The Irish of Portland, Maine: A History of Forest City Hibernians

Slàinte.

INTRODUCTION

I have been researching the story of the Portland Irish since 1995 with the eventual goal of writing a detailed, in-depth history telling of their triumphs and failures; the good, the bad and the indifferent; the indefatigable spirit of these people who overcame the struggles of famine, emigration, prejudice, disease and poverty; and their acclimation to a new home in the United States. The initial idea was to write a book covering the years from 1661, when the first known Irish person settled here, until 1901, when Bishop Healy was dead and William O’Connell had become the city’s new Catholic bishop. This book, entitled From Galway Bay to Casco Bay: The Story of the Portland Irish, has not yet come to fruition. In 2011, I began a history of the Portland Irish during the Civil War, The Blue and the Green, which was an offshoot of a chapter in my Portland Irish history. In November 2012, The History Press contacted me to ask if I could perhaps write a book on the Maine Irish or the Irish of a major municipality. I was quite excited by this proposal and informed them that I had two books already in the works. I said I could write a history, an overview, of Portland’s Irish from 1661 until 2012, but I have had to curtail the story to cover only up until 190l.

By way of introduction, I have been researching my family history since the age of eight (1981). I had already been interested in American history for a few years and had been told by my mother to always be proud of my Irish heritage. Over the years, I have traveled throughout Maine, New England, Canada and Ireland to trace my heritage. On my father’s side, I have English (including ten Pilgrims), Irish, French Acadian and Scottish ancestors and, on my mother’s side, Irish. I have also studied local history since the early 1980s.

This is an overview of the years 1661 to 1901, especially focusing on the 1820s to 1850s and the rise of the Irish Catholic community. There is much, by necessity of space, that has been left out. Thus, this history concentrates on certain aspects of Portland Irish history that are little known and mostly unfamiliar to people. For the most part, political and occupational history has been kept to a minimum, as have endnotes. A focus on Irish nationalism is included.

This brief history is a forerunner to the aforementioned histories I have planned for the future.

Chapter 1

AN INVISIBLE PRESENCE

1661–1798

Irish people were few and far between in what is now Portland, Cumberland County, Maine, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But they were here, from the first known Irish emigrant to settle in the town, Thaddeus Clarke; to the famous McLellans, a Scots-Irish family who realized substantial profits during the 1700s; to the Irishmen who fought in the French and Indian Wars.

Early Portland History

We begin our story with the first Europeans who settled in what is now Portland 380 years ago. Members of what became known as the Wabanaki Nation had spent summers in this area for some eleven thousand years before the first European explorers made intermittent forays along the coast of Maine in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

It was the Bristolian captain Martin Pring who surveyed the coast of what is now Maine in 1603 and called the area from Saco to the Piscataqua the Mayne or the maine land.¹ Pring is said to have sailed into a bay in a land called by Native Americans Aucocisco, a name that later morphed into Casco. His reports back in England fascinated such men as Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Plymouth, who, in 1606, helped charter the Plymouth Company for American colonization. This company hired Captain John Smith, of Virginia fame, who sailed along the coast from Monhegan to Cape Cod searching for gold, copper and whale oil. Two years later, he published his seminal work, A Description of New England, in which were named Capes Ann and Elizabeth. He also labeled the Portland area as Aucocisco and first named New England. The eminent nineteenth-century Portland historian William Willis stated that Aucocisco "came as near the sound of the Indian word for the bay as could be expressed in English, as Smith and the early voyagers caught the sound. It should be pronounced Uh-kos-is-co, the Uh being guttural."²

The Plymouth Company was reorganized in 1622 under Sir Gorges and Captain John Mason, who claimed the land from the Merrimac River to the Sagadahoc in what is now Maine and New Hampshire. Christopher Levett was granted some six thousand acres by them in the area east of the Piscataqua. He traveled the coast of Maine for some time in 1623 before deciding to start his planned city on an island lyeing before Casco River. What is still in doubt by historians is whether this river was the Fore River or the Presumpscot and whether the island was House, Hog or Mackworth Island. At any rate, this island was renamed York for Levett’s birthplace, and Levett and his men soon built a stone house and fortified the island. This overly ambitious Englishman returned to the Mother Country to get his wife and children and bring them back to Maine to begin his envisioned city. Due to difficulties in England, he never returned.

In December 1631, the Council of Plymouth granted Robert Trelawny and Moses Goodyear, Plymouth merchants, land between the Spurwink River and Casco Bay, including Tucker’s land. Early the next year, a ship from England brought George Cleeve, yet another Plymouth resident. Tucker and Cleeve went into partnership and were briefly successful at trading with the Indians and farming until Trelawny’s agent John Winter arrived, who had been commissioned to develop Trelawny and Goodyear’s new patent. Winter immediately ordered Cleeve and Tucker to depart. Although Tucker claimed he had a deed, Cleeve was seen as a squatter. But both men were forced out and relocated to the peninsula, or the Neck, which was known by Native Americans as Machegonne.³ Here they built the first known house in 1633.

By 1634, John Winter and about sixty men had become engaged in the ever-popular fishing industry and made Richmond Island the most prosperous endeavor in the area. According to one source, Dry cod, pickled ‘core fish,’ fish spawn, dried bass, and fish oil were shipped in great quantities to Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands, where they were exchanged for wine which was then carried to England. At this time many ships engaged in this trade were anchored in the harbor of Richmond Island. Beef and pork were plentiful, the original stock having been brought in by Winter on one of his English voyages.⁴

It is quite interesting to learn that Winter and the sixty-odd people working for him, including a handful of women, dealt in Irish goods at the time. According to the Trelawny Papers, inventories taken at the time (1634–35) mention Irish stockings, Irish ruggs and Irish trousers called trushes. They also quite frequently mention aqua vitae (Latin, water of life), a common term at the time for strong liquor. Local historian James P. Baxter, who edited and published the Trelawny Papers, equated aqua vitae with Irish aqua-vitae…usquebaugh.⁵ The Irish word for whiskey is uisce beatha: water of life. So it is rather fascinating that these English fishermen were wearing Irish pants and stockings and perhaps drinking Irish whiskey!

Baxter also theorized that Richmond Island may have been an offshoot of a settlement in Bandonbridge, County Cork, Ireland, where Puritans settled under George Richmond, a wealthy merchant, until immigrating to America. Richmond traded with John Winter.

Eventually, George Cleeve was able to convince Gorges that his squatter rights were legal, and he obtained the first deed on the Neck in 1637 for two hundred pounds sterling; this lease, good for two thousand years, contained the land west to the Capisic River in Stroudwater, then to the Presumpscot Falls and back again to the Neck.

In 1642, civil war broke out in England, and Oliver Cromwell came to power as the Lord Protector. George Cleeve, again concerned about his property in Casco, traveled to England and quickly went from loyalist to Republican. He appeared before Alexander Rigby, one of Cromwell’s major agents and a member of Parliament, and was able to secure from him the dormant Plough or Ligonia Patent. Cleeve, appointed Rigby’s deputy in Maine, returned to Casco and took over the whole province of Ligonia, which extended from Cape Elizabeth to Cape Porpoise. He granted many tracts of land in Falmouth and Scarborough to land-needy newcomers in 1647. Casco was a part of the Province of Ligonia from that date until 1658, when it submitted to the power and jurisdiction of Massachusetts.

In 1658, there resided on the Neck only Cleeve, Mitton and Tucker. By 1662, Cleeve and Tucker had made grants of land all around Back Cove. Soon after, Devonshire native George Munjoy settled on the part of the Neck that has ever after borne his name. By 1671, Casco (also known as Falmouth) had about forty dwelling houses or forty families representing about four hundred inhabitants, as well as eighty militia soldiers.⁶ It was growing in numbers and prosperity, but the peace would not last.

King Philip’s War, raging in southern New England and named for Metacomet or King Philip, leader of the Massachusetts Wampanoag Indians, reached Maine in the fall of 1675. In September, Native Americans attacked the settlements on the eastern side of the Presumpscot River and at Saco, Blue Point, Scarborough and Spurwink; many were unable to escape and were either killed or taken prisoner. Hostilities were renewed the following year. On August 11, 1676, Anthony Brackett’s extensive farm at Back Cove near what is now Deering’s Oaks was brutally attacked, and twenty-one men were killed. In all, thirty-four people were killed or captured in Falmouth. Many residents fled to Massachusetts, including the minister George Burroughs, never to return. The area was left desolate until a peace accord was reached at Casco in April 1678.

Thaddeus Clarke

The first known Irish person to settle in what is now Portland was Thaddeus Clarke, who sometimes went by the name Teage.⁷ He may in fact have been born Tadhgh O’Clery, a name that at some point was anglicized to Thaddeus Clarke. It is also possible that Thaddeus was one of the thousands of young Irish people who were abducted from their homes in Ireland and brought as indentured servants (virtually slaves in many respects) to the Americas in the 1650s by edict of Oliver Cromwell.⁸ This theory seems possible, as Clarke appears to have been literate and English-speaking, and he may have learned to read, write and speak English growing up as an indentured servant in a home in New England.

We may never know the exact origins of Thaddeus Clarke, but we do know he became a successful and important resident of Falmouth, having married Elizabeth Mitton, daughter of early settler Michael Mitton and granddaughter of George Cleeve, about 1662. They had several children; thus, old Irish Gaelic blood appears to have been infused into the founders’ old English blood! Years later, some of Thaddeus Clarke’s descendants would try as they might to prove he was not Irish but rather English or at least Scots-Irish.

In 1680, a new form of government was adopted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the General Court appointed Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth the president of Maine. He held court at Fort Loyall that February and confirmed grants of three-acre lots to about thirty people. At another meeting at the fort in September, we find the names of four selectmen of the town, including Ensign Thaddeus Clarke, who was, in 1684, listed as one of the trustees of the town.⁹

Thaddeus was involved in a land transaction in 1681, when he was referred to as Teage Clarke.¹⁰ At some point, he was granted the one hundred acres of land in what is now the West End of Portland that his father-in-law resided on. His house was on the riverbank just above what was known as Clark’s Point, which used to be at the foot of Park Street (the remains of his cellar were still visible in 1831). In 1686, Thaddeus conveyed forty-four acres of this land to his own son-in-law, Captain Edward Tyng, married to his daughter Elizabeth.

Thaddeus became a lieutenant in the local militia. A second Indian war broke out in 1689, called King William’s War in the colonies. This was actually part of the War of the League of Augsburg in Europe, and Frenchmen joined the Indians in the attack on New York and New England. Colonel Benjamin Church held a war council at Falmouth on November 13; many attended, including Thaddeus, who became a leader at Fort Loyall, at the foot of what is now India Street, the following year. On May 15, 1690, he led, against orders, a contingent of about thirty of the stoutest young men from within the protection of the fort on a scouting expedition to learn the whereabouts of the enemy. In no time, a party of half Indianized French and half Frenchified Indians (as Cotton Mather called them) ambushed them and killed Clarke and thirteen others on the spot.¹¹

Another Irishman, Dennis Morough, also settled here in this era and owned three acres on what is now Congress Street, but he moved from town after 1690, and little is known about him. Other emigrants appeared on the scene in the 1680s, including four French Protestant (Huguenot) families. Pierre Baudoin, a physician in France, immediately anglicized his name to Peter Bowdoin when he came here; he purchased five acres on the Neck in 1687 and twenty-three acres in 1688. Upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), Bowdoin, his wife and several children had fled to Ireland and then to Falmouth.¹²

When the wreck of the Three Friends occurred at Casco in October 1711, Captain John Lane, a native of County Limerick, Ireland, and his company of men arrived here to aid and assist. Lane, who had emigrated, married and settled in