Ireland's New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922

3. Irish Rural Life: Minnesota and New South Wales Compared

Irish Rural Life Minnesota and New South Wales Compared W     nineteenth -century Irish immigrants settled adjacent to the United States eastern seaboard, a minority moved away from the nation’s emerging urban centers to pursue lives in the agricultural lands of the West. However, the history of these rural Irish, unlike that of their countrymen and women who took to farming in Australia, remains at present very much underdeveloped. The extensive attention in American historical writing given to Irish urban settlement, mobility, and nationalism as well as the Irish position at the intersection of ethnicity and race has seen the experience of the rural Irish largely bypassed. The absence of significant recent work on America’s rural Irish is puzzling for two reasons. First, a group of scholars writing in the s, including Grace McDonald, James Shannon, and Merle Curti, laid a foundation for studies of the rural Irish that is unparalleled elsewhere in the Irish diaspora .1 Given the refreshing changes in approach to rural history in the last four decades, it is surprising that few attempts have been made to build upon these writers’ pioneering endeavors or revisit issues raised in their works. Secondly, given the high profile of rural studies in recent overseas scholarship on the Irish diaspora and the significant controversy they have provoked, it is curious that the implications of these works for the American Irish have seldom been pursued. This chapter contributes to redressing the omission by comparing Irish rural settlement in the American state of Minnesota and the southwest region of the Australian state of New South Wales. While cross-national comparison of the experiences of immigrant groups remains rare, comparison under-  3 Irish Rural Life  taken at a local or regional level is rarer still.2 Yet such intensely focused comparison provides an opportunity to compare the experiences of an emigrant group in different destinations in much finer detail than is usually possible in a transnational study. It also lends itself to a more precise assessment of the relative influences of cultural heritage and local conditions in shaping immigrant experiences, and to assessing the validity of the commonplace assertions that the Irish were unsuited to, alienated from, or incapable of, rural life in the New World.3 Minnesota and southwest New South Wales share a number of features that suggest their potential for comparison. In the mid-nineteenth century, both experienced rapid increases in their European populations as the frontier gave way to more established settlement. In both regions, the Irishborn were prominent among the early arrivals who sought to take advantage of the opportunities available in the still unrefined settings. In ,  percent of the British Isles–born population in the Minnesota Territory was of Irish birth, while in southwest New South Wales between onethird and a quarter of the settler population was Irish-born, others the children of Irish immigrants.4 Parallels continued in the second half of the nineteenth century too: settlement extended and became more intense, towns developed to service farming communities, and as the population in each location increased, a significant Irish presence remained a feature of both regions. However, during the last quarter of the century significant differences emerged between the two. In southwest New South Wales the large Irishborn population gradually diminished in significance, though the presence of second- and third-generation Irish ensured the region maintained its reputation as a location of intensive Irish—and by that time, Roman Catholic—settlement. In Minnesota, while the proportion of Irish-born in the population declined, the organization of Irish settlement underwent significant changes. Colonization schemes, especially those organized by Bishop John Ireland and the Irish-American Colonization Company, achieved prominence, and increasingly these ventures departed from the processes that had underpinned the successful establishment of Irish settlers in the state. These colonization schemes undermined old configurations and, for the most part, proved unsuccessful in promoting viable Irish rural communities. Yet as this chapter shows, in the historical literature it is the less auspicious second phase of Minnesota’s experience that has achieved the most prominence, with the result that stereotypical assertions about the Irish incapacity for rural life have been reinforced. * In  the Irish-born, though few in number, constituted . percent of the total population of the infant Minnesota Territory and . percent of the total foreign-born. A decade later their presence was more pronounced, Irish immigrants then comprising . percent of the state’s total...