The Irish Immigration to America - The Famine Irish --
Where Did They Go and What did They Do
| With San Francisco a notable
exception, they did not go west. For the most part the famine-driven Irish
settled in the Northeast. And cities offered the opportunities and ethnic
ties. Among several scores of cities receiving significant Irish
emigrants, favorites included Boston, Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River and
Worcester in Massachusetts; New York City and Troy in New York, Jersey
City in New Jersey, Hartford in Connecticut and Philadelphia in
Pennsylvania.
The following table is derived from Census data compiled by
Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American
Emigration, 1850 - 1900, Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Springs,
PA, 1997. (This interesting text focuses on the impact on Ireland
of the emigration to America in the subject
period.) |
|
Year |
Total Irish |
Irish in 7 States |
Number of Irish Born | |||||||
|
Total No. |
% of Total
Irish | |||||||||
|
Mass |
Conn |
N.Y. |
N.J. |
Penn. |
Ohio |
Illinois | ||||
| 1850 | 961,719 | 747,880 | 77.7 | 115,917 | 26,689 | 343,111 | 31,092 | 151,723 | 51,562 | 27,786 |
| 1860 | 1,611,304 | 1,167,295 | 72.4 | 185,434 | 55,445 | 498,072 | 62,006 | 201,939 | 76,826 | 87,573 |
| 1870 | 1,855,827 | 1,340,974 | 72.2 | 216,120 | 70,630 | 528,806 | 86,784 | 235,798 | 82,674 | 120,162 |
| 1880 | 1,854,571 | 1,322,637 | 71.3 | 226,700 | 70,638 | 499,445 | 93,079 | 236,505 | 78,927 | 117,343 |
| 1890 | 1,871,509 | 1,360,677 | 72.7 | 259,902 | 77,880 | 483,375 | 101,059 | 243,836 | 70,127 | 124,498 |
| 1900 | 1,615,459 | 1,216,797 | 75.1 | 249,916 | 70,994 | 425,553 | 94,844 | 205,909 | 55,018 | 114,563 |
What They Did
| With few exceptions, they
started at the bottom. They served as laborers and domestics, supplying
manual labor to fuel the rapidly escalating urbanization of America. With
pick and broom they earned what the plow and hoe back home could not
produce.
They were not to remain at the economic bottom. Indeed, as Daniels, id., notes, even at the height of the famine years, more than a third of the Irish-born in Boston worked in categories above the lowest occupational categories. By 1880, more than half of the Irish-born in Boston were in that relatively privileged group. It should be kept in mind that the Irish-born in areas out of reach of the Famine immigrants, San Francisco for example, enjoyed a higher economic status. It should also be noted that the statistics obscure individual cases, many of which are glorious exceptions to the gross tallies. According to Daniels, in 1850, nearly a tenth of Boston's physicians were Irish-born. |