Many Irish descendants have traveled back to Ireland to dig up their family’s history. But this month — in what is believed to be the first project of its kind — college students from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell will begin a dig of a different kind, excavating a buried shanty town that was home to scores of Irish canal diggers around the lawn of extant St. Patrick Church in Lowell, Mass.
In August, 1822, immigrant leader Hugh Cummisky lead about 30 Irish laborers who walked the 30 miles from Boston to Lowell at the invitation of wealthy Bostonians who wanted to harvest the Merrimack River to power textile mills by building a series of canals. The research project has identified Cummisky’s homestead, now an abandoned ruin.
A team of archaeologists from both Queen’s University in Belfast and UMass Lowell will begin the supervised dig with six UMass college students on August 16 and hope to find the dishware, hearth remnants and clay pipes that are the remnants of a hard luck life lived by the enclave of Irish workers. Hundreds eventually settled there in cabins, bringing their religion, building a wooden church and then the current St. Patrick church in 1831, as well as a schoolhouse for 150 children. The canal digging and building work was dangerous and many laborers died from drowning, disease, or accidents. The Boston industrialists saw the shanty town as temporary, but the work of the immigrants proved to be a powerful economic engine and both the city of Lowell, and the immigrant shanty town, known as paddy camp, thrived.
“From cartographic and pictorial evidence it would seem that the area to the front of the church has remained unchanged since that time and remains in lawn,” says Colm Donnelly, a Queens researcher on the study.
Next summer, the team from UMass Lowell will travel to Northern Ireland to do a similar excavation of an abandoned rural settlement there. Researchers at Queen’s have already begun excavating sites where immigrants lived before their arrival in Massachusetts, so the project is a rare chance to understand the immigrant experience from both sides of the Atlantic.
Photo courtesy of the Lowell National Historic Park.