Finding Home

The push for compulsory education was heating up in Ohio as Richard Gilmour began his tenure as Bishop in Cleveland in 1872. Like many Catholics, Bishop Gilmour feared that the Americanizing impulse of public schools also had the hidden agenda of taking the "Catholic" out of Catholic immigrants. Gilmour championed Catholic education, battling against compulsory public education and asserting that parish schools should be exempt from property taxes. Catholic grade schools had been a part of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland almost since the diocese was formed in 1847. After the Ohio State Legislature passed a compulsory education bill in 1877, Bishop Gilmour promoted the expansion of the Catholic school system in Cleveland to include high schools for both young men and young women.

Bishop Gilmour wrangled continuously with Irish community leaders for more than a decade. The bishop had managed to enforce centralized planning for the city's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. But enthusiasm for his planning process was waning. The Ancient Order of Hibernians bridged the gap between the Catholic Central Association and the secular organizations that Bishop Gilmour shunned. The Hibernians were a national organization, founded in New York in 1836 to protect Irish Catholics against discrimination. Although they were associated in the public mind with the labor agitators, the Molly Maguires, they managed to fly under the bishop's radar in Cleveland. They were able to leverage their role as mediators to maintain Cleveland's parade tradition.

A series of bad weather and bad growing years in the late 1870s and early 1880s caused what historians now call the "Forgotten Famine" in the west of Ireland. James Hack Tuke, an English banker and Quaker who had been involved in relief efforts during the Great Famine, decided to do something to alleviate the hunger and civil unrest. He raised funds to offer "assisted emigration" to needy families in communities surrounding Blacksod Bay, including townlands on the Belmullet peninsula, townlands such as Ballycroy and Mulranny along the western edge of the bay, and the townlands of Achill Parish, along the southern edge. With steelmaking surging, Cleveland was one of the country’s fastest growing industrial centers at the time and drew a significant number of Tuke immigrants.  They were drawn to the two neighborhoods most connected with steel--Newburgh, where the steel mills were located, and the Angle, where the raw materials were unloaded.

Bishop Richard Gilmour was already affronted when Irish community members formed organizations without a religious purpose and without the leadership of priests. He was further exercised when those leaders and organizations began to push more aggressively for Irish nationhood. But the conflicts between Bishop Gilmour and some Irish community leaders reached a new level of antagonism when a bold group of women got involved in promoting Irish nationhood. Calling them unwomanly and "brawling politicians" whose place should have been in the home, Gilmour excommunicated the women who persisted in participating in the Ladies Land League.

Since 1842, the city's St. Patrick's Day Parade had gone forward, whether led by religious leaders or lay leaders. Cleveland's Irish priests and Irish community members knew each other and interacted easily. Some organizations, like the Irish Literary and Benevolent Association, had Catholic members but did not have a Catholic purpose and were not led by priests. No one had flagged this situation as problematic until Bishop Richard Gilmour arrived in Cleveland in 1872 and set about trying to prevent "un-Catholic" groups from participating in the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade.

In the 1860s and 1870s, people of Irish birth and descent moved more and more into different forms of public service. The city's police and fire departments were both organized in the mid-1860s, and Irish-born Civil War veterans joined both forces. In the 1870s, the city's first two lawyers of Irish birth or descent were admitted to the bar. Both became active in Democratic party politics, leading to a career in government for one of them. The late 1860s and 1870s saw the city's first Irish councilmen and appointments to various government boards and commissions.

In the 1860s and 1870s more and more Irish immigrants decided to go into the business of providing goods and services to their neighbors. Opening a grocery store, a saloon, or a boarding house increasingly became an option for immigrants who didn’t have a trade but had the ambition to be their own boss. People in those days didn’t travel far and wide to shop in specialty boutiques or to sample craft beer or whiskey. They sought the basics in food and drink in their own neighborhoods, even on their own blocks. Irish-run grocery stores, saloons, and boarding houses on both the West and East Sides of the River, near the River mouth, a grocery store in Newburgh, and one in Tremont reflected settlement patterns for Irish people in Cleveland. These small business owners paved a path toward upward mobility for themselves, but at the same time gave their immigrant neighbors a sense of community and belonging.

Undertaking was a new profession in the 1860s and 1870s--and an entrepreneurial type of family business. Undertakers had to deploy the skills of embalming, coffin making, and stabling horses. They had to balance the books of a small business, while not appearing to take advantage of folks in mourning. They had to have the ability to calm and console. The pioneering Irish undertakers of the 1860s and 1870s were trusted and known to neighbors and friends--Thomas McLane and Mark McGorray on the West Side, Thomas Gallagher downtown, Michael McGreal in Newburgh, and James Flynn moving east along St. Clair, later Superior, then Euclid.

Cleveland's Irish community was coming of age in the 1870s. Jobs in Cleveland were plentiful. People had time for leisure activities--for clubs. More and more clubs formed, making their presence known in the city's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. Along with the Temperance Society, parish sodalities, benevolent societies and fraternal organizations like the Ancient Order of Hibernians began appearing. An organization that was unique to Cleveland came to prominence--the Irish Literary and Benevolent Association. In addition to providing assistance to members in need, the group built a large lending library, encouraging self-improvement, citizenship, voting, and support for the cause of Irish nationhood. All of these groups started meeting together to plan the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade--a symbol of communal pride.

The complaints about Bishop Rappe mounted in the 1860s. Priests of Irish birth and descent protested Rappe’s unpopular pew rent fees and annual seminary tax, his habit of assigning French-and German-speaking priests to Irish parishes and his frequent transfers of Irish priests. There were outcries when Rappe replaced an Irish seminary rector with a French one and admitted to favoring bi-lingual French- and German-speaking seminarians over Irish ones. Rappe saw himself as counteracting the barriers of nationality as he struggled to build a cohesive diocese. A group of Irish-born priests began to meet to formulate a complaint to Rome, ultimately forcing Bishop Rappe to resign from the Diocese of Cleveland in August of 1870.