In their illustrated PHM history lecture, Eileen Eagan and Patricia Finn of the University of Southern Maine History Department recreated the life and times of the late nineteenth century Portland Irish community.
For Portland's early Irish settlers, the sea was both a blessing and a curse. Victims of the 1864 wreck of the immigrant ship, Bohemian, on Aldens Rock off Cape Elizabeth were laid to rest in an unmarked Calvary Cemetery grave. A few years ago they were memorialized by a Celtic cross erected in the cemetery.
Following their perilous sea passage, early Portland Irish families settled into a tight knit Gorham Corner neighborhood close to the waterfront. Life in their new country was anything but easy. The appalling mortality rate of men employed in dangerous jobs led to a preponderance of women listed as the head of Portland Irish households. Poor sanitation and infant mortality were further impediments to a long life for early Irish settlers in Portland. Over 100 saloons along Commercial Street, many of them Irish owned, added to the community's health woes.
Following early waves of immigration in the closing years of the nineteenth century, conditions in the Portland Irish community began looking up. The first jobs for men were along the waterfront and on the Maine Central Railroad. By the turn of the century, Irish officers filled the ranks of the Portland Police Department. Fifty out of a hundred presidents of the American Federation of Labor were Irishmen and Maine saw its first Irish governor.
Domestic service was the route upward favored by Portland Irish women. It worked well for them. The jobs were easy to learn and free meals, uniforms and a place to sleep meant that their three-dollar weekly wage could go for family expenses. When Portland finally opened school teaching positions to Irish Catholics another route upward for women was open. Lizzy Walsh began teaching in 1878 and went on to become the city's first principal. Both men and women looked to the Catholic Church for many of the social benefits denied by the public sector.
Eagan and Finn recapped the Irish trans-Atlantic experience and later employment as longshoremen with the hope that new plans for the city's waterfront will reflect the history of people who lived and worked on it.