Finding Home

The craze for baseball hit Cleveland in the 1860s, and is reflected in telegraph operator William Manning's diaries. He and his cousins played baseball among themselves. The Cathedral Sodality Club that they belonged to formed a team, as did their father, Thomas Manning's, iron foundry. William Manning also mentioned attending several Forest City Baseball Club games. Cleveland's baseball team was a fully professional team and charter members of the American League, by the time that Irish Americans Jack Graney and Steve O'Neill joined the team in 1908 and 1911, respectively. Both were members of the 1920 World Championship team, and Graney went on to become the team's radio broadcaster. Boxing rivaled baseball in popularity, however, and Cleveland's Johnny Kilbane rose to national prominence as world featherweight champion from 1912-1923.

The newspapers of the day and the diaries of telegraph operator William Manning document an Irish presence on both sides of Cleveland’s footlights in the 19th century. Manning went to the theater almost once a month in the 1860s, sampling melodramas, farces and large-cast spectacles. He took in plays by Dion Boucicault, a versatile Irish-born actor-manager-playwright who was especially celebrated for a series of comic Irish melodramas that showcased his comedic talent while tapping into the growing audience of Irish immigrants in the United States. A Boucicault successor, actor Joseph Murphy, criss-crossed the country with his own roster of Irish melodramas, often stopping in Cleveland. As vaudeville or variety shows gained in popularity in the 1890s, Irish kids in Cleveland dreamed of making it in vaudeville and could see "one of their own," Mitty Devere, at the Majestic Theatre on West 25th Street, or the Empire downtown.

From benevolent or mutual help societies in the 1860s and 1870s, Irish immigrants took the next step--establishing building loan associations and commercial insurance companies in Cleveland. Fenian supporters and Irish community leaders helped to form such groups as The Forest City United Land and Building Association in 1867 and the Hibernia Insurance Company in 1870. People of Irish birth and descent moved more slowly into the higher status ranks of banking and stock brokering. Several came to banking through their success in retail business, others through political connections. It was an Irish immigrant, Jeremiah Sullivan, President of Central National Bank, who chaired the committee that secured the Federal Reserve Bank for Cleveland in 1914.

The ranks of Cleveland city government and Cuyahoga county government were filling with Irish officeholders in the 1890s. Irish Americans occupied the mayor’s office twice that decade. Many of the same folks who were active in the city's Irish organizations were also active in Democratic Party politics--though Irish Republicans also had success at the ballot box in the early 1900s. The progressive reformer, Tom L. Johnson, was not Irish but garnered support across a broad spectrum of the Irish community--from rank and file laborers, who were the backbone of Democratic Party support, to such community leaders as Martin A. Foran, William Gleason, and Hibernian P. J. "Honest Pat" McKenney, a longtime Cleveland councilman and county commissioner. But Johnson's management of the city’s police department may have cost him some Irish votes along the way. Though Johnson promoted the first Irishman to the top position in the police department, he also skipped over and forced out popular Captain Michael English, and lost the Angle vote in the 1909 election.

Cleveland supporters of Irish nationhood launched a summer picnic in 1864--a tradition that lasted for decades. The picnics featured speeches promoting the cause of Irish freedom, but also offered summer amusements at parks outside the city. Railroads offered excursion rates for days filled with swing, tugboat or dirigible rides, races, music, and sports and dancing competitions. The names of the organizations that sponsored the picnics changed over the years--from the Fenians, to the Land League, to the National League, to the Irish Nationalists. Sometimes the nationalist impulse intersected with a business networking impulse, and downtown hotels and club rooms also became the scenes of nationalist activities. But the same leaders were behind those shifting organizations for decades, only gradually giving way to a new generation of leaders. A new century was dawning, but Ireland was still not free. The pressure to support armed rebellion grew.

In the 1890s, the pastor of an Irish Parish in Cleveland was called upon to be many things. Irish parishes continued to be a focal point for Irish identity and pride. The Cleveland Catholic Diocese, under Bishop Horstmann, was encouraging parishes to host musical concerts and productions of plays. Educated Irish priests introduced Irish or Irish-American plays to their parishioners, and Irish parishes and pastors were happy to be associated with these displays of cultural aspiration. At the same time, one of the pastor's fundamental tasks was to erect and manage large building projects--church and school buildings, rectories, and convents. They were called upon to function essentially as businessmen, but had to be wary of getting too caught up in the pitfalls of business speculation.

As industry accelerated in Cleveland during the 1880s and 1890s, the pace of industrial accidents--all too often fatal--also picked up. The newspapers of the day gave brief but vivid accounts of workplace accidents. The ore docks seem to have been particularly dangerous, but fatal accidents took place in factories of all kinds. Larger industrial disasters also took place. Some of those disasters are little remembered today--such as a riverbed accident that claimed the lives of 16 ore dock workers in July 1896. One of the most dramatic industrial accidents in Cleveland history was the water tunnel explosion of 1916. 20 lives were lost as tunnel workers, firemen, policemen, doctors, tugboat crew members, the janitor on the crib, and African American inventor Garrett Morgan were all swept up in desperate rescue attempts.

More and more Irish immigrants began to share in Cleveland’s rising prosperity in the 1880s and 1890s. Cleveland was the industrial equivalent to Silicon Valley in the 1890s. Irish immigrants who had been living elsewhere were drawn to Cleveland. Along with those who had been here for decades, they were becoming businessmen, lawyers, and bankers. And prosperous families hired help. More and more new Irish immigrants, especially women, arrived in the US with the expectation that they would become servants. Working for Cleveland's most prominent families or for fellow immigrants, they became coachmen, chauffeurs, gardeners, cooks, maids, and nannies.

Cleveland shot to the forefront of the American oil refining industry after the Civil War. The city's lead in oil was largely due to the enterprise of John D. Rockefeller, who quickly jumped on the opportunities presented when oil was discovered in Titusville PA in 1859. But Grasselli Chemical Works, Sherwin Williams, and Glidden Paints also helped to put Cleveland on the oil industry map in the late 1860s. A few of the city's oil pioneers had Irish roots. Brothers John and James Corrigan, sons of an Irish immigrant, became involved in shipping oil products from Cleveland to their native Canada in the late 1860s. By 1870, they were both living in Cleveland and engaged in kerosene refining. (James Corrigan later shifted his attention to shipping iron and founded the Corrigan McKinney Steel Company in 1894.) Jeremiah Murphy, another son of an Irish immigrant, founded the Ohio Oil Company in 1881. Unable to compete with Rockefeller's ruthless business practices, Murphy had to fold Ohio Oil in 1885, but was able to gather the resources to start Phoenix Oil Company in 1890 and found success as the maker of Murphy's Oil Soap.

Many Irish immigrants had been shut out of land ownership in Ireland. They were eager to own a lot and a home in Cleveland, though many could not accomplish property ownership in the span of one generation. However, the most successful of the city’s pre-Famine Irish immigrants were able to do more. As industry took off after the Civil War, families who could afford it--such as brass foundry owner James Farnan--sought property in less congested areas, for instance, along  Detroit Avenue, past today’s W. 65th Street. John McCart, another Irish immigrant who bought property in the area in 1860, became a real estate speculator and helped to open up what we now call the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.