Irish immigrants faced challenges of frontier life with faith
By Emilie Lemmons
The Catholic Spirit
The farmhouse near Annandale where Mary Ortler’s grandparents settled is a tiny place, even today. It’s hard to believe a family could raise 12 children within its small frame — which contained no bathroom, no running water and just a couple of bedrooms upstairs. But James and Mary McLeod did it, just like the tens of thousands of immigrants who made their way to Minnesota
in the late 1800s. Babies were born on the McLeods’ kitchen table, taking their first gasps of a frontier life filled with poverty and faith. Times were so hard, Ortler said, that her grandparents could afford to buy shoes for only one of their children each
year. The others had to make do with old ones until their turn came. They were no stranger to illness, either. Two girls died in infancy. Once, during a diphtheria outbreak, the family had to lower an infected nanny out the second-floor window so she wouldn’t contaminate the children.
Irish Catholics whose parents came over from Ireland to escape the potato famine, the McLeods were devoutly religious.
“They were extremely poor, but they had 12 children,” Ortler said. “You did exactly what the church said, and you didn’t deviate from that. That’s exactly what my grandparents did. Even
confession: I went to confession once a week [as a child] because that’s what my grandmother did.” Mary McLeod’s parents had grown up in Ireland — her mother, Julia O’Driscoll, in County Cork, and her father, John Kelly, in County Sligo. Their families
eked out a living as farmers there, living in thatched-roof cottages that still dot the Irish landscape. When the potato famine hit,
O’Driscoll and Kelly ended up being on the same ship that sailed to New York in 1853. The months-long voyage was not easy. Ortler recalls her grandmother’s stories about the lack of food and storms that rocked the ship and made people sick. The Irish people, along with the other poorest classes, traveled in steerage
— the lowest level of the boat. All they carried with them were their clothes and a small satchel with a few items. It’s not clear when John Kelly and Julia O’Driscoll met, but in 1860, they married in Hazelton, Pa., where the men worked as coal miners for a time. They had seven children, including Mary, whose youngest sister would go on to become a nun in Duluth.
In 1877, the Kellys moved to the Annandale area, where they farmed. Other family members congregated there, too, and soon there was an Irish enclave. Although the Irish population was a
significant part of Minnesota’s foreignborn makeup, relatively few Irish immigrants came to Minnesota, most of them
staying in the Northeast, writes Ann Regan in the 2002 book “Irish in Minnesota.” Some came because they were encouraged
by clergy, such as the influential Archbishop John Ireland. But most — like the Kellys — came because of job opportunities or to follow family west. In St. Paul, especially, the Irish became integrated in all levels of society, becoming leaders in business, government, politics and religion.
In Annandale, the Kellys were founding members of a small church, which started in a small house, and later moved
into its own building. It was at the new church, St. Ignatius, that Ortler’s grandparents — Mary Kelly and James McLeod
— were married in 1893. The other predominant ethnic group
in the area was from Finland, and the two groups did not mix well, Ortler said. “The Finns would make fun of [the Irish kids] on the way to school,” Ortlersaid. “So that made them stick together. Finnish people were not Catholic, and they did not like the Catholics. And the Annandale area was not very Catholic
except for the Irish.” Distrust of the Irish was a common
problem in those days, according to Regan. “Their ‘popery’ and their continuing intense interest in Ireland’s struggle made the immigrant Irish especially alien and unassimilable to the unsympathetic Protestant Anglo-American establishment,”
she writes. “The mistrust was often mutual. The Irish blamed the
British for all of their homeland’s troubles, including the famine, and they carried over this prejudice in the form of distrust of that American establishment.”
Bound by their common suffering and faith, the immigrants brought many of their Irish traditions with them and passed them on to their children. “They were really family oriented,”
Ortler said. “The table was huge because of all the kids. . . . They cooked a lot of Irish stew.” And every Christmas Eve, they ate oyster stew, a tradition John and Julia Kelly had brought with them from Ireland. The family also had a three-ring notebook
that was passed down through the generations. In it were old photographs of relatives with holy cards tucked in and
captions and prayers written for each relative. And when her grandfather James McLeod died in 1951, the family honored
him with a traditional Irish wake. “They had his body in the house for at least two days,” Ortler remembered. When Mary died five years later, the family did the same thing for her. Mary and James McLeod’s children went on to become successful in their
own careers. All four girls who lived to adulthood went to college and became teachers — perhaps with the financial help of their oldest brother, William, who became a wealthy businessman in
Grosse Pointe, Mich. William also brought three of his brothers to Detroit and helped them get started running gas stations. Their mother wrote them letters every week, Ortler said. Today, the Irish tradition of strong family ties continues. Ortler, 65, and her
husband, Gordon Ortler, members of Holy Name in Medina, have visited Ireland and found her O’Driscoll roots in County Cork.
And the old farmhouse where James and Mary McLeod raised their 12 children? It’s still there, and Ortler has gone
back to see it. A cousin is running it — so it’s still in the family.
James (back row, second from right) and Mary McLeod (front row, far left) had 12 children, 10
of whom survived to adulthood. Mary Ortler’s mother, Grace, is in the front row, far right.