The Irish Arrive
He came in 1846, a young man of twenty-four, with the smell of a failed harvest still on the country he had left. Michael Raftery had been born on the twenty-second of August, 1822, in the parish that Cutter's sketch spells Achrom, in the county of Galway, on the far western edge of Ireland where the land runs out into the Atlantic. He had gone to the schools of his native parish, and then he had crossed an ocean, and he never saw Galway again. The volume that preserves his life sets the matter down in a single plain line that holds a whole catastrophe inside it. During the first of the flood of emigration caused by famine in Ireland, it says, he determined to make his home in America. That line is the only window onto why he left, and it is enough.
The first of the flood. The phrase fixes him in time with a precision the writer may not even have intended. The great famine of Ireland, the failure of the potato that began in 1845 and deepened into the worst years of want the modern country had known, drove a migration out of Ireland that would reshape the cities and the towns of the American northeast for a generation. Raftery was not among the latecomers who left after the worst was over and the routes were worn smooth. He was among the first. He left at the very opening of the exodus, in 1846, while the disaster was still fresh and the roads to the ports were still filling, and he carried himself across the water at the front edge of the wave that would follow him for years. The man who comes first into a new country comes into something harder than the man who comes after. There is no settled community of his own people to receive him, no church of his own faith to gather him in, none of the quiet machinery that later arrivals would find already built and waiting. The first man builds it. A single farmer's life sketch can carry the weight of his story for exactly that reason.
The core source for what follows is a printed sketch of the Raftery family, set down in William Richard Cutter's Historic Homes and Places of Middlesex County, published in 1908, the year Michael Raftery died, by someone who knew the town and knew the outline of his life. Much of what follows grows from that one sketch, following it closely and quoting its own words. The shoe trade and how the machines came and ended it draws on this same sketch, and that ground will not be covered again here. The shoe was Raftery's living. But the story that follows is the other thing the sketch records, the new thing. It is the story of how an Irish Catholic came to a New England farming town that had no church of his faith, and how he and his wife, out of almost nothing, helped to build one. A second source, the parish's own later account of its founding, fills in details the Cutter sketch does not give, and adds one point where the two sources disagree.
The simple strangeness of his arrival is worth setting out plainly. Hopkinton in the middle of the eighteen-forties was an old Massachusetts town, incorporated since 1715, settled by English Protestant stock, its religious life organized around the meetinghouse in the manner of every town in the Puritan commonwealth. For more than a century its public worship had been Congregational, the church and the town grown up together, the minister a town officer in everything but name. A town like this had no place in it, no building and no habit and very nearly no memory, for the old faith of Rome. Catholicism was foreign here. The Catholic Church in Massachusetts in those years was a small and often unwelcome thing, concentrated in Boston and the larger mill towns, regarded by much of the old native population with a suspicion that ran from cool reserve to open hostility. To be a Catholic in a country town like Hopkinton in 1846 was to be a stranger twice over, a stranger in nation and a stranger in faith, with no chapel to go to and no priest within easy reach and a surrounding population that had been raised to think of his church as something foreign and suspect.
Into that town Raftery came, and the sketch allows his short first road to be followed. He did not come straight to Hopkinton. He came in 1846 and went first to live in Milford, Massachusetts, the larger and more industrial town a little to the south and west, where the Irish were already beginning to gather around the work that the boot and shoe trade offered. He worked there a short time. Then, the sketch says, he went to Hopkinton, an adjoining town, in the same year, 1846. So his arrival in the town can be dated to that first year of the famine emigration, the same year he crossed the ocean. Milford was the doorway. Hopkinton was where he stayed, and where he would spend the whole long remainder of his life, more than sixty years, dying in the town in 1908 as one of its oldest inhabitants and certainly its oldest Irishman.
He was, the sketch says, probably the oldest of the Irish settlers of Hopkinton. The writer was not certain, and said so. But the claim, even hedged, is a large one. It means that when the long roll of Hopkinton's Irish families came to be counted, Michael Raftery stood at or very near the head of it, the earliest of them, the first or nearly the first of his people to put down roots in the town. He was the pioneer in the oldest and plainest sense of the word, the one who arrives before the road is made.
The parish's own later history, drawn from records of the Archdiocese of Boston, adds a name the Cutter sketch does not give. In that same year Raftery arrived, 1846, a priest named Father Boyce, based in Milford, began making monthly visits to say Mass in Hopkinton, and the house he used for it belonged to a man named John McDonough. So the very earliest Catholic worship in the town, before any building of its own existed, was held in a private home, and the man who opened his house was not Raftery but McDonough. The sketch's claim that Raftery was probably the oldest of the Irish settlers, not the first Catholic present for a single Mass, stands alongside this fact rather than against it. The little Catholic community of 1846 already had more than one household in it, McDonough's among them.
What falls in Raftery's light, above all, is the matter of the faith, and the sketch turns to it with real feeling. Mr. Raftery, it says, was a firm and faithful follower of the faith of his fathers, and a pioneer of the Roman Catholic religion in Hopkinton. The faith of his fathers. There is a depth in that phrase the writer plainly meant. Raftery did not adopt his religion in America or take it up for convenience. He brought it with him out of Galway as the oldest thing he owned, the inheritance of generations of Irish Catholics who had kept the faith through centuries when keeping it in Ireland had been dangerous and sometimes deadly, through the penal years when a priest could be hunted and a mass said in secret in the open fields. That history was in him. When he carried his religion across the ocean to a Protestant New England town, he carried something his fathers had defended at a cost, and he held to it in Hopkinton with the same firmness, a stranger keeping faith in a strange place.
And keeping it, at first, was hard in the most literal and physical way. The sketch records one detail here that puts the difficulty into the body, into the feet. He remembered well, it says, when he and others of his faith had to walk many miles to attend mass. There was no Catholic church in Hopkinton when Raftery came, and for some years no priest of its own either, and so a man who wished to keep the obligation of his faith, to hear mass and receive the sacraments, could not simply go down the road to a building in his own town. He had to travel, on foot, many miles, to wherever the nearest mass was said, and then walk the many miles home again. This was the ordinary condition of the Catholic in Hopkinton in those first years, repeated week after week, in the heat of summer and the deep snow of a Massachusetts winter, the long road out and the long road back, for the sake of an hour at the altar. The writer says Raftery remembered it well, and of course he did. A man remembers the miles he walked for something he loved.
Out of that want the church came, and here the two sources tell the story somewhat differently.
The Cutter sketch puts a married couple at the center of the founding. He and his wife, it says, were the prime movers for the establishment of a church in Hopkinton. This was no project handed down from a bishop or organized by a visiting priest, in the sketch's telling. It rose from the ground, from one farming couple who were tired of the long walk to mass. And here the writer does something unusual and generous, giving the wife her own line and her own credit, in an age when the wives in these genealogical volumes are most often a name, a date of marriage, and a list of children. It can be said truly, the sketch says, that Mrs. Raftery caused the first step to be taken by enlisting the sympathy and assistance of many not Catholics. The first step, in this telling, was caused by Catherine Raftery, who went outward to the Protestant majority and won their sympathy and their help for a church of the faith they did not share. The sketch names the man her outreach drew in: one prominent citizen, John Wilson, became interested in the effort to establish a church, and with his aid, the sketch says, a meeting was called and funds raised, in the year 1857.
The parish's own later account, compiled from the records of the Archdiocese of Boston, gives a different year and a different frame. In 1849, it states, a Protestant employer of the town called a meeting of all the Catholics of Hopkinton and, with a gift of two hundred dollars from that same person, the attendees unanimously voted to begin a drive to erect a church. This account does not name Michael or Catherine Raftery at all, and does not name the Protestant employer either, though it is entirely possible that employer was John Wilson under another description. Both accounts describe the same kind of moment, a Protestant citizen of standing lending decisive help to a struggling Catholic congregation, but they disagree on the year by eight full years, 1849 against 1857, and neither source explains the other away: one family's proud memory of its own part in the church's founding, and one institution's own later account of its beginnings.
The parish's own history supplies the shape of the building itself, filling a gap the Cutter sketch leaves open. The original Catholic church raised in Hopkinton stood on Cedar Street and was known as St. Malachi, a wooden structure sixty feet by forty. For years it had no priest of its own, served instead by the Milford clergy making the trip out as they had from the start, until July of 1866, when a Reverend Barry was appointed the first resident Catholic pastor of Hopkinton. The parish grew from there. In the eighteen-seventies, under a later pastor named Ryan, land was purchased on Church Street for a larger and grander building, a granite church to be called St. John the Evangelist, its first sod turned in May of 1876 and the finished building dedicated on the second of September, 1889, nineteen years before Michael Raftery's own death.
The sketch says, of the church the Rafterys helped begin, that from that feeble beginning, this church has grown until the Hopkinton parish has the finest place of worship in the Boston archdiocese. The contrast was the whole point when the writer set it down in 1908, looking back across half a century. A handful of poor Irish Catholics with no building and no priest, who had to walk many miles to mass, who had to beg the help of their Protestant neighbors to take even the first step. That was the beginning, and it was feeble, a wooden building on Cedar Street with a name, St. Malachi, known now only through the parish's own later history. And from it had grown, by 1908, the granite church on Church Street, dedicated in 1889, that the sketch could call the finest place of worship in the whole archdiocese without expecting to be laughed at.
And the sketch closes its account of the church with a tribute that is the warmest passage in the whole record. The fine church, it says, is a fitting memorial to those devoted few who kept alive the fire of their faith and by their self-sacrifice supported the church in the difficult early years. Those devoted few. The phrase gathers up the whole of it. They were few, a small band in a Protestant town, the oldest of them Raftery and his wife, and among them, the parish's own record now shows, a man named John McDonough who opened his house before there was any church to open at all. They were devoted, holding to the faith of their fathers when holding to it meant a long walk and a cold reception. They kept alive the fire of their faith, the writer's own image, the small flame carried and guarded through hard years, in a home on some Hopkinton road before it ever had a building of its own, then in a wooden church on Cedar Street, and at last in granite on Church Street. The fire was kept alive by the few who walked the miles.
It remains to give the family its due, plainly and from the record. For the church was not the whole of Michael Raftery's life, and the man who founded it was first of all a husband and a father, and the sketch closes with the family record that fixes him among his own. He married at Milford, on the sixteenth of May, 1848, two years after he had come to America, Catherine Supple, the daughter of Michael and Mary Supple of Milford, Massachusetts. So the wife who would do so much for the church came, like her husband, out of the Irish settlement at Milford, and the marriage joined two of the early Irish of that part of the state. They had been married forty-four years when she died, in September of 1892, at Hopkinton, in the town where they had made their life. Michael Raftery outlived her by more than fifteen years and died on the thirty-first of January, 1908, the year his life sketch was written, an old man who had come to America penniless in his young manhood and had acquired in Hopkinton a farm of three hundred acres and raised a large family on the rocky hills.
The children the sketch names: Mary was the eldest, born on the twenty-eighth of February, 1849, the first year of the marriage, and she married Albert Hickok. Honora came next, born the fifteenth of August, 1851, and she married Thomas Healy and had a large family of her own, a line of Healy grandchildren that the sketch sets down at length, Mary and John and Margaret and Michael and Martin and Catherine, the third generation of Rafterys in the town. Edward was born the first of April, 1855. Then a son Michael, born in May of 1857, who died young, the first of the family's griefs that the record marks. Patrick was born the fifteenth of January, 1859, and died in 1887. Another son was named Michael again, born in 1861, the old name given a third time after the first Michael's early death and the father's own. And Thomas, the youngest named, was born the seventeenth of June, 1863, and died in 1885. Three of the sons, then, the first Michael and Patrick and Thomas, the father outlived, for to raise a large family on a nineteenth-century farm was to bury some of one's children, and Michael Raftery buried his.
Raftery's generation built the church. The generation that followed built the rest of the Irish community's standing in the town, and one man's career shows how far that standing had come. Richard M. Fahey was born in Ireland around 1840 and first appears in the Hopkinton record on the 1865 state census, single, living with the Connor family, working as a bootmaker, a fairly ordinary start for an Irish immigrant of his generation. What followed was not ordinary. Fahey headed the Hopkinton chapter of the Fenian Brotherhood, the American counterpart of the Irish Republican Brotherhood dedicated to Irish independence from Britain, and he later led the local lodge of the Knights of St. Crispin, a shoemakers' labor union that spread through the Northeast's shoe towns after its founding in Milwaukee in 1867, eventually serving a term as the union's state president. The Crispins were not shy about striking. In March 1871 a bitter contest over pay at Hopkinton's boot factories ended with an employer sending armed men into the street against strikers trying to return to work, three of whom were shot, and with the town constable sending to Boston for state police before the strike finally collapsed with little gained. Fahey was also active in the more sociable Ancient Order of Hibernians alongside his wife, Margaret Horan of County Kerry. Beyond his work among his fellow Irish, he served the town itself for decades, on the board of selectmen, on the school board, as tax collector, as town meeting moderator more often than any other man of his time, and for the last fourteen years of his life as a member of the board of assessors. When Fahey died in 1899, the Boston Globe's obituary headline read simply, Hopkinton Honored Him.
He had crossed an ocean at the front of a famished migration, a young man with his schooling from a Galway parish and his faith from his fathers and very little else. He had walked many miles to mass in a town that had no church for him. He had married a woman from his own people, raised on rocky ground a farm and a family, and had lived to see a wooden church on Cedar Street grow into a granite one on Church Street that his own life's sketch could call the finest in the archdiocese. The fire he and the devoted few had kept alive was burning still when he died in the winter of 1908, in the town he had come to as a stranger sixty-two years before and had helped, in the one way that mattered most to him, to make a home. Richard Fahey had died nine years earlier, in a town that by then had long since learned to honor its Irish sons back.