In December 1845, as Ireland stood on the brink of the Great Famine, an advertisement appeared in the Miners’ Journal of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, offering regular ship passages from Londonderry (Derry) to Philadelphia.
At first glance, it seems out of place – why advertise transatlantic travel in a newspaper serving Pennsylvania’s Coal Region? The answer lies in the surge of Irish immigration that reshaped Schuylkill County in the 1840s and 1850s, as thousands fled poverty, hunger, and disease and came to the anthracite coal fields in search of work.
Once established in Schuylkill County, these immigrants relied on notices like this to bring family and friends across the Atlantic. By the 1860s, Irish communities were deeply rooted throughout the region.
Yet the same newspaper that carried these ads would soon help fuel a rising nativist backlash in the 1850s. The Miners’ Journal was edited by Benjamin Bannan, who profited as a ticket agent for Irish emigrants before later embracing Know-Nothing politics and popularizing the term “Molly Maguires” to stigmatize the very communities he had helped build.
Read more about Irish history in the Coal Region
“The Irish in Pennsylvania Coal Country” | Interview on the “Transatlantic” podcast
A letter from an Irish immigrant in Scranton, PA to family in Ireland | 1865
Major Joseph Anthony | Civil War veteran and mining superintendent
“The hour of doom” – The Molly Maguire executions in Pottsville on June 21, 1877
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Thanks for sharing! I’ve often wondered about the bits of ephemera like this that drew my ancestors to seemingly random places. Just 10 years earlier in the 1830s, my French ancestors —worn down likely from 30+ years of revolution war and famine— left the Alsace region to settle in Tamaqua of all places. Who knows what led them there, but my great grandfather’s grandfather Louis Beyel (1812-1890) worked as a teamster in Tamaqua for the rest of his life. Could have been a silly little ad like this that completely changed their lives.