Irish Immigration and the Molloy Family of Glenside Park

IRISH IMMIGRATION AND THE MOLLOY FAMILY OF GLENSIDE PARK

I am sure you have noticed that one of my favorite things about pursuing these monthly posts detailing the history of a tiny village in New Jersey is the opportunity to add to my own understanding of history. I often describe myself as learning—it’s a continuous process–American history through the lens of a small village.

Last month I promised to introduce the Molloy family—Thomas, Annie, and Anna—who, along with Warren Ackerman and Ella King Adams are the most important people in the resort period of Feltville, renamed Glenside Park. I am pleased to introduce them this month, starting with how their origins as Irish immigrants brought them towards the village. The rest of their history, including Annie Molloy’s widowhood from a Civil War veteran and the topic of malaria will come soon in other posts.

Thomas and Annie arrived from Ireland in the 1850s as children. We don’t know who Thomas may have immigrated with, but for Annie, evidence suggests she came over with her mother, Mary, and both went into domestic service in two separate households. I wanted to understand what sent all of them, along with other Irish citizens, to America, and particularly the circumstances around Mary and Annie apparently emigrating together, but probably without any man accompanying them. My mind went to something most of us have heard about, the potato blights in Ireland, which I knew had sent many Irish immigrants to the United States. I quickly found that there was so much more to understand—class and gender structure in Ireland, the response of the British in the face of starving Irish men, women and children, and more. The reading alone—five or six books—threatened to overwhelm me.

I bring my developing understanding to you in hopes that it will interest you too, and in the knowledge that one post cannot explain it all. With that in mind, I will also leave you with a list of books, in case you want to go deeper.

IRISH IMMIGRANTS AND THE VILLAGE—INTRODUCTION

The creation of a resort from the village which had once been Feltville required the wealth of Warren Ackerman, and the status and leisure of Ella King Adams. But the resort would never have been successful without working class individuals who did the day to day work of cooking and cleaning, growing food and all the other upkeep tasks that kept resort guests happy and feeling carefree. Chief among these support staff at the resort was the Molloy family. Serendipitously, Anna Molloy (later Anna Molloy Walsh), the daughter of these two immigrants, has left us one of the most complete records of the village’s resort period history, through a set of letters and interviews collected by two researchers in the 1960s.

One of these researchers was my grandfather, Edwin A. Baldwin. Elsewhere on this website, I have described how, during the 1960s, the County of Union asked my grandfather to write a new history of the Deserted Village of Feltville, as a successor to the 1947 one written by Dr. Arthur L. Johnson. ¹ My grandfather responded to this request by recruiting his friend James B. Hawley to do the writing, while he (my grandfather) worked on selected research topics to assist Hawley. My grandfather did not like writing anything longer than the letters he wrote to would-be genealogists and historians, pointing out their errors.

Hawley relied on material from the Johnson book, along with new research conducted both by himself and my grandfather. One of the most important sources they found, and both consulted, was then 84-year-old Anna Molloy Walsh, who had lived in the village from 1884 until the beginning of 1906, along with her parents, Thomas and Annie, who were first employees at, and later managed, the resort. Anna returned to manage the resort herself for at least one summer after that, without her parents. Through Hawley’s and my grandfather’s work, we have Anna’s eyewitness accounts of her experiences during the resort period at the village.

Anna’s parents, Thomas and Annie Molloy came to the village about 1884, in an effort to make sure that the malaria endemic to Newark, New Jersey did not kill their only child. Their earlier immigration from Ireland had brought them to Newark at the period in which Stuart Galishoff describes the city as being the nation’s unhealthiest. I will write about all of that in a future post. But for now we backtrack to the immigration which brought Thomas and Annie to Newark in the first place.

“NATIVE AMERICANS”

As touched on briefly in my previous post on the Lenape/Munsee transfer of land to European settlers, New Jersey was one of the last of the original colonies settled along America’s east coast, and most of its earliest European colonizers, at least in the East of New Jersey, did not arrive directly from Europe, but were migrants from existing English settlements in New England. By the time of the mass immigration which Annie, her mother and Thomas, were part of, these early migrants thought of themselves “native-born Americans.”²  The Lenape, the original “Native Americans”, had died or been relocated.

Following these first settlements, New Jersey experienced some additional direct European immigration. As we have seen in a previous post, the Netherlands continued to send individuals to eastern New Jersey and other parts of its own previous colonies even after the English took control. Other European countries, including Ireland, also sent immigrants. But the numbers of people arriving in these immigrations were small compared to three major immigrations to New Jersey, the first of which occurred in the nineteenth century, and which is the one which brought the Molloys.

In his book Immigration and Ethnicity in New Jersey History, Douglas V. Shaw describes the first of the three great waves of immigration to New Jersey as taking place from the 1830s and 1840s until the 1880s. This wave brought immigrants almost exclusively form Ireland, Germany and Great Britain.³ Since this post is meant to introduce us to how the Molloys got to the village, I will concentrate on the Irish immigrants to the state.

For the Irish, it was indeed the potato blights I mentioned above—generally referred to as the “Great Famine,” which initiated much of the mass immigration from Ireland. In his book The Irish in New Jersey, Dermott Quinn confirms that there had been immigrants from Ireland into New Jersey even before the Revolution—but “in the hundreds, not thousands,” as was the case in the nineteenth century.⁴ The Famine turned what had been a flow of immigrants into a flood—a flood which continued for decades beyond the immediate impacts of the Famine.

Historians often differ in describing the same events. Shaw and Quinn differ somewhat in dates for the immigration, which may be due in part to the fact that Shaw’s book covers immigration to New Jersey from various European nations, and Quinn’s book is limited to Irish immigration to New Jersey. Quinn notes that the Irish actually emigrated in large numbers for longer than the mid nineteenth century period during which Shaw notes that they arrived in such masses in New Jersey. Quinn’s longer period includes periods during which large number of Irish were leaving for destinations other than New Jersey and the United States. Quinn’s larger migration started from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, ending about 1921, with three discrete dominant destination periods: to Canada before the Great Famine, to the United States between the Famine and the First World War, and after that war to Great Britain. We shall concentrate on the period between the 1830s and 1880s, and New Jersey, but I encourage you to consult the list of books if you have an interest beyond the scope of this post.

THE GREAT FAMINE AND A GREAT MIGRATION

What created the flood of Irish to New Jersey and the United States? Although the chief aim of Hasia R. Diner’s study, Erin’s Daughters in America is to understand the gender-based peculiarities of the Irish immigration which began in the 1830s and 1840s, Diner begins her book with one of the most succinct descriptions of the origins of that migration. She makes it clear that this immigration could not have happened without an overdependence on potatoes as food. Potatoes had been introduced from the Americas to Ireland sometime in the late sixteenth century (in a story possibly involving Sir Walter Raleigh).⁵ Potatoes, once introduced, had been found to grow well in the rainy climate of much of the Irish countryside.⁶ According to Diner’s study, during the early nineteenth century, Ireland’s lower classes were subsisting almost exclusively on potatoes, since even a small plot of land held by a poor family could provide enough potatoes to provide a subsistence diet for the family.⁷ Indeed, Diner suggests, the ability of potatoes to provide a subsistence living apparently prompted the lowest classes, those with no prospects for mobility, career or income wise, to marry early. Diner seems to suggest this was often seen as the only life reward of sorts available to them. Many of these poor subsistence farmer families then produced many children (at least in comparison to other European countries), with the parents confident in their ability to feed their children even on a small plot of land. As the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century progressed, land parcels owned by such families, not large to start with, were continually subdivided as fathers passed on smaller plots to sons, since the recognized Irish method of inheritance was to subdivide the land, giving each son a piece as they grew up and started their own families. Diner observes that “this pattern of early and improvident marriage characterized the depressed peasants—the cottiers and the poor laborers—much more than any other class.”⁸

It took the Great Famine, which started in the mid-1840s and included multiple years of failure of the potato harvest, to change this pattern of marriage and child bearing. There had been poor crop periods before, but Diner indicates that the Famine of the 1840s essentially wiped out the lowest classes in Ireland, killing many, and sending many others abroad, including, of course, to New Jersey.

NOT A MELTING POT—NATIVISM AS “BESETTING SIN”

By the 1830s and 1840s, when the Irish began their major immigration wave to New Jersey, the descendants of New Jersey’s first European migrants thought of themselves as “native-born Americans.” Additionally, they had already established a dominant culture where, along with the rest of the developing United States, English was the recognized language, Protestant beliefs and practices were considered the norm, and there was a developing sense of the rights and responsibilities of democracy—albeit not necessarily a democratic sense which afforded all people the same privileges.⁹

Quinn calls nineteenth century nativism “New Jersey’s besetting sin,” and notes that it contained two rather inconsistent attitudes: New Jerseyans wanted the service of foreign labor but looked down on the foreign laborers providing the services. The Irish who provided New Jerseyans with day labor or domestic service were commonly depicted in the newspapers and elsewhere by “native-born Americans” as apelike, drunk, dirty, stupid, and aggressive. But it was the dominant religion of the Irish, Catholicism, which excited the most animosity, with Protestants fearing the loyalty of Irish Catholcs to a distant Pope, and viewing the level of ritual and other practices such as veneration of the relics of those to whom the Catholic Church had granted sainthood as unnatural and bizarre.¹⁰

In what historian John Cunningham calls the “nadir of prejudice to that time” in Newark, New Jersey, violence against Catholic immigrants by nativists resulted in the deaths of two Irishmen. On September 5, 1854, men from various parts of New Jersey and also New York and Brooklyn, all Protestants, descended on Newark for an all-day march through the town. Quinn says that their clear intent was the destruction of Saint Patrick’s Pro-Cathedral, a long time Irish Catholic institution in the city. He identifies the marchers as being from thirteen lodges of Freemasons and Orangemen; Cunningham indicates they were members of the American Protestant Association Lodge of New Jersey. ¹¹ Many of the marchers were carrying guns.

Along the route, in the vicinity of another Catholic church, the predominantly German Saint Mary’s, passersby were accused of throwing a rock, and violence erupted, wounding four people, killing one Irishman outright, with another dying within days. Saint Mary’s Church, not the original target of the march, was badly damaged.

THE IRISH AND THE NATIVIST CULTURE

While the Irish migrants in this first great immigrant wave to New Jersey arrived to find a “nativist” culture quite different than their own, and often antagonistic to their culture, they also arrived without any real desire to fit in with that culture. Shaw indicates that the Irish simply considered themselves as Irish in America, holding on to their own traditions in America, perhaps with the assistance of other Irish immigrants whom they had followed to a particular area. Kerby A. Miller’s study, Emigrants and Exiles, details his research based on thousands of letters and other primary sources which shows that many Irish immigrants saw themselves as exiles from their homeland. Many Irish felt forced to leave Ireland because of the way the English, who controlled Ireland, had failed to provide adequate support for the countless Irish suffering the famine and poverty caused by the potato crop failures. Miller notes further that the Irish did not attempt to adapt to America, so much as to reproduce Ireland there, calling their adaptation dysfunctional, but “necessary to the survival of Irish identity and Irish American nationalism.”¹²

The Irish retained their own religion—Catholicism—and built their own churches so they could continue to worship as Catholics. Finding the schools of the time as promoting the prevailing Protestant views of religion, they also started their own schools.

The two sexes related to the larger American society in different ways, but these patterns, too, replicated the Irish customs of the sending homeland. Diner assesses Ireland’s women of the time, particularly those emigrating, as seemingly more independent than the “native born American” women they found, but only in terms of their notions of the economic contribution they could make to the family. In short, both in Ireland and America, Irish women were prepared to earn money to provide for the well-being of their family. American women, contrariwise, were looking to pursue the “Cult of True Womenhood,” which, whenever possible excluded wage work, and indeed often relied on Irish and other immigrant women to provide domestic labor.

The independence of Irish women was limited—they might be drawing income from wage work outside the home, but they largely continued to observe and respect prevailing Irish gender-role mores, which gave Irish men the superior status in most areas of public life. Political activity, in particular, was left to Irish men, both in Ireland and in the United States. Indeed, in America, Irish men soon learned how to leverage their increasing numbers by voting candidates out when they did not protect Irish interests, as in elections of 1866 and 1877 when the nativist past of Protestant Governor William Newell, and his supposed role in putting an Irishman to death for a murder he may or may not have committed, was used to rally Irish votes for his opponent in each case.¹³

“ERIN’S DAUGHTERS IN AMERICA”

Explaining the most significant gender-based characteristic of Irish immigration, Diner’s study, Erin’s Daughters in America, notes that Ireland is alone among countries from whom America has received immigrants in having sent more women than men (a least until 1983, the date of the study). During the Irish immigration of the nineteenth century, not only were more than half the immigrants female, but women often emigrated in groups without any men in them, which meant many women were leaving by themselves for America, without a husband or brother, and choosing to defer or forego marriage. As in the case of Annie and her mother Mary, who arrived in New Jersey in the late 1850s, Diner indicates that this pattern continued beyond the period immediately following the Famine.

Quinn confirms that this trend of more women than men immigrating was true of New Jersey, not just the overall United States. Quinn notes that it is ironic that the very fact that more Irish women than men emigrated to America meant that an Irish man in America often had a better chance of finding an Irish wife than if he remained in Ireland. Indeed, he says Ireland was left as “a country of too many bachelors.”¹⁴

Quinn notes that, upon their arrival, Irish American women (like other groups of American women) “disappeared” from view, which makes it somewhat hard to track them. They were invisible as they began charting their way first through domestic service, one of the only two major career paths most chose in America, then potentially into marriage and motherhood. Like Diner, Quinn notes that some Irish women chose to completely forego marriage—including those who entered the convent, where they found a ‘rich sphere of autonomous action.”¹⁵ Indeed, in a time when women were largely ceding the public spheres to men, Quinn notes that these women, from the security of their religious life, founded New Jersey schools and hospitals, and served as teachers to the next generation. In all of this, these women were helping preserve Irish Catholic identity in America.

Quinn also notes that towards the end of the nineteenth century some Irish women moved beyond their gender roles to seek higher education. This will become, relevant to our story of the village, since according to oral history passed down in her family, Anna, the daughter of immigrants, considered studying at the newly created College of St. Elizabeth in the late nineteenth century.

“SERVING WOMEN”

As noted, Irish women arrived in New Jersey and other parts of the United States prepared to work outside the home, including as domestic servants in the homes of the wealthy and the growing middle class. Perhaps in part because of the contradictory attitudes which found “native-born Americans” seeking laborers, including domestics, but looking down on the individuals hired, these Irish women became part of a developing trend in the way that in-home service was perceived and practiced across nineteenth century America.

Specifically, over the nineteenth century, service in the home went from being “help” to “servant.” In her book Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America, Faye E. Dudden says that “help” described an activity, perhaps by a neighbor girl, paid to help out in the home of another, perhaps to assist a woman with production of textiles or farm goods, like butter and eggs, for market.¹⁶ Part of the compensation for such work might be a portion of the output produced by the “helping” individual. “Help” tended to be on a part time, temporary or otherwise casual basis.¹⁷ Many of those providing “help” ate with the family at its regular meals, which Diner sees as an indicator of equal status between the individual “helping” and those being “helped.”¹⁸
“Help” predominated in American life through the early nineteenth century. 

Dudden says as the nineteenth century progressed, what had been predominantly “help” gave way to employment as “domestics” or in “domestic service.” Individuals so employed had to regard themselves as servants, not simply “help”, and were definitely not considered to be equals to the family served. These domestic servants might or might not be required to live in the household they served, which would make marriage or a family difficult. This transition to domestic service from “help” also made the position seem much more demeaning to most “native-born American” women (who probably had the Cult of True Womenhood in mind as their ideal, anyway, and probably hoped to hire, not be hired). Accordingly, most “native-born American” women withdrew from this kind of employment, leaving it to immigrants. Dudden indicates that “the hiring of domestic service was crucial to the practice of sentimental domesticity and the ‘true womanhood’ so central to nineteenth-century middle-class culture.”¹⁹ Dudden quips that “employers fretted about the degree to which their housekeeping arrangements matched those projected in Godey’s.” (the leading ladies’ magazine of the time).

Domestic service was among the few careers open to most women, particularly immigrants. Indeed, many serving women were Irish—as noted, Irish women of the time were inclined to contribute economically to the family, and many, indeed, deferred or avoided marriage, which was probably more compatible with being a live in domestic than marriage would have been. Still, the conditions faced by an individual in domestic service varied significantly with the employer and may have caused many of those in service to look more favorably at marriage as a way out. Domestic service also helped engrain the larger American gender-based patterns of the time, including the “Cult of True Womenhood,” in which the “native born” husband left home each day to earn the family’s income, and his “native-born” wife stayed home to care for children—and to whatever extent not covered by domestic servants, the home.

In a period in which the hiring of one or more domestic servants freed middle class women from some portion of day-to-day household chores, the woman so freed, notes Dudden, could even visualize herself as providing a foreign-born domestic servant with some civilizing influences, by employing that person as servant. This could be a sort of benevolence work, at a time when such work was one of the recognized outlets for proper female activity. As noted, the prevailing “nativist” notions of the Irish were of people less civilized than “native born Americans.”

At the same time, Dudden suggests, and perhaps unrecognized at the time, the middle-class woman with one or more servants became a supervisor in her own home. This mimicked, to some degree, the role of the entrepreneurial husband, who was out of the house, earning the family’s livelihood (although not always a supervisor). A bonus to the husband’s earnings being used to finance domestic servants for his wife was that he, along with his wife, gained social status.²⁰

ANNIE AND MARY IN DOMESTIC SERVICE

It is time to bring this contextual history back to the Molloy family of Glenside Park. It is not until the 1900 census that the census takers ask those not born in the United states when they arrived. That census listing for Annie Hoyne Molloy indicates she arrived in 1858, and also suggests that she would have been 12 at the time of arrival. By 1860, at the age of 14, she was already a full-time domestic servant, living in Newark in the home of the family of Edward and Harriet Parker, probably caring for the Parker family’s youngest members, two twins less than a year old. Edward is described as a feed merchant, with a personal estate valued at $3000.

It seems unlikely that Annie emigrated by herself at 12, and seems more likely that she and her mother Mary came together, probably without a husband/father. Unfortunately, Mary was dead by the time of the 1900 census, so the census taker would not have been able to ask her when she arrived.

I move on to what the various censuses do tell us about Mary. In the 1870 census, Annie’s mother, Mary, is listed as a domestic servant in the Kearny, New Jersey residence of Nathaniel N. Halstead, who, incidentally, was a partner to Warren Ackerman in his rubber business during the Civil War. Halstead is identified as a 57-year-old farmer and doesn’t appear to have any of his own children living with him and his wife. Mary, whose last name is misspelled as Hoye, is identified as being a 45-year-old from Ireland. The census enumerator for that year and town has indicated that Mary cannot read and cannot write by checking two separate boxes.

Since I hadn’t been successful finding a listing for Mary Hoyne in the 1860 census, even using various misspellings of her name, I tried moving back to the 1860 census listing for Halstead’s household. Nathaniel Halstead was apparently living at the same location as later, in 1870, although the city is identified as Harrison, rather than Kearny. This difference reflects the fact that it was Halstead himself who prompted the creation and naming of the municipality of Kearny, which originated as a piece of Harrison, New Jersey. Halstead sought the change in order to honor his great friend Philip Kearny, who will figure in a future post, and who was a close neighbor of Halstead in 1860.

The 1860 census listing for Halstead shows that his household includes a live-in domestic servant named Mary, but her last name is identified as Haines. As is the Mary Hoye of the 1870 census listing, this Mary is from Ireland and cannot read or write. I believe it is the same Mary, Annie’s mother. However, along with the problem of the name being misspelled as Haines there is the wrinkle that in the 1860 census Mary’s age is inconsistent with that reported in the 1870 census. If Mary were 45 in 1870, she should have been 35 in 1860, rather than 38, as listed in that census. But it is clear many such errors occurred in the census process.

If, indeed, both the 1860 census listing for “Mary Haines” and the 1870 census listing for “Mary Hoye” are both for Annie’s mother, Mary, this suggests to me that Mary was not married during this at least 10 years of service to the Halstead family. Further possible evidence of her single status comes from the 1880 census. By 1880, Mary is 55, apparently retired from domestic service, and still unable to read and write. She is living with her daughter Annie, in a home shared with Annie’s (second) husband, and their young child, Anna. If Mary and Annie did emigrate in the late 1850s with a husband/father, he is clearly not around now.

Of course none of this definitively tells us whether Many and Annie came together, but without others, or what motivated them to come at all. Perhaps more evidence will turn up at some point, but for now I will leave you with a list of books for any further reading you may want to do.

THOMAS MOLLOY, ALSO AN IMMIGRANT

Although I focused mainly on Mary and Annie as immigrants, the 1900 census also confirms that Annie’s husband Thomas was an immigrant. Subtracting Thomas’ birth date from the date he apparently reported arriving in the United States makes him 10 years old when he immigrated. Again, there are some possible inconsistencies with the data reported, when compared to Thomas’ record in the 1880 census. In 1900, he is reported as 4 years younger than Annie, his wife, while in 1880, they are both 30 years old. Oh well!

Thomas will feature prominently in future posts.

NEXT MONTH

I will be presenting at Union County’s Four Centuries in a Weekend again this year on October 19 and 20, 2024. This year I will be doing an interactive activity to allow you, the visitor to the Deserted Village, to explore the different worldviews which the European colonists and the native Munsee brought to the bargaining table when contemplating the purchase of the land which became the Deserted Village of Feltville. I hope to have you join me.

BOOK LIST, NINETEENTH CENTURY IRISH IMMIGRATION/DOMESTIC SERVICE

Cunningham, John. Newark. New Jersey Historical Society, Newark, NJ. 1966.

Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. 1983.

Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut. 1983.

Laxton, Edward. The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America. Henry Holt and Company, New York. 1996.

Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York. 1985.

Quinn, Dermot. The Irish in New Jersey. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. 2004.

Shaw, Douglas V. Immigration and Ethnicity in New Jersey History. New Jersey Historical Commission, Trenton, N.J.