Alexander Campbell’s funeral in June 1877 is a fascinating moment in the story of the Molly Maguires – an opportunity to set aside sensational tales that surround his life and death.

Campbell, hanged at Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania on June 21, 1877 for his alleged role in two murders, has become a particular focus of my ongoing research into the Coal Region’s most polarizing episode.

That work has already taken me to his hometown of Dungloe, in the rural western moorlands of County Donegal.

This contemporary account of his wake and burial, published just days after his execution in a Philadelphia newspaper, offers a stark contrast to more dramatic, folkloric versions that ran in newspapers across the country at the time.

Yet, those accounts may still have value, too, hinting at cultural practices around death carried from Ireland to Pennsylvania’s anthracite fields. I’ll look at those in a future post.

Campbell’s death came as the climax of the violence that consumed Schuylkill and Carbon counties in the 1870s, when the shadowy figure of the “Molly Maguires” became a catch-all for violence, ethnic tension, and the struggle for power between labor and capital in these anthracite mining communities.

Many contemporary accounts of the funerals of the Molly Maguires in the days after their executions showed a fascination with the imagined “Irish wake” – wild scenes of keening, whiskey-fueled outbursts, and whispered plots for revenge.

Yet the newspaper correspondent who traveled to Lansford on the night before Campbell’s burial reported something very different. Inside the house, a handful of women kept vigil by the body; outside, fifty or sixty men smoked their pipes in low conversation. No shouting. No drinking. No threats. Only the uneasy hush of a community under suspicion, where this visiting reporter was eyed as a potential detective.

The sober tone of this wake stands in sharp contrast to the deeply ingrained Irish funerary customs that many immigrants carried with them, especially those from Donegal. Back in Campbell’s native Dungloe, old traditions of storytelling, song, and communal mourning shaped the final rites of ordinary people well into the 19th century.

That quieter, more restrained vigil in Lansford may reveal how those customs had softened in America under social pressure, or how fear of authorities and corporate police reshaped ritual into caution. Or that the newspaper reporter had only glimpsed a small part of the 30-hour long wake for Campbell in Lansford.

Even so, the vast turnout for Campbell’s funeral in Summit Hill – estimated to be one of the largest ever seen in the Coal Region to that point in history according to the reporter – showed the solidarity of Irish Catholic communities during one of the most volatile moments in the region’s history.

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THE MOLLIES’ WAKE. 

QUIET AND ORDERLY PROCEEDINGS. 

Plenty of Pipes and Whisky, but No Demonstrations or Threats of Violence –

Aleck Campbell’s Funeral – Peace Prevailing in the Mining Regions, Special Dispatch to THE TIMEs. 

SUMMIT HILL, June 24. 

Alexander Campbell, the last of the hanged Mollies, was buried here this afternoon.

His remains were followed from his late home in Lansford, a mile down the mountain, by the largest funeral ever seen in the coal regions, the procession reaching almost from the tavern of the dead man in the valley to the little church on the top of the mountain. 

This being Sunday, and Campbell having been the leading spirit of the Mollies in this hot-bed of Maguireism, his funeral gathered from all the towns, villages and patches around the great body of the order in Schuylkill and Carbon counties. 

Campbell was hanged at Mauch Chunk for procuring the murder of the mining boss, John P. Jones, by Kelly and Doyle, who were hanged alongside of him, and also for procuring the murder of the mining boss Morgan Powell by the hand of Yellow Jack [Donahue], at Tuscarora, who was buried also this afternoon in Tamaqua, alongside of Duffy.

THE WAKE. 

Campbell was a well-to-do Irishman, having risen from the position of a miner to that of a bottler of porter and seller of liquors, and his wake was conducted with the greatest decorum last night, notwithstanding the published rumors of an expected wild time there, the night before the body should be put in the ground. 

Hoping to see the typical Irish wake, made doubly interesting to a newspaper man by the circumstances which produced this one, I went to Campbell’s house last night and remained several hours, but there was not a single incident worth recording outside of the ordinary watching of the dead by a dozen women in an inner room, and at the most fifty or sixty men who sat in an outer room smoking their pipes and conversing in low tones. 

The yard and front of the house had a few idlers standing about in groups, but not even the episode of a drunken man or a weeping woman broke the monotony of the wake. I was forced to draw on an incident which amused me for awhile for the want of something better from the suspicion with which I was myself regarded.

The idea of a detective in their midst makes these people feel as though each had the hangman’s rope about his neck. When it finally became noised about that I was or might be a detective the shyness of every young Irishman that had spoken to me, and every old one with whom I had smoked, was apparent; there was not a drop of liquor drunk or furnished. 

THE FUNERAL. 

At High Mass to-day in the church in whose grave-yard the two coffins of Boyle and MeGeehan were covered up yesterday afternoon, and the third stood gaping for Campbell, Father Wynne, whose parishioners the men were, requested the prayers of the congregation, which crowded the church, for the repose of the souls of Alexander Campbell, Hugh McGeehan, James Roarity and James Boyle, and, continued the young priest, according to the formula of missal, “may their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.” 

About the grave and on the hills around when the funeral of Campbell came up this afternoon there may have been two thousand lookers-on, but there was nothing whatever to indicate the slightest use for the reinforcement of the two regular policemen of the town by four strange police of the Reading Coal and Iron Company. 

These last were called in more as a matter of duty than from any sense of danger for the past three days while the bodies were unburied to mining bosses of the obnoxious kind, of which the murdered Jones and Powell and others were.

One of them has just told me that he walked from his colliery through the woods and up the streets of Lansford between 12 and 2 o’clock in the morning and dropped in for a quarter of an hour at the wake of Boyle, night before last, and he did all this alone, having refused the escort of a couple of Coal and Iron police. 

FEARS OF THE OPERATORS. 

The only fear the operators or bosses have now is that some sneaking fellow out of work may apply a match to a breaker and cause the destruction of valuable property. About the same time as Campbell’s funeral hour this afternoon, Yellow Jack Donohue, who killed Morgan Powell, the mining boss in this place, in the public street, was buried alongside of Duffy, in Tamaqua.

The funeral as it passed up the main street of the town, which is about five miles from this place, was a large one, but not so big as that of Campbell. 

There were no funeral services in Tamaqua, Father Bridgeman, of that place, having considered the services over the bodies of Duffy and Yellow Jack, at Pottsville, as sufficient. Peace reigns in the coal regions, but the Mollies say it is the peace of Warsaw.

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Campbell’s funeral at Summit Hill says a lot about the Coal Region in 1877. Beneath all the fear, suspicion, and sensational headlines were real families trying to bury one of their own amid difficult times and with a national spotlight.

As I keep digging into Alexander Campbell’s life, from his beginnings in Donegal to his final days in the jail at Mauch Chunk, I’m finding that the truth is often far more complex than the legends passed down through generations. There’s much more of his story and the wider story of the Molly Maguires that deserves to be told with care and clarity.

I’ll be sharing more of that work soon.

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Read more about the Molly Maguires

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

Alexander Campbell | From the shores of Ireland to a gallows in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region

The Murder of Frank Langdon | Audenried, Pennsylvania, 1862

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