Irish descendants are embracing St. Paul's forgotten Connemara Patch

After a grueling ocean voyage to Boston, a train carried 300 dirt-poor Irish immigrants to St. Paul in 1883. They'd come from the Connemara region on the coast of western Ireland, where the latest famine had left them in rough shape.

"Their appearance was indeed miserable in the extreme, each were poorly clad for this climate, and a great many were without shoes," according to the St. Paul Globe. Even the train crew was "afraid to enter the cars until the voyagers came out and a hose was applied to wash out the interior."

Connemara immigrants came to Minnesota in 1880 and 1883, fleeing a largely forgotten famine brought on by crop failure a generation after the infamous potato famine of the 1840s. Many wound up at the base of Dayton's Bluff on St. Paul's East Side in a four-block shantytown known as the Connemara Patch.

"They were vilified, considered the lowest human beings living on a patch below the bridges leading into downtown St. Paul," said Leslie Thomas, whose great-great-grandfather came from Connemara and worked as a street sweeper.

Thomas, a retired aviation worker from Afton, learned about the Connemara Patch while digging into her family genealogy a few years ago. Now she's among a fervent band of history buffs dusting off its gritty history.

The group worked with St. Paul officials to erect an interpretive sign about the patch this summer in Swede Hollow Park, just south of E. 7th Street (tinyurl.com/ConnemaraPatchSign). Their private Facebook page, where descendants prune stories from family trees, has swelled to more than 400 members (https://www.facebook.com/groups/805342643604898).

That, in turn, has sparked a trans-Atlantic connection with people in Ireland curious about what happened to family members who left for America more than 140 years ago.

"We're building a descendant community on both sides of the Atlantic," said Thomas, who showed me the new sign last week before flying off to Ireland to speak at a genealogy conference in Connemara.

The first batch of destitute Irish to immigrate to Minnesota in the 1880s came to the patch under a colonization program engineered by Bishop (and later Archbishop) John Ireland that eventually settled 4,000 Irish Catholic families, most from crowded East Coast cities, in western Minnesota.

Answering a plea from an Irish priest, the Catholic Colonization Bureau sent 30 Connemara families to Graceville, a farming town near Morris in western Minnesota. The colonization group had acquired thousands of acres for immigrants to settle along James J. Hill's railroad tracks. Families were given 160-acre parcels, with 5 acres broken for planting. Each plot came with a small house, farming tools, flour, cornmeal and a cow to get them started.

But the "venture started failing almost immediately," according to Michael Carlson, a retired federal archivist and Connemara descendant who lives in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash. "The settlers knew little about farming on the prairies of the American Midwest."

When a brutal winter swept Minnesota in 1880, the resettling experiment unraveled. One of the replanted Irishmen, Coleman Malone, told a local leader that his son John had frozen on his way from St. Paul, that he was hungry and had only a week's worth of firewood.

Most of the Graceville immigrants moved to St. Paul in spring 1881. Carlson's great-great-grandfather Michael Curran was among those who wound up in the patch along Phalen Creek.

"The area," Carlson wrote, "was crowded with a haphazard array of poorly constructed shanties, small businesses and railroad tracks where men worked for minimal pay as industrial laborers and women found employment as domestics in homes of the wealthy and laundry workers in the many hotels."

In her 2003 book "Forgetting Ireland," fellow descendant Bridget Connelly wrote that the immigrants arrived "dirty and worn" and were called the "Conamaras," a name that assumed "a negative connotation."

That contempt followed the immigrants from Graceville to the Connemara Patch, which Connelly notes was "far from the bluffs where Hill would build his mansion and Bishop Ireland would build the Cathedral of St. Paul."

The second Connemara wave arrived in Minnesota in 1883, thanks to a program funded by English Quaker philanthropist James Hack Tuke. After consulting with Ireland about the Graceville debacle, Tuke required that his Connemara immigrants travel in family groups, with at least one member speaking English.

"They were able to select their destination, as long as there was someone willing to receive and help them get started upon arrival," Thomas wrote last year in the Irish Gazette. Her ancestors settled in the patch and the West Side Flats.

The Connemara Patch disappeared in the 1950s when Interstate 94 cut through the old neighborhood. In 2005, St. Paul created the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary where the shantytown once stood — all but forgotten until the recent efforts of descendants to revive its memory.

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.