You may know Alexander Campbell as the convicted Molly Maguire who placed his dirty hand upon the wall of the Carbon County jail at Mauch Chunk (modern-day Jim Thorpe) while claiming his innocence.

I recently had an opportunity to visit Campbell’s hometown in County Donegal, Ireland. Campbell was born in western Donegal around 1833 and emigrated to Pennsylvania’s Coal Region in the years after the American Civil War.

The coastal town of Dungloe, known in Irish as An Clochán Liath, is nestled along the rugged northwestern coast, offering a picturesque yet challenging landscape that has shaped its resilient inhabitants.

Just outside the village on the road to the north, you’ll find scattered abandoned cottages on the slopes of windswept hills at the foot of the almost treeless landscape. It is a harsh landscape.

Campbell emigrated and settled among the Irish diaspora in Schuylkill and Carbon counties and opened a tavern serving Irish mineworkers and laborers.

In the mid 1870s, hysteria around a shadowy group known the Molly Maguires saw Campbell caught up amid the round-ups of suspected Mollies.

Campbell was convicted along with three alleged co-conspirators in Carbon County in a trial that remains controversial today. He was executed on June 21, 1877 along with 3 others at Jim Thorpe (then Mauch Chunk) and 6 additional men at Pottsville, Schuylkill County.

Campbell is buried in St. Joseph’s Church Cemetery in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania.

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Read more about the Molly Maguires

“Something more than a river” – The West Branch in “Sons of Molly Maguire”

“The hour of doom” – The Molly Maguire executions in Pottsville on June 21, 1877

“Revolutionary Disloyalty” – A coal miners’ rebellion in Schuylkill County during the Civil War

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