Building New Lives, Maintaining Old Identities: Irish Associations in Michigan’s Copper Country, 1860-1900

The celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day is a common event throughout the Irish diaspora. In the United States, its celebration dates back to the colonial period with observances in Boston and Savannah among other cities with Irish populations. Notably, St. Patrick’s Day has not always been an Irish Catholic observance. As Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair suggest in their history of the day, The Wearing of the Green (2002), the holiday deserves more serious attention from scholars than it has received, if only because the celebrations offer a window into each particular community, and how the community defined itself and responded to the challenges it faced at various times in its history.¹ That is certainly the case in the Michigan Copper Country, an area in the Upper Peninsula comprising Keweenaw, Baraga, Houghton, and Ontonogan Counties. There, St. Patrick’s Day was the central event in the various Irish communities’ year. However, the observance was only one part of the communities’ efforts to keep in touch with events in Ireland and to maintain Irish identity. In addition to their March 17 celebrations, the Irish of the Upper Peninsula established and supported a number of organizations. Those organizations and their activities give us an insight into the lives and concerns of the Irish in Michigan’s Copper Country, who unfortunately have left few direct records of their lives.

Ethnic organizations have been, and remain, an important way in which all American immigrant groups have dealt with the tensions, pressures, and adjustments inherent in migration.² These organizations played varied roles in the lives of their members. Most provided protection from the uncertainties of life in a frequently hostile and dangerous new environment; others helped continue familiar cultural practices and customs; and all ethnic organizations provided opportunities to fill positions involving leadership and responsibility often denied immigrants and their children by the larger society. Collectively, such organizations helped to create and sustain a sense of community among newcomers.³ Of course, non-immigrant, native-born Americans were equally active in fraternal and benevolent organizations. For much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Americans participated in social, fraternal, and benevolent societies on a scale that invariably drew the attention and comments of European travelers.

In this respect, Irish immigrants in Michigan’s Copper Country during the last half of the nineteenth century were not different from other immigrant groups. They formed a large number of organizations that served various purposes in their new home. No formal records of any of these organizations appear to be extant—or at least, none have yet been found—but their activities were covered extensively in the region’s newspapers, among them the Portage Lake Mining Gazette, the Copper Country Evening News, and the Northwestern Mining Journal. This press coverage makes it possible to reconstruct much of this aspect of Irish immigrant life in the Michigan Copper Country.

Many of the organizations that Copper Country Irish immigrants formed were similar in purpose to those of other ethnic groups, both in the Copper Country and elsewhere; one of the most frequent purposes was to provide for a proper wake and burial as well as some modest monetary benefits for surviving widows and children. Nonetheless, distinctly Irish groups and purposes do form part of the associational history of the region. They reflect the continuing interest and involvement of the Irish of the diaspora in political and economic events unfolding in Ireland, such as Fenianism, the Land League, and the cause of Irish freedom most generally. It is difficult to determine if the concerns of these organizations were based on the Irish experience of the men and women of the Copper Country—but they clearly reflect an awareness of and deep interest in events in Ireland

The experience of the mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants in the Copper Country differed, in some ways, from that of other Irish immigrant communities. They were, to a substantial degree, skilled workers and among the pioneer settlers of the region. A significant portion of the men were experienced...