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The Caseys’ Homestead in America (1865–1882)
It was the twenty-fifth of November 1870 — exactly one month before Christmas — when a newborn’s cry could be heard inside the three-room log house near Oak Grove, Wisconsin, just south of Prescott. The snow-topped cabin was perched upon a bluff high above the mighty Mississippi River, the boundary at this point between Wisconsin and Minnesota. But here, twenty-five miles from St. Paul — across the river and about two hundred miles from where the Mississippi River has its origins — the river was “modest” and not quite so “mighty.”
The snug Irish Catholic family at home inside the cabin had origins far from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Barney and Ellen Casey were immigrants from Ireland to America during and after the years of Ireland’s Great Potato Famine of the 1840s.
Bernard and Ellen didn’t fully know the size of this migration from their native Ireland. They knew only that they had plenty of Irish company on the crossing boats. Historians confirmed their impressions, noting later that four million Irish had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to America from 1845 to 1900. “Poor Ireland’s done” and “the country’s gone forever,” Irish immigrants told one another in this country.
While the Caseys were still thinking of a name for the newborn boy on this cold day in 1870, his mother, Ellen Elizabeth Murphy Casey, was resting. She herself had also been born on a wintry day — January 9, 1844.
Ellen was born in Camlough, County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. The Irish cherished County Armagh for its connection with St. Patrick. In the fifth century, according to tradition, the great St. Patrick had put up a church there. Armagh, therefore, was soaked in the traditions of the Church. Ellen had carried that well-rooted love of the Catholic faith to America as a very young child.
Ellen’s father died during the potato famine that scourged Ireland from 1845 to 1850. When blight ruined the potato crop for several years in a row, the result was a nationwide disaster. On the table and as a crop the potato was the staple for this small island nation. One-fourth of the arable land of Ireland had been planted in potatoes.
After her husband’s death, Brigid Shields Murphy took her children — little Ellen, her older daughter, Mary Ann, and her three sons, Patrick, Owen, and Maurice — across the Atlantic to America around 1852. The family came first to the Boston area, where Brigid had relatives on the Shields side of the family. But soon thereafter, the family made its way to Portland, Maine. There, Brigid and her two older sons went to work in the textile mills.
At the time, they had few alternatives. Like most of the Irish who came, the Murphys had almost no money left once their passage was paid for. Even with jobs, grinding twelve-hour days and six-day weeks provided little more than a subsistence income. Ellen and Mary Ann boarded with a Portland housewife in exchange for light housekeeping chores. The baby, three-year-old Maurice, was cared for by a family friend.
After almost ten years of scrimping and hard labor, Brigid had money enough to move west to the region around St. Paul, Minnesota. Patrick and Owen, young men by then, had already found work there. Mary Ann had married and moved there as well. Ellen, however, stayed behind to live and work in Biddeford, Maine. Now almost grown-up, she was a petite, lovely young woman with straight facial features and deep-set blue eyes.
At a Fourth of July picnic in 1860, sixteen-year-old Ellen met Bernard James Casey, the brother of her friend, Ellen Casey. A tall, handsome, dark-haired young man, Bernard told Ellen that he’d come from County Monoghan three years earlier. In turn, she told him about her background in Armagh. No doubt they both laughed when they realized that though County Monoghan and Armagh were neighboring counties in the north of Ireland, the two of them traveled all the way to America before they met.
Young Casey had just turned twenty not too long before their meeting. Born June 10, 1840, at Castleblayney in County Monoghan, he and his sister, Ellen, had left Ireland behind for America when he was seventeen. In the Boston area, their brother Terrence was already becoming established. Once he’d settled in, Bernard learned the shoemaking trade and soon went into business with Terrence.
Apparently, Bernard and Ellen felt drawn to each other from that Fourth of July meeting. In the months that followed, they saw each other often. Before long, Barney proposed, and Ellen wrote to her mother in Hastings, Minnesota, about her thoughts of marriage.
Although Ellen’s mother was hundreds of miles away, her authority was persuasive at any distance, and she didn’t want her daughter married at so young an age. So she sent for Ellen, and Ellen traveled to Minnesota. The Casey-Murphy romance would have to be conducted via letters.
As the months went by, however, it was clear to Brigid that the relationship would survive the difficulties of courtship by letter. She finally gave her approval to the marriage. On October 6, 1863, Ellen and Barney were married in a small church in Salem, a Boston suburb. The bridegroom was twenty-three, his bride was nineteen.
For a while, the young couple lived in Boston. The Civil War had begun two years earlier, and wartime demand for shoes by the Union army kept the Casey brothers busy. By the end of the war in April 1865, however, the demand for shoes fell drastically. The Northern armies disbanded and no longer ordered shoes by the hundreds.
Bernard and Ellen Casey, looking for a livelihood, began to move westward in stages. They lived in Germantown, Pennsylvania, for a few months and then went to New Castle. There, Bernard and Terrence opened a shoe store. But the brothers quickly saw that making and selling shoes would no longer provide them with a good living, and they split up.
Terrence decided to move back east to attend law school. For the young Caseys, however, the move to farming and to the Midwest seemed inevitable. The couple already had two children to support — little Ellen, born July 8, 1864, and James, born August 14, 1865.
In 1862, Congress had passed the Homestead Act, which granted 160 acres to anyone wishing to settle on and cultivate public lands for at least five years. Variations on this “homesteading” concept were adapted in many areas. Thus, in the autumn of 1865, Barney and Ellen Casey moved into the area near Prescott, Wisconsin. A small log cabin was soon put up, as was a shelter for a pair of oxen and a cow. Barney, as a new farmer, watched with amazement as his brothers-in-law showed him how to use the steel plow to break the ground. The little family of four settled in, and the head of the house registered his claim. Crops were planted during the following spring.
Most Irish immigrants who came to America settled in urban areas in the East because they lacked the capital to move west. And, despite the fact that the Irish had come from rural settings, American agriculture on the frontier was very different than growing potatoes, or “murphies,” on their small plots in close-knit communities in Ireland. In this respect, the Caseys were unusual, but they were not alone. Pierce County apparently still had plenty of room to offer to newcomers. An 1860 county census, taken only five years before the Caseys arrived, showed that only eighty-two families, including seven Irish families, were settled there.
Although German immigrants outnumbered the Irish in Wisconsin in census reports for 1870, the Irish constituted the second largest group of foreign-born at that time. (After 1870, Norwegians poured into the state, overtaking the Irish immigrants for a ranking behind the Germans.) On the whole, the Midwest was clearly developing a German flavor. German immigrants were settling in such numbers in the Midwest that Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis were said to form a “German Triangle.”
But even though Irish neighbors were few in number, Bernard Casey felt more at home in farming than he had in business in the city. He meant to make it work for himself and his growing family. Like many Wisconsin farms, Casey’s land had a combination
