the church for use as a school in 1909, and requested teachers from the Sisters of Venerini Order to begin classes for the city's Italian children. Seven Italian Venerini nuns arrived in Lawrence in November, and with the help of two lay teachers who taught English, grade school classes began in January 1910. In 1912, Milanese responded to the rising numbers of Italian school children by requesting the English-teaching services of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and in 1917 built a kindergarten for the Venerini Sisters to operate.” (Source: Sterba)
​​
His masterpiece was the Holy Rosary School. In 1915, Milanese purchased two houses on Summer Street and had them knocked down. Construction started in 1917 with a grandiose cornerstone ceremony.

According to a July 28, 1917 article in the Lawrence Telegraph, “plans were perfected for the parade and ceremonies incidental to the cornerstone laying at the Italian school on Summer Street, Sunday afternoon, August 5 at 2 o’clock, and the Rev. Fr. Mariano Milanese expects that it will be one of the most edifying spectacles in the history of the city. There will be in the parade about 2000 people, representing the largest Italian organizations of the city.”

The article then described all the luminaries who would be present at the laying of the cornerstone, including the priests from the (de facto Irish) churches of St. Mary’s, Immaculate Conception and St. Laurence O’Toole; prominent Italian-American doctors, lawyers and businessmen; and even well-known Protestants. It then describes the parade in grandiose terms, listing the exact formation of the parade by organization.
​
The parade route was to be “Jackson street to Essex, to Union, to Common, to Lawrence, to Union, to Summer.” Representative organizations included numerous village-based mutual aid societies, such as the Societia Teanese [i.e. of Teano, a village near Naples], the Societia Tricacria [i.e. the symbol of the island of Sicily], and the Societia Lafiazi [anyone know what this is?], as well as the drum corps of Our Lady of the Rosary.

In the construction of the school, no expense was spared. It had an ornate Italianate exterior decorated with columns and multi-toned brickwork. Inside, it featured state of the art technology, such as film projectors (in 1919!). It had fourteen classrooms, an auditorium and a basement. It cost a quarter of a million dollars.

A celebratory pamphlet published for its dedication in November 1919 stated: "Truly such a beautiful school was never dreamt of by the people of Lawrence; and when it was seen, they were struck with bewilderment."
​
Below: Image of the Holy Rosary school from a 1990 brochure. The school closed in 1994 and is presently abandoned.

How Father Mariano funded his efforts, and his downfall

At every step of the way, Father Milanese seems to have wanted Holy Rosary to be as nice a parish as possible, with grand institutions such as its school. Given the financial limitations he faced, he often had to resort to creative measures.

In 1915, he got in trouble with the archdiocese for baptizing Polish and Lithuanian children from nearby churches, for a fee, when their priests were not available on desired dates. He was made to stop.

In 1916, he incurred the anger of the archbishop for giving his homilies in English, in order to attract more English speaking parishioners, whom he could then ask for donations. He was made to stop.

In 1918, when funds ran out for the construction of the Holy Rosary School, he secured a $50,000 donation from the Manufacturers' Association for Welfare Work, an organization founded by the major mills of Lawrence. "The city's manufacturers saw the Catholic school as an indirect means of subduing and Americanizing the future generations of Italians that would come to work in their mills." (Source for all of this: Sterba)

"The manufacturers' contribution, kept secret from the public, was made possible through Milanese's close contact with William Wood, president of the American Woolen Company. Wood and the other owners provided a second large donation to Holy Rosary for the construction of a community building in November 1919." (Sterba)

During the 1919 strike, Milanese railed against communists and anarchists in the Italian community, and criticized the government authorities for not silencing these voices. This is in contrast to his behavior in the 1912 Bread and Roses strike when, among all the priests of Lawrence, he was the most supportive.

Sterba explains Milanese's later attitude: "Milanese's vision of prosperity and uplift for the city’s Italian population consisted of a strong and respected parish, a large parochial educational system, and church organizations that provided social and recreational services for the community. These institutions depended financially on a healthy and mutually supportive relationship with the mills where his parishioners labored. Conflict in the workplace therefore meant for him destructive community conflict, impoverishment, and a backward step in the Italians' struggle against prejudice and discrimination. But despite all of Milanese's anti-strike activities, Italians again formed a pro-union bulwark in 1919. The experience of this failure compelled Milanese to expand Holy Rosary's works even further, and completely ignore any financial confines that the Archdiocese imposed upon him."

He continued to borrow and spend money to maintain Holy Rosary Parish in the most impressive manner. In 1925 , he paid $10,000 for a new steeple and roof, and murals for the school. In 1928, he conducted an enlargement and refurbishing project for the church, converting the basement back into a space for worship and making other improvements. In 1929, he embarked on a major beautification process for the upper part of the church.

In 1928, he finally confronted the saints' societies, threatening to forbid their processions entirely unless they handed over all their collections to the parish. He ultimately came to a settlement where they agreed to contribute a sizable portion.

He was in hot water for the entire period. The archbishop criticized him in 1925 for not paying down the mortgage, in 1926 for not getting his permission to make improvements, and in 1928 for having the nerve to ask for financial assistance for certain projects. The archbishop also criticized Milanese for using expensive stationary.

Then in 1931, when contractors threatened to sue the archdiocese for unpaid bills, the wheels started to come off. "In October the Cardinal demanded that Milanese employ a certified public accountant to make a complete audit of the church's financial records. Although Milanese claimed that the parish owed just over fifty thousand dollars in each of his reports for the years 1927-1930, the accounting firm estimated that the church was an astonishing $212,246 in debt." Later investigations showed three sets of books - Milanese pleaded incompetence rather than malice - and additional debts based on handshake contracts. By 1934, the indebtedness of the parish was over $300,000.

The defense for continuing to work on improving the church after money had run out was "it was the belief of all concerned that if the church were finished the Italians of the Parish would then help by their contributions." "The congregation had frequently stated that they would contribute nothing toward the church" until all work was completed. (Sterba)

Father Milanese was relieved of his duties in July 1935, moving to Villianova, the Augustinian college. He retired from the priesthood in 1937, and lived in a nursing home until his death in Baltimore on September 26, 1952.

Legacy of Father Milanese

In 1935, the corporate arm of the Augustinians in Lawrence, the St. Mary's Corporation, assumed the debts. They were in effect paid off by all the churches of Lawrence that were Augustinian (St. Mary's, Immaculate Conception, St. Laurence O'Toole, St. Augustine's, Holy Trinity, St. Francis, Ss. Peter and Paul, Church of the Assumption and Holy Rosary). The improvements to Holy Rosary church were completed, making it one of the most impressive churches in Lawrence.

In my view, Milanese was unfairly treated. He very much resembled the first Augustian priest of any standing in Lawrence, Father James O,Donnell, whose mission in the 1850s was to see to the construction of the grand St, Mary’s church and the creation of schools. He used whatever financial means he could find to achieve his goals. By Father Milanese’s time, the powers-that-be had forgotten that Father O’Donnell’s clever solution, the “St Mary’s Bank”, had eventually failed in 1882. It had to be bailed out by the diocese because it couldn’t pay its debts that had been incurred in constructing the first wave of (essentially Irish) churches. (Source: Ennis, No Easy Road: The Early Years of the Augustinians in the United States).

Above: Father Lorenzo Andolfi.  Source: Website of the Augustian Order

The much-beloved Father Lorenzo Andolfi assumed the pastorate of Holy Rosary in 1935, and remained there until his death in 1962.  He successfully led his parish through  a time of transition.  Italian immigration had ceased in the mid-1920s and the community instead focused on assimilation and becoming American.  Father Andolfi led the expansion of the parish into  the Pleasant Valley section of Methuen, which was largely Italian, with the founding of St. Lucy's in 1960.  Parishioners by this time actively participated in all aspects of the church, making the Holy Rosary and its schools one of the strongest in Lawrence.   Its St. Rita's Soldality, founded by Father Milanese, remains one of the strongest female lay organizations in all of the Merrimack Valley.  See https://www.saintritasodality.com/​

Below: Father Andolfi's Golden Jubilee (50th Anniversary of being a priest), April 30, 1961.

 
Below: The current state of Holy Rosary school, Lawrence, Mass.  It has been closed since 1994. (Source: Queen City blog of the archivist of the Lawrence Public Library)

​​Among persons of Irish descent, support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was widespread, even if it was superficial. Somehow it was okay to like Princess Diana and Irish republicans…

The IRA story was easy to understand.  The British army was an occupying force.  IRA men were freedom fighters, naturally fighting for a unified Ireland.  British empire, bad.  Freedom fighter, good.  It’s all very romantic.
​
Almost nobody from the area knows the story of the “other side”, the so-called Ulster Orangemen, who also made the region of Ulster their home.  They were fighting for minority rights just as much as the IRA.
​
Below: Logo of the Ulster Defence Association, paramilitary group

​The history of the Orangemen in a nutshell

Ireland was ruled by the English crown starting in the 1500s.  In the early 1600s, Scotland was technically still a separate kingdom. The English king had a problem. What to do with all those pesky Scots who lived on his side of the English-Scottish border?  They kept trying to rise up against him.  Solution: deport them to Ireland.

These “Scots-Irish” (Americans like to say Scotch-Irish) were given land and rights in the province of Ulster, which was called a Plantation.  They were supposed to raise sheep and pursue other productive ventures.  Some of them soon left Ulster and settled the hillbilly regions of the United States.  That’s another story.

The ones who remained in Ulster had a tenuous relationship with the English powers. They refused to kowtow to the Anglicans who ran everything.  Instead, they followed a very Calvinistic form of Presbyterianism.  Although they had more rights and wealth than the Catholic population, they were an often-second-class minority within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
​
Below: Political Cartoon from 1913 Regarding Ireland "Home Rule"

When Ireland began to break away from Great Britain, the Ulster Scots leveraged their close-knit status as a political force. They won the separation of most but not all of the Ulster province from independent Ireland. The section in which they were a majority remained with Great Britain. The Ulster Scots saw themselves as a beleaguered minority of Ireland proudly clinging to their traditions. The British crown was now their protector, hence their extreme loyalism.

​The Orangemen

One of the big traditions among Ulstermen is a commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne (July 12, 1690). In this battle, Protestant William of Orange, who rule as co-regent with his wife Mary II (hence the reign of William & Mary), defeated the deposed King James II, thus thwarting James’ failed bid to restore Catholicism to Great Britain. To commemorate this victory, Orangemen hold marches. During the “Troubles” of Northern Ireland, from 1969-1998, often these marches were designed to provoke their Catholic rivals, just as republican (meaning pro-Republic of Ireland) countermarches were designed to provoke Ulster communities.

Technically, the Orangemen are a fraternal organization, comprised mainly but not exclusively of Ulster Scots (some are descended from English settlers of Ulster). It was technically founded as a brotherhood for all Protestants, in 1795 in County Armagh in Ulster.

Below: Typical procession of Orangemen in Northern Ireland, July 12, 2016. PHOTOGRAPH BY Michelle McCarron​.

What does any of this have to do with the Merrimack Valley??

On July 12, 1875, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, a group of self-styled Orangemen held a picnic on the banks of the Merrimack River in Methuen.  When they returned to Lawrence by way of steamer to Water Street, they were met a mob of 200 Irish Catholics.  A riot erupted, and police fired at the mob.  Here is the coverage from the New York Daily Herald:

Mary O’Keefe, whom I have written about, condemned the riot. She specifically cited the efforts by Irish Catholic clergy to distance themselves from the events.

“And now we come to an event which we are doubtful about mentioning in a sketch of Catholicity in Lawrence for testing as we do, that Catholicity had no share in it. We refer to the ‘Orange riot’ which took place on the 12th of July, 1875, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, and was, by an accident, very largely advertised all over the country, and, of course, ridiculously exaggerated. However, lest we should be understood as acknowledging, by our silence, the truth of these reports, we here insert a card signed by the Catholic clergy of Lawrence, and published, at the time, in all the local papers. It expresses not only their sentiments, but those of all others in the city deserving the name of Catholics.

“We, the undersigned, Roman Catholic clergymen of Lawrence, desire to publicly make known our condemnation of the riotous proceedings of last Monday evening. We do not consider as Catholics, in the proper meaning of the term, those who participated in the disturbance of the public peace, and who, by their shameful conduct, sullied the fair fame of our city. We teach our people good will towards all men, and we strive, by precept and example, to impress upon them the importance of faithfully observing the laws. We trust that the few ruflians who, under the name of Catholicism versus Orangeism, have created such bad feeling and given rise to so much trouble, may be made to feel the enormity of their crime. – SIGNED
W. H. Fitzpatrick, Pastor of the Immaculate Conception Church;
J. H. Mulcahy, Asst. Pastor of the Immaculate Conception Church;
Jno. P. Gilmore, D. D. Regan, J. A. Marsden, O. S. A., Pastors of St. Mary’s

Analysis and Questions
​
What I would like to know: were these marchers really Orangemen, meaning they were really of Ulster descent? I have never heard of any Scots-Irish living in Greater Lawrence. I asked the Lawrence History Center, who have a redoubtable collection of materials related to dozens of different immigrant groups to the area. They have nothing on Scots-Irish, Ulstermen, Orangemen or anything similar. (There was however a large Scot-Irish settlement in Londonderry, New Hampshire - however, this town is probably too far away to have been the source of these marching "Orangemen".)
​
I can’t help but think the march was of anti-Catholic types, of which there were still many (soon I hope to write about the Catholic school controversy of 1888 of Haverhill). But more research is needed. If anyone’s ancestor was a member of the Grey Presbyterian church in Lawrence, it would be great if you could contact me about the origins of your ancestors.

Below: First Presbyterian Church (The Grey Church), 315 Haverhill Street(?), Lawrence, Mass.

​
​
The Ayer Mill Clock Tower as a landmark

There aren’t many landmarks left for a Lawrencian to point to. The beautiful post office? Demolished. The grand old police station? Demolished. “Theater Row” where many mill workers and their children watched the latest Hollywood talkies? Gone. Department store Sutherlands and the other large retail establishments of Essex Street? Gone. Also gone are many nice churches and schools, and even whole neighborhoods demolished for “urban renewal”.

Most of the surviving Lawrence landmarks are industrial: the Great Stone Dam that made the whole place possible; and the mills lining the river and canals – the Pacific, the Wood, the Everett, etc. About half of the old mill buildings have been demolished.

By far the most prominent landmark left in Lawrence is the clock tower of the Ayer Mill, now a New Balance factory. The tower rises 276 feet and is visible from many parts of the city, as well as from Interstate 495 passing by on the elevated roadway. It is the biggest mill clock tower in the world. As we all know, its clock face is only six inches smaller than the one on Big Ben. After decades of neglect the clocktower was restored in 1991 and has been maintained ever since.

Below: Video of New Balance factory in Lawrence, Mass.

This blog post tells the fascinating life story of its namesake, Frederick Ayer, peddler of patent medicines and almanacs who diversified into textiles. After you read it, maybe you’ll start calling the Ayer Mill clock tower “Big Fred”.

Frederick’s background

​Practically every person in this country with the last name of Ayer – including my great grandmother Mildred Ayer – is descended from the original American Ayer [or Ayre or Ayres], named John. He was born in 1582 in Salisbury England and was a founder of Haverhill, where he died in 1657. John Ayer was Frederick Ayer’s fourth great grandfather, making Frederick a Haverhillite of sorts (and my sixth cousin five times removed). However, three generations earlier his family had moved from Haverhill to the coast of Connecticut. Frederick was born in Ledyard Connecticut, near New London, in 1822.
​
Below: Frederick Ayer late in life. Source: Wikipedia

His Brother James Cook Ayer and Ayer’s Patent Medicines

For the early part of his life, Frederick followed in the shadow of his older brother, “Dr.” James Cook Ayer, born 1819. James studied medicine, apparently in Philadelphia, and may or may not have become a proper doctor. He did however become an extremely successful proprietor of patent medicines.

James started practicing as a pharmacist in Lowell in 1841 at age twenty-three. His uncle lent him the money to buy his original pharmacy in Lowell. He settled there because his mother, a Cook, was from the Lowell area. He was a graduate of Westford Academy in neighboring Westford, Mass.

Below: "Dr." James Cook Ayer, from his 1874 congressional campaign

While a pharmacist James began developing cures for his customers’ ailments, and soon founded J.C. Ayer & Company.  His five major products were Cherry Pectoral (“cure-all”), Cathartic Pills (laxative), Sarsaparilla (cure for syphilis and other “blood disorders”), Ague Cure (anti-malaria), and Hair Vigor (against thinning hair).  Cherry Pectoral was by far his most popular and profitable product.  Its popularity was possibly aided by three grams of opium in every bottle.

In 1859, the company built a facility at 165 Market Street, Lowell, which they later expanded.  By 1865, Ayer employed 150 people. In one year the factory processed 325,000 pounds of drugs, 220,000 gallons of spirits and 400,000 pounds of sugar.

Below: Ayer's Cathartic Pills.  Source: Cliff Hoyt website (​http://cliffhoyt.com/jcayer.htm)

Ayer’s Almanac

James distinguished himself from other quacks – um, I mean doctors – by means of extensive advertising.  In 1851, he hit upon the idea of providing a free almanac to all his customers. Almanacs were already essential household items, offering a range of helpful information for the current year – from public holidays to suggested planting times to town directories to historical summaries.  However, James also peppered his almanac with advertisements for his products.

Print production of Ayer’s Almanac is estimated to have exceeded 16,000,000 and was possibly as high as 25,000,000. The J.C. Ayer Company’s modest slogan for its publication was ‘Second only to the bible in circulation.'  The almanac was eventually published in twenty-one different languages, reflecting the burgeoning immigrant population of the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Below: Examples of foreign language copies of Ayer's Almanac (Source: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/almanac/heyday.html)

James looked for a marketing opportunity wherever he could find it.  For example, during the Civil War when Congress allowed postage stamps to become legal tender due to a shortage of currency, James encased stamps in miniature advertisements to protect them from wear and tear but also market his brand (source: www.cliffhoyt.com/encased_postage.htm).

Below: Encased postage stamps bearing J.C. Ayer insignia
(Source: Cliff Hoyt website http://cliffhoyt.com/encased_postage.htm)

Transition of The Medicine Business to Frederick; James’ Business and Political Pursuits; His Untimely Death
​
In 1855, James offered his brother Frederick a partnership, and ceded day-to-day operations to his younger sibling.  He started to become a man of wealth and leisure, traveling on extensive tours.  In 1865, he purchased a statute on a trip to Germany and presented to the City of Lowell.  This “Winged Victory” statue still stands today in Monument Square in front of Lowell City Hall.

​Below: Victory Statue, Monument Square, Lowell (Source: Wikipedia)

By the 1850s, he was looking for investments for his enormous profits. However, he seems to have been the “dumb money” that came in late – in 1857, he lost $2 million dollars when the Bay State mills in newly founded Lawrence went bankrupt. That was an enormous sum of money in those days. Later, in his book Some of the Uses and Abuses in the Management of Our Manufacturing Corporations, he complained of the ways in which shareholders like him were denied a voice because entrenched management controlled the governance apparatus of corporations. Basically, he said, the insiders rigged shareholder elections. These days, someone like James C. Ayer is called an activist shareholder.

In the book James launched an attack on the firm of A. & A. Lawrence, the powerful firm founded by brothers Abbot and Amos Lawrence, consummate Boston Brahmins and benefactors of great cultural institutions. (Lawrence, Mass. is named after Abbot Lawrence.) I take this as an indication that the Ayers were outsiders, not connected to the commercial elite of Boston, such as the Lawrences, with their ties to Harvard and Unitarianism (you know, “Cabots talking to Lowells and Lowells talking to God” and all that). This observation helps explain Frederick Ayer’s very unusual decision, in 1886, to allow the swarthy Portuguese immigrant’s son, William Wood (a.k.a. Guilherme Madeira), to run his textile empire and marry his daughter. More on that below.

Ayer, Massachusetts (formerly a section of Groton) was set off and named after James Ayer in 1871 when he paid for the new town’s city hall.  He had dreams of becoming an important public figure.  In 1874, he ran for Congress and was heavily defeated.  He was so unpopular, the citizens of Ayer even burned him in effigy.  This was apparently too much for his ego to handle. He went mad, spending a number of months at a private insane asylum in New Jersey.  James died in 1878, leaving his brother Frederick to run the family business empire for another forty years until his death in 1918.

Below: The Town Seal of Ayer, Massachusetts, named after James Cook Ayer

Frederick Ayer Takes Over

In 1878, Frederick was fifty nine years old and a millionaire many times over thanks to the patent medicine business. However, by this time he had embarked on his second act: textile magnate. After a number of setbacks – and the loss of stupendous amounts of money as his family’s mills in Lawrence kept going bankrupt – he managed to get a handle on matters by hiring William Wood of Fall River to run the businesses.

​The relationship began in 1886 when Ayer met Wood while the latter was selling shares to a new mill he wanted to build in Fall River. Instead of investing in Wood’s mill, he hired Wood to help run Ayer’s mill in Lawrence, the Washington Mill. One thing led to another, and within a few years Wood was making $25,000 a year (up from his original pay of $204 a year) and he had married Frederick Ayer’s daughter.

Below: Frederick's Son-in-Law, William Madison Wood, 1914 (Source: McClure's Magazine)

As William Wood’s biographer wrote of the 1888 marriage between William Wood, age 30, and Ellen Wheaton Ayer, age 29:

• “The marriage of this aristocratic young lady to the son of [poor] Portuguese immigrants must have raised eyebrows in Massachusetts society. Her ancestors had settled in Connecticut in the eighteenth century…Ellen’s brothers were Harvard graduates; Wood had never finished high school. Her world was one of culture and refinement; his, thus far, had been one of work.” (Mills, Mansions, and Mergers: The Life of William M. Wood. Author: Edward G. Roddy. Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, 1982)

The partnership between Frederick Ayer and William Wood culminated in the formation of the American Woolen Company in 1899. The two men raised $25,000,000 from investors in New York and bought up seven mills. At its peak in 1926, the American Woolen Company had around sixty mills in New England and upstate New York.

in addition to his involvement in patent medicines and textiles, Frederick Ayer was a founding director of the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, serving in that role from 1877 to 1896. He was also a founding director of the Lowell & Andover Railroad, a subsidiary line of the Boston & Maine, serving from 1873 to the time of his death. (Source: his New York Times obituary, March 15, 1918.)

Below: The Frederick Ayer Mansion, 357 Pawtucket Street, downtown Lowell (Wikipedia)

The Ayer Mill

The following is a description of the Ayer Mill in a wonderful study of the architectural heritage of the lower Merrimack Valley by Peter Molloy (published 1978 by the sadly now defunct Merrimack Valley Textile Museum):

“The Ayer Mills were designed by Charles T. Main Architects and built for the American Woolen Company as that firm's third worsted mill in the city of Lawrence. The mill was named for Frederick Ayer, a Lowell patent medicine manufacturer and the father-in-law of William Wood, the President of the American Woolen Co. The Ayer Mill manufactured worsted suitings and every operation in worsted manufacture was accomplished within its two mill buildings and dye house. An underground tunnel connected the Ayer to the Wood Mill, which was situated within 200 feet of the Ayer. During the 1950s the American Woolen Company ceased operations, and the Ayer Mill was tenanted to a number of small concerns. The dyehouse and boiler-turbine house were destroyed to create a parking lot. The boiler-turbine house contained eight 600 HP boilers and two 2. 5 MW turbo-generators. The dyehouse was 2 stories, brick, 90' x 126'. Of the two remaining mill buildings No. 1 is brick, 6 stories in height, 123' x 595'; No. 2 is 7 stories, brick, 123'x329'. The 2 mills are connected at the east end by an 8 story building, 40'x81', which contains water closets and stairways. Another building, 40'x81', connects the west ends of mills 1 and 2. This building was used as a stair and elevator tower. Above the roof level of this building rises a 40' x40' brick tower, the weather vane of which is 267' above street level. In the tower was a 20,000 gallon water cistern, a bell, and a clock with 4 illuminated dials each 22' 6" in diameter. The buildings were decorated with elaborate facades in a neo-Georgian style, with pediments, granite coursings, and Palladian windows. The buildings are among the most highly styled 20th century mills in the United States. In 1910, the mill's first year of operation, it contained 75 worsted cards, 80 combs, 45,000 spindles, and 320 broadlooms. It employed over 1,000 workers. Although situated near the Essex Company's South Canal, the Ayer did not utilize water turbines, but it did use water from the canal for process and boiler water.”

Below: Frederick Ayer grave, Lowell, Mass. (Source: Find A Grave)(Note the famous "Ayer Lion" in the Lowell Cemetery is James's grave)

A month and a half later, Whittier returned to Methuen and was arrested in his wife's home.  The follow-on article in the Boston Evening Post said "He appears to have broken down mentally and presents a pitiable appearance."

The above poem, classified as "doggrel" or a nonsense poem, was written by the famous American philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts in 1850. He wrote it at the height of the Irish refugee crisis, when improverished Irish refugees fleeing the Irish potato famine built refugee camps called shantytowns on marginal land. The newcomers mostly worked at menial pick-and-shovel jobs, building roads and railways.

Thoreau kept prolific journals. Through them, we learn something about his encounters with his Irish neighbors living in the woods in a shack, just like he was (although he did so out of philosophical choice, they out of bare necessity). 

The boy’s name was Johnny Riordan.  Thoreau first mentioned the boy in a journal entry of November 28, 1850, when he penned the poem.  A few weeks later, on December 21, 1851, he became upset about the boy’s condition:

“This little mass of humanity, this tender gobbet [?] for the fates, cast into a cold world with a torn lichen leaf wrapped about him…I shudder when I think of the fate of innocence.” 

On February 8, 1852 Thoreau finally acted. 

“Carried a new cloak to Johnny Riordan,” he remarked in his journal. 

Upon giving his gift to the boy, he gained entry to the Riordan shanty.  He wrote in his journal, favorably if very condescendingly, that “the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish…What if there is less fire on the hearth, if there is more in the heart!” 

Thoreau’s friend, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was also living in Concord and on whose wooded lands Thoreau lived, wrote to Thoreau:

“Now the humanity of the town suffers with the poor Irish, who receive but sixty or even fifty cents, for working dark till dark, with a strain and a following-up that reminds me of negro-driving.”
 
A few weeks later, Thoreau wrote back to Emerson positively:

“The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple.  Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins and pigs and children reveling in the genial Concord dirt…”

In this correspondence, as in his dealings with the Riordan family, Thoreau seems very sympathetic towards his poor Irish neighbors living in their shanties and laboring at building the railroad. 

And yet…Thoreau was at this very time putting the finishing touches on his masterwork, Walden.  In it, he famously and derogatorily denigrates his shanty-Irish neighbor, John Field, for his “inherited Irish poverty” and lectures him for not being able to resist wanting “luxuries” like butter and tea that force him to slave and toil from dawn to dusk, instead of saving his pennies to better his situation.  Even better, suggests Thoreau, Field should realize that he should transcend his material needs entirely! And all that coming from a Harvard-educated bachelor who can afford to live in the woods in a shack, not out of necessity but to make a philosophical statement!

The poem “I am a little Irish boy”, then perhaps was not meant by Thoreau to be sympathetic, but rather sarcastic.  Maybe it's making fun of the boy and the pathetic constraints on his life that have already predestined him to an existence of digging ditches.  Nevertheless, the poem can be touching when read in the right spirit.  I found this version of it, set to music and sung, that is particularly touching.  I hope you enjoy it.
​

PS: A​t some later point, I hope to write a blog post about Thoreau's journey on a raft down the Merrimack River with his brother, which he covered in his book "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" (the Concord River flows into the Merrimack at Lowell).

Above: Katherine O'Keefe O’Mahoney, born Ireland 1855, died Lawrence, Mass. 1918 (Source: Lawrence, Massachusetts by Ken Skulski, 1995)

The Backstory
​
Before there was Lawrence, there was ye olde New England: clapboard farmhouses, village greens, slow-moving farmers who mended their stone walls and carted their produce to market. This is how things were in 1845, the year Lawrence was founded as a town.

Things in 1845 really weren’t all that different from 1645, two hundred years earlier, when the area was first settled by English Puritans in the towns of Andover and Haverhill. The ancient towns were later carved into the towns that we know today – Methuen, Salem N.H. (both formerly part of Haverhill), North Andover (the original part of Andover)…and Lawrence.

Sure, the railroad had been introduced a decade earlier, and the Puritans had mellowed somewhat. People were no longer executed for witchcraft or whipped for heresy. But the culture was basically the same as it had been for generations. The original Puritan settlers had come forth and multiplied, cleared the land, built meetinghouses. Some of them went off to sea, chasing whale oil or Far-East silks and spices; or enterprisingly built waterwheels to grind their neighbors’ grain. Some of the local militia boys had gone off to the Battle of Bunker Hill and other early encounters of the Revolution. Basically, however, people farmed, traded, read their King James Bibles, attended meetinghouse, lived and died. Things were homogeneous and consistent, generation after generation.

Below: Typical New England farm of the early 19th Century, similar to Bodwell's Farm in what became Lawrence (Source: New England Historical Society)

Then, in the second half of the 1840s, two things happened: (1) industrialization and (2) a refugee crisis.

Here Come the Factories

The fast-moving tributaries of the Merrimack River had always powered waterwheels – little mills that were used to grind grain, saw logs into boards, or run a few looms to supplement the homespun cloth. However, in the 1840s, the mills being planned were different: they would now be on a grand scale. The immense new wealth of the spice trade and whaling was chasing new investments, and could finance endeavors on a previously unimaginable scale. The industrial revolution was underway in Britain and provided the technology. The planned textile city of Lowell was the first example, as we all know, but bigger and bigger factories could be planned.

​So a group of rich Boston merchant pooled their capital to form the Essex Company. In 1845 this company started to build Lawrence in a backcountry corner of Essex County, smack in the middle of farmers’ fields that had been cleared two centuries earlier. Their project – to build the largest dam in the world across the Merrimack and force its waters down two long canals to power dozens of enormous mills – required a lot of labor, the cheaper the better.

Below: Plan for Lawrence showing new dam, canals and plots for water-powered textile mills, 1845 (Source Digital Public Library of America)

Here Come the Irish Refugees

And who should conveniently show up but a bunch of Irish refugees who could be put to work for pennies a day?  These rag-clothed, impoverished, filthy bands of people were escaping the biggest humanitarian crisis of their time.  The Irish Potato famine was so severe it killed one third of the people and forced another third to flee.  The Famine Irish had arrived on dangerous, unseaworthy “coffin ships” operated by unscrupulous people-runners looking to exploit the desperation of the refugees. A risky voyage across the water was nevertheless preferable to staying in Ireland.
​
Below: A So-Called Coffin Ship Leaving Queenstown (Now Cobh) Ireland, 1848

​The Irish migrants crowded the port of Boston, then made their way inland, likely on foot, looking for work.  The stream of refugees began in 1847 and did not abate until the mid-1850s.  At Lawrence, they formed their refugee camp – the shantytown on the southern bank of the Merrimack – and the men started working on the dam.  One of these laborers was my great great grandfather, Jeremiah Driscoll, arrived from Ireland in 1851 at age 29.  He worked as a laborer for the Essex Company. His home address in the Lawrence town directory, once the town was big enough to have a directory, was “Shantytown, South Side.” 

​Other Irish built a shantytown/refugee camp on the plains above Haverhill Street, near the Spicket River.  A report from 1870 stated that some shanties had to be cleared for construction of the Lawrence reservoir.  One of them was 120 feet long, and made of rough boards.  It housed 80 people, mostly single men but also a family who built the place and charged the boarders a half penny a day to shelter there.

Below: Derogatory Cartoon Depicting Shanty Irish

​Irish Pride in Early Lawrence

Fast forward thirty-five years or so to 1882. Lawrence has grown from a couple hundred residents to 38,000…and around half of them are Irish. Although the town is seven square miles, most folks are concentrated in walking distance of the mills lining the river, spanned now by three bridges. There are by this time over a dozen large textile mills with more being built. The Irish, though largely still poor, have survived massive prejudice and exploitation within a largely hostile Yankee society.
​
What do they do to show their pride? Do they march in a St. Patrick’s Day parade? Hardly – the first proper St. Patrick’s Day parade in Lawrence wasn’t until the 1900s. Go to a Riverdance concert? Listen to the Dropkick Murphy’s? No: they celebrated their Catholic faith by building magnificent churches and then organizing their lives around them.

Below: Interior, St. Mary's Church, erected Lawrence, Mass. 1871

• “[L]ess than thirty-five years ago, the population of this city, which now numbers about thirty-eight thousand souls, was not more than two hundred; and, of the numerous churches that now attest the religious zeal of the people, not one had then [been] raised…What a change has such a short time effected! …But such was God’s holy will, and His divine wisdom and power have accomplished it. It is safe to conclude that, amongst this first two hundred, a few, at least, were …Irish Catholics, perhaps, with the noble simplicity and confiding trust of their country’s Faith still in their brave, generous hearts. Yes, they were even then here, hopeful and resigned, but sad from recent partings; ready to take up the burden of life in a strange land, to form new friends and associations and to be as' loyal to them as their sorrowful, tender hearts would ever be faithful to the dear ones left behind.”

          Katherine O’Keefe O’Mahoney, Lawrence, Mass. 1882

As one observer wrote, the Irish were known to spend their money on beautifying their houses of God before they beautified their own homes.  Indeed, in 1882, three grand churches had been constructed of granite and brick in Lawrence – Immaculate Conception on Chestnut Street, St. Mary’s on Haverhill Street, and St. Lawrence O’Toole at the  corner of Essex and Union Streets (it was renamed Holy Rosary in 1904 when the new St. Laurence O'Toole was built on East Haverhill Street). Yet at the same time, many Irish in Lawrence still lived in shanties.  The last shanty was not torn down until 1894.
​

The sense of Irish pride in their Church and its institutions – its grand churches, its rigorous schools, its charities like orphanages and hospitals – is captured in an 1882 book, “Catholicity in Lawrence” by Katherine O’Keefe O’Mahoney.

According to Ken Skulski’s history of Lawrence, O'Keefe was “an author, lecturer and educator”.  Irish-born, she graduated from Lawrence High School in 1873 (a rarity for girls, especially an immigrant girl), and then she started working there as a teacher. 

“Robert Frost considered her one of his favorite teachers.  She was also among the first Irish-American women to lecture in New England.  Her books include A Sketch of Catholicity in Lawrence and Vicinity (1882) and Famous Irishwomen (1907).”  She also published a newspaper for Irish-American Catholics in Lawrence and conducted Irish classes there.  She died at her Tower Hill home in 1918 at age sixty three. (Source: Ken Skulski’s Lawrence, Massachusetts.)

For the about the first thirty year's of Lawrence's existence (until French Canadians started to arrive), pretty much the only Catholics in Lawrence were Irish.

Reading O'Keefe's proud descriptions of St. Mary’s Church, you can get a sense of the importance of a magnificent church like this to the community:
​

• “[I]t is conceded by all, to be, not only the finest parish church in New England, but one of the finest in the country. It is of the Gothic style of architecture and the material of which it is built is light granite, brought from Westford, Mass, Salem, N.H., and Hallowell, Me.  The length of the building along Haverhill street is two hundred and ten feet, and its width eighty feet, except at the transept where it is one hundred and two feet wide. The steeple, which is at the northwest corner, is two hundred and twenty-five feet high, the top of the cross that surmounts it being two hundred and thirty-five feet from the ground, which makes it fifteen feet higher than the top of Bunker Hill Monument.” (emphasis added - she wanted to make clear it was better than the monuments built by these Yankee neighbors!)

​Below: St. Mary's Church, Lawrence, Mass. erected 1871

 
For her, the priests are towering figures, and funerals of priests are the equivalent of a funeral for a head of state. The following is from her description of the 1875 funeral of Father Louis Edge, O.S.A., who built St. Mary’s along with the Augustinian Order. She claims that 10,000 people viewed his body lying in state in his coffin in front of the altar. Note the participation of the numerous Irish social and religious organizations:

“Early on Monday morning, crowds began to assemble in the vicinity of the church, awaiting the opening of the doors. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, numbering nearly 150 men, were the first to enter, and to them was assigned the East wing; after them came the Ladies’ Sodality of St. Mary’s Church, with medals and white veils. They numbered over seven hundred, and presented a beautiful appearance. The Irish Benevolent Society, headed by the Lawrence Brass Band, were the next to enter the church. They numbered nearly two hundred, and bore a silken mourning banner; they were seated in the Gospel aisle. Next came the Ladies’ Sodality of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, in white veils, similar to St. Mary’s Sodality; they had been assigned to them the West wing. After them came the Men’s Sodality of St. Mary’s Church, wearing white sashes and white crosses; they were placed in the Epistle aisle. And then came the Catholic Friends’ Society, and the Conference of St. Vincent de Paul.

The church was tastefully draped in mourning, the black festoons in the galleries were relieved with white rosettes, and the mourning on the altar with small white crosses. Over the altar was a large cross, formed of blazing gas-jets; and there was a star of gas-jets [!] in front of the organ. When the clergy, forty-six in number, entered the sanctuary to chant the Solemn Office, the scene was truly grand and impressive.”

She then goes to name each of the forty six priests in attendance, treating each one as a celebrity.

“The architect of this magnificent structure was [Irish-born] P. C. Keely of Brooklyn, N. Y.,” she continues. He was in fact one of the preeminent architects of Catholic churches in the Northeast in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

“The stone work was under the supervision of James Trainor of Boston; the wood work was superintended by James Bulger of Burlington, Vt; and the painting, as we have recently stated, was by Schumacher of Portland, Me. Its cost was over $200,000.”

Given that this amount was largely raised by small donations from the commuity, it is quite an amazing sum considering that a laborer made a couple dollars a week.

Later, she describes the fundraising campaign to pay for the bells of the church (weighing a total of over 10,000 lbs). The list of donors reads like a directory of Irish residents of Lawrence:

​John Kiley, Sr., Patrick Moran, John Brennan, Patrick Connors, Joseph Morrissey, James Kilbride, Anne O’Donnell, Mary Anne Quinn, Mary Connolly, Mary Burke, Bridget Bradley, Catherine Cushing, Thomas Regan, Mary Dowd, Mary O’Brien, Mary McCarthy, Rose Walsh, Mary Burns, Sarah McGuohan, Maria O’Sullivan, Annie M. Rafferty, Kate Reilly, Ann Mahon, Mary McGuinness, Rosanna Mulligan, Ellen McCavitt, Hannah Moriarty, Mary J. Sweeney, Ellen Ryan…

The list extends for a couple hundred more names, three quarters of them obviously Irish in origin.  Far more than half of them are women.

Katherine O'Keefe O'Mahoney dedicated her life to promoting Irish pride. I have newspaper clippings of a lecture tour she did in 1911, about Ireland featuring numerous illustrations. She is billed as "a little woman with an enormous voice."

Irish Legacy In the Catholic Church

By focusing on their religion as a defining institution of being Irish, the Irish came to dominate the Catholic Church in America.

“In 1880, the percentages of the clergy who were Irish American was 69 percent in the Archdiocese of Boston…Moreover, in 1886 thirty-five (51%) of the sixty-eight Catholic bishops in America were Irish born or of Irish descent. In 1920, it was still the case that two-thirds of Catholic bishops were Irish American, and in New England, that proportion was three-fourths.” (Source: American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion, by Michael P. Carroll, 2010)

Later, when other Catholic immigrant groups followed - first the French Canadians, then the Poles, Italians, Portuguese, Lithuanians and (a few) Catholic Germans -- they found waiting for them a church that could provide something of a welcome, whereas the Irish basically had to create the Church in New England.

​Epilogue

Since the early 1990s, many of the grand Catholic churches of the original Catholic communities of New England have been closed and often torn down. In Lawrence, this includes the aforementioned Immaculate Conception and St. Lawrence O'Toole, as well as half a dozen other churches. The same pattern was repeated in other urban centers: Lowell, Haverhill, Fall River, Worcester, Boston. I hope this and other blog posts will remind people that these abandoned churches were not just religious institutions, but were part of the physical culture of the immigrant groups who built them.
​
Below: Today's St. Mary's church (Santa Maria de la Asunción)(source: church website)