Vermont’s Green Mountains bear more than passing similarity to the emerald hills of Ireland. But picture postcards are for Yankee tourists: mills, quarries, iron rails—and freedom from England’s economic and cultural oppression—were all the destination-marketing needed to entice thousands of Irish immigrants since the early eighteenth century. Once here, many stayed, and Vermont’s ethnic tapestry today continues to weave around a strong core of Irish-American threads.

Early Irish

Vermont’s earliest Irish settlers were delivered by John Bull himself. “The British army was full of Irish,” says Vince Feeney, adjunct UVM professor of Irish history for over thirty years and author of a pending book on Vermont’s Irish. “In the French and Indian War and in the Revolution as well, many deserted. If you didn’t have a lot to go back to, here was an opportunity to start fresh.”

O’hAnleigh—Cindy Hill, Tom Hanley, Becca Hanley—at Carol’s Hungry Mind in Middlebury. Photo courtesy of Margaret Michniewicz.

Irish-Vermonters lined up on both sides of the Revolution. Dublin-born Crean Brush is traditionally cast as Vermont’s loyalist villain opposite local hero Ethan Allen. And while Matthew Lyon may have been a genuine son of Vermont in spirit—infamously re-elected to Congress while serving a sentence for sedition at Windsor jail—he was Irish-born and active in the United Irishmen, a movement advocating Irish emancipation, factors which inspired his floor-of-Congress brawl.

Feeney’s research shows that by the 1790’s about ten percent of Vermont’s inhabitants were Irish immigrants or first generation born of Irish parents. Some were Catholic, but many were Presbyterian Scots-Irish who came with the linen trade. A later collapse of the linen market boosted immigration to Vermont, where linen was quickly replaced by woolen production. But the fall of the linen market paled compared to the devastation of the potato blight.

Famine And Industry

The Great Hunger arose from successive crop failures beginning in the mid 1840s, but to attribute the famine solely to agricultural fungus is historical error. Over seven hundred years of British domination, Parliament had outlawed Catholic land ownership, rendering the Irish tenants on their own land. As Britain’s upper classes grew more prosperous, demand for beef, cheese, and butter increased. Irish lands were enclosed for pasture, and Irish tenants were squeezed onto smaller, higher, rockier plots. Potatoes, introduced in the 1600s by Sir Walter Raleigh from the Virginia colonies, became the necessary staple: they are the only means by which a family can raise a year’s supply of food on a postage-stamp plot of rock with no tools.

Irish-raised food flowed to England in record quantities during famine, while the disenfranchised Irish died in the ditches or fled. “From 1845 to 1860 half of all immigrants coming to America were Irish,” writes Elise Guyette in Gathering and Interaction of People, Cultures and Ideas: Immigration to Vermont 1840 to 1930, a set of Vermont educational curricula. “By 1850, the largest foreign-born group in Vermont was Irish, numbering 15,377.”

Rails And Rocks

At the time of the famine, what Feeney calls a “mini industrial revolution” was going on in Vermont. Railroads, textile mills, and quarries drew the Irish from Boston and New York to Burlington, Bellows Falls, and St. Albans. “It was a perfect storm for Irish settlement,” says Peter Patten of Fair Haven.

Patten’s maternal ancestors arrived in North Poultney in the 1850s. “They had worked slate in Tipperary, and when they heard slate quarries were opening here they bee-lined over.” The west shore of Lake Bomoseen was all “patches,” small quarry villages where “even the American-born of several generations spoke with an Irish accent, the roads were so bad and people didn’t get out much. When I began to get interested in these things in the 1970s, the old folks in that area still talked with what was called the Castleton Brogue.” An American-born neighbor in Fair Haven “could say the Lord’s Prayer in the purist Munster Irish, so that must have been the last thing they let go of in the language, they held on to their prayers.”

Burlington attorney John Leddy’s ancestors were also famine Irish, among those arriving through the British Canadian quarantine station at Grosse Ile, where over 5000 souls expired of starvation in the summer of “Black ‘47” alone. “Congress had passed stringent immigration laws, they didn’t want the sick famine Irish coming in,” Leddy says, but ships bringing lumber from British Canada to England would otherwise be returning empty, and so were happy with human cargo loaded like cattle by landlords and relief agencies. It was not unusual for half the passengers to die en route.

The Leddys haled from the Meade side of Parish Kilbride, and eventually made their way to an Irish settlement in Underhill populated by other families from Leitrim and Cavan. Leddy’s parents moved to Burlington in 1924, when their farm was condemned for the Underhill artillery range. “My great aunt kept a summer camp in Underhill but everybody left the Irish settlement there, to Boston or Burlington. The Leddys moved in across from where the police station is now, on North Avenue, which was an Irish neighborhood. And my wife’s family, the Cassidys, lived on Park St. North, where there were a lot of Irish.”

Anti-Catholicism, The Civil War, And Fenians

The influx of famine Irish sparked anti-Catholic backlash. “The old British immigrants distrusted the Irish,” writes Elisa Guyette. “By the mid 1850s more than 100 members of the Vermont House represented Know-Nothingism, an anti-foreign sentiment pledged to end the spread of Catholicism.”

The Know-Nothing movement temporarily dissipated during the Civil War, and when Irish Fenians attacked British Canada in the 1870’s, Vermonters of all religious stripes were supportive in sympathetic retaliation for the St. Albans raid. The Fenian military excursions failed in the short term, but cannot be ignored as part of a series of events which established the Republic of Ireland in 1923, in all but six counties of the Emerald Isle.

In the 1890s when Vermont’s government enticed protestant Swedish farmers as antidote to the Irish and French Canadian plague. Later the Vermont Eugenics Program took a pointed interest in breaking up Irish, French-Canadian, and Abenaki families who were considered to have genetic criminal predisposition. But anti-Catholicism in Vermont was doomed by sheer numbers; despite the white Congregational Church-on-the-green iconography, the state today stands as the fourth most Catholic in the country.

Green Ties Continue To Bind

The 1920s and 30s were the great immigrant era, “but the newcomers are Italians, Poles, Finns, Swedes, a wholesale shift in immigration ethnicity,” Feeney says. “The Irish benefit from that, because, number one, they are so close to their own immigration experience that they can empathize, and number two, they are the success stories. The Irish become the upper class of the newcomers, and to a certain extent, except for the French Canadians, the new immigrants defer to the Irish, and the Irish become community and political leaders. In 1903 Burke was elected mayor of Burlington, Powers was elected mayor of St. Albans, Corey in Barre, H.A. Bailey was the first mayor of Winooski in 1920, and so on, all because of the changing demographics.”

While Irish immigration slowed to a trickle, the institutions which bound Vermont’s Irish communities–Catholic churches and schools–stayed strong through the 1950s. But whether due to frightful echoes of the eugenics program, the overwhelming urge to be modern Americans, or simply the passage of time and the loosening of tight church and community bonds, the light of Irish culture in Vermont grew dim by the 1960s.

“I think it was just assimilation, enough generations had gone by, and unlike Boston or New York there was no new influx of Irish immigrants here to keep the culture fresh,” Patten says. “DNA-wise, it is still very Irish around here. But in terms of identifying with Irish roots, it’s not that strong.”

That outlook, however, is fast changing.

Keeping the tradition of Matthew Lyon’s United Irishmen and the state’s Fenian circles, some Vermonters still work passionately to free the six counties of Northern Ireland from the British yoke. Graydon Wilson of Burlington has served as an international observer in Northern Ireland conflicts and organized a Vermont unit of Irish Northern Aid. “There’s a common misconception that the difficulties in the north of Ireland have been resolved,” Wilson says. “They’ve eased some, but the British government still rules the north. Loyalist gangs, still fully armed despite the IRA having decommissioned all of its weapons, still run rampant and terrorize Catholic communities. The work will not be over until Ireland is no longer a partitioned nation.”

Other Vermonters are rekindling their Irish heritage through music and cultural events. Tenor and bodhran player Patrick Webb was recently the first of his family to return to Ireland in over 150 years. He frequents the growing number of “seisuns”–Celtic music jams–in the Burlington area including Wednesday nights at both the Lincoln Inn at Essex Junction and Radio Bean in Burlington. Webb’s maternal grandmother was a MacAllister who married into the North End’s Ganey clan. Webb recalls her singing as she engaged in days-long bread and pie baking. “I do a lot of research in old Irish songs and some are hauntingly familiar,” he says. “I’m just drawn to it, I have a passion for Irish music.”

That passion led Webb to join with the Burlington Irish Heritage Festival, an annual mid-March week-long series cultural presentations celebrating the heritage of Vermont’s Irish. At the festival’s tenth anniversary in 2007, Webb launched the first Vermont Irish Music Showcase. This year’s Showcase will follow the Festival’s traditional ceili–a music and stepdancing party—on Sunday March 16th at the Contois Auditorium.

Many of Vermont’s Irish will be there, celebrating the Emerald Hills amidst the Green Mountains their ancestors came to call home.

Cindy Ellen Hill is an attorney in Middlebury.

Irish Culture in Vermont: Resources and Contacts

The Burlington Irish Heritage Festival runs annually the week preceding St. Patrick’s day. The Festival includes lectures, films, a children’s event at the Fletcher library, a ceili, and the Vermont Irish Music Showcase. Find the schedule, volunteer, or contact the Festival.

Irish Northern Aid is a nonprofit organization which works for peace in Northern Ireland by providing support to families suffering from violations of civil rights and political discrimination. Reach the Vermont unit at Graydon.Wilson@gmail.com.

Vermont’s Irish music scene is exploding. Some of Vermont’s top Celtic and Irish-American bands include O’hAnleigh , Trinity , and Atlantic Crossing.

You can also catch spectacular Celtic music on the “alternative” New Year’s Celebration where for one low button price, more than twenty Celtic Vermont performers play at venues in the beautiful historic village of Richmond.