New York Irish History Roundtable

03/12/2026

Mary McCann - Young Immigrant Hero, 1904

On a beautiful early summer's day in June 1904, an excursion boat named the General Slocum made its way up the East River with more than 1,000 members and guests of the St. Mark's Lutheran Church from the Lower East Side's "Little Germany." On board were hundreds of young girls dressed in immaculate white dresses, all happily waving white handkerchiefs at the patients at the hospital facility on North Brother Island off the Bronx. One of the recovering hospital residents was Mary McCann, a 17-year-old native of Glassan, near Athlone in Co. Westmeath, who had arrived in New York less than two months previously with $10 in her pocket. Suddenly, great rolling clouds of heavy black smoke erupted from the bow and stern of the Slocum as Mary listened in horror to the anguished cries of children and adults. The steamboat turned toward land, but it soon ground fast on the soft sand off the island, and it rapidly became a funeral pyre for many of the poor excursionists. Although weak and still pale from several illnesses, including scarlet fever, Mary plunged into the water, crawling and paddle swimming her way to help the young victims, many of whom were already jumping desperately into the water, some falling literally into her arms. Nine times she hurried back and forth between land and ship, nine lives saved, before she herself collapsed in exhaustion. More than 1,021 people on board perished, crushing the vibrant German community on the Lower East Side forever. Five years later, Mary McCann was presented with a Congressional Medal for Bravery in Washington, DC, while attending a training school in that city. Soon after, she went on to marry and raise a family in New Jersey.

03/11/2026

The Unusual Irish Fair - 1897

One of the most unusual Irish events ever held in New York was the Irish Fair held in May, 1897 to raise funds for the "Irish Palace," a planned million-dollar building to provide a home for all the city's Irish social, cultural and sporting activities. The feature that attracted the most attention was the map of Ireland in miniature that was composed of actual soil imported from each of Ireland's 32 counties. It became an emotional pilgrimage site for many elderly immigrants who could, in an age when few ever returned home to Ireland, claim to have once again set foot in their native land.

The members of the women's Irish county organizations in the city were the heart and soul of the Irish Fair. Like missionaries serving a sacred cause, the young Irish immigrants descended on patrons at the fair in order to sell them tickets for raffles for various Irish prizes ranging from blackthorn sticks to paintings of Irish scenery. Depicted in the illustration are some of the Irish county women coaxing passersby to buy their tickets. One newspaper commented, "It doesn't matter whether there's 10 cents or $10 in your pocket, they'll get every penny of it for the $1.000,000 fund to build an Irish palace, the fair's object." Although the fair failed to achieve its goal, some of the funds that were raised helped to purchase the magnificent headquarters of the American Irish Historical Society that stands today on Fifth Avenue.

03/10/2026

Three Irish Immigrant Women, 1897

Very few arriving Irish immigrants ever had their images recorded on arrival in New York, particularly in 1897. The exceptions were three arrivals who landed from the White Star Liner Majestic from Queenstown (Cobh) and the Cunard liner Servia from LIverpool early in the season on the 29th of April. Newspaper accounts described a wave of Irish immigration in that year, most of the women destined for domestic work not only in the city, but "out west" where it was said about two thirds of them were headed. The Irish women were almost all impeccably dressed and enthusiastic about their new country "and lively and witty as any woman Vassar turned out."

03/09/2026

Countess Markiewicz, 1922

In April of 1922, Countess Markiewicz, one of two surviving leaders of the 1916 Rising, came to New York as part of an Irish delegation to America to build up support for the Republican cause in Ireland. Markiewicz, born Constance Gore-Booth to a Sligo upper class family, married a Polish count, but returned to Ireland where she began a life dedicated to helping the working class and poor and to the crusade for an independent Ireland. She was active in the founding of several Irish organizations key to the fight for separation from the United Kingdom, including the Cumann na mBan (Irish Women's League). Markiewicz joined the men of Easter Week as they rose in armed revolution in 1916 and was condemned to death with all the other leaders. Only a last- minute commute of the sentence saved her life. She never relaxed her agitation for the Irish cause and took a strong no-compromise position at the time of the signing of the treaty to create the 26-county Irish Free State

Markiewicz spoke before 12,000 people at Madison Square Garden and in other cities where large numbers of Irish lived. The last picture of her taken in America shows her waving American and Irish flags on the steamship Berengaria of the Cunard Line just before her departure for Ireland at the end of May 1922.

03/08/2026

Another fascinating woman, this one from Belfast, as reported on Quora:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CZzcquFHh/

Belfast, 1889. A 22-year-old woman walked into a medical lecture theatre at Queen's College and sat down.
Every man in the room stared.
Not because she was late. Not because she was unprepared. Because she was a woman in a room that had been built, for generations, to keep women out.
Some of the men whispered. Some smirked. The message needed no words: you don't belong here.
Elizabeth Gould Bell opened her notebook and began taking notes on anatomy.
She had no intention of leaving.
Medical education in 1889 was not designed for women. The rules had recently, technically, changed — but a thousand small hostilities remained in their place. Professors who looked through female students entirely. Clinical instructors who refused to let women examine male patients. Classmates who made collaboration impossible. A culture that treated a woman's presence in a dissection room as inherently inappropriate, as if studying the human body was unsuitable for someone who happened to live in one.
Elizabeth endured all of it. She studied. She practiced. She attended clinical rounds where doctors addressed her male peers and pretended she was invisible.
And then she outperformed them anyway.
In 1893, she qualified as a physician from Queen's College Belfast — the first woman to earn a medical degree in that city. The same men who had smirked at her entrance watched her graduate.
She was 26 years old. She had proven everything they said women couldn't prove.
Then she opened a practice in Belfast — and the real education began.
Women arrived at her office carrying injuries that had no clean medical name. Exhaustion from bearing child after child with no ability to prevent pregnancy. Wounds from factory floors that paid starvation wages and offered no safety protections. Bruises from marriages that the law could not touch, because a husband's authority over his wife's body was, in 1893, entirely legal.
Elizabeth treated every woman who came to her. She delivered babies. She diagnosed illnesses. She dressed wounds.
And she began to see a pattern she could not unsee.
The bodies she was treating weren't broken by accident or misfortune. They were broken by law. By a system that gave women no vote, no property rights in many cases, no legal recourse against a violent husband, and no choice over their own reproduction. Women were being destroyed by the deliberate design of a world they had no power to change.
She was treating symptoms. The disease was political.
She joined the suffrage movement.
For years she worked through petitions, peaceful demonstrations, and rational argument: women are citizens, women pay taxes, women deserve representation. Parliament listened politely, year after year, and did nothing. Decade after decade. While women kept dying in her examination room from conditions that were fundamentally political.
By the 1910s, her patience had run out.
She aligned herself with more militant suffragette tactics — civil disobedience, disruption, refusal to cooperate quietly with a system that refused to cooperate with them. It was not abandoning reason. It was twenty years of watching reason fail.
She was arrested.
A physician. A woman who had met every standard they had set. Who had earned credentials they once said women couldn't earn. Who had spent years healing the patients no one else had time for.
Arrested for demanding the right to vote.
She risked her career, her reputation, and her practice for it — because she had spent too many years in examination rooms watching women absorb a society's deliberate harm, and she could no longer separate the medicine from the politics. They were the same wound.
In 1918, partial suffrage finally came — but only for women over 30 who met property qualifications. A partial victory. Not enough.
In 1928, equal voting rights were achieved. Elizabeth Gould Bell was 61 years old. She had been fighting for forty years.She died in 1934, having spent her entire adult life fighting on two fronts: in the examination room and in the streets. She trained younger women entering medicine. She pushed for public health reform. She never stopped.
She walked into that lecture theatre in 1889 when almost no one believed women should be doctors.
She proved them wrong.
And then she spent the rest of her life proving something harder: that being allowed into the room is not the same as having rights. That credentials don't protect you from a system that was never designed to include you. And that sometimes the most powerful thing a person with knowledge can do is refuse — loudly, publicly, at great personal cost — to pretend that what they see every day is simply medicine, and not injustice with a medical chart.
She kept making trouble anyway.
Because she had seen too much to stop.

03/07/2026

Anna Francis Levins - Poet and Photographer 1878 - 1941

Born in New York City of a Drogheda-born father, Anna Francis Levins was a pioneer woman photographer who owned her own studio just off Fifth Avenue. She was mainly a portraitist, but she was also the official photographer for several New York Irish Societies, including the American Irish Historical Society and the Gaelic League. She was also a noted lecturer and a poet of the Irish cultural revival. Her shop was the frequent gathering place for her organization, The Friendly Daughters of Ireland, and she was visited there by Patrick Pearse and Eamon DeValera. In 1924, she married Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde, a former M.P. for Wicklow in the Irish Parliamentary Party and then a Free State Senator. Anna F. Levins, although her home was in Ireland, died while visiting the United States in 1941.

Her grand uncle was Father Thomas C. Levins, founder of one of New York's earliest Irish weekly newspapers in 1834. Father Levins was rector of Old St. Patrick's Cathedral and resided at 263 Mulberry Street.

03/06/2026

Mary Mulcahy McWhorter, the Limerick-born crusader for Irish freedom, was a familiar figure as a speaker and lecturer before audiences across America. An immigrant to Chicago while still a teenager, she was a successful organizer of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1898, despite heavy opposition from some of the members of the men's organization. As a national officer of that organization, she traveled the length and breadth of the country lecturing in a witty and informative style on the history and culture of her native land. She was elected National President of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1916 and remained its leader through the critical years of Ireland's fight for independence until 1921. Thereafter, she continued her support for the Republican cause through her leadership of the Celtic Cross Association and as an active member of the DeValera support organization, the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic (AARIR). Besides appearing before congressional committees in Washington in 1919 to advocate for American support for Irish independence at the peace conference in Paris, she was a frequent speaker in New York at Hibernian events and at the massive demonstration at the Polo Grounds in 1920 in protest against the treatment of Irish political prisoners in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Mary McWhorter is pictured as one of the keynote speakers at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan with Kerry-born Captain John J. Clifford of the New York Irish 69th Regiment, a Silver Star and Purple Heart medal winner.

03/05/2026

Josephine Patricia Smith was one of the pioneers of Irish radio broadcasting in New York with her program "Rambles in Erin" that began in the late 1920s. She was a respected scholar of Irish music and folklore and an advocate for Irish cultural nationalism. Her annual trips to Ireland to gather material for her broadcasts popularized ancient Irish melodies that had been almost lost to history. She performed on the harp, accompanied by her tenor husband Seamus O'Doherty, and left a legacy of recordings and written material that was brought to perfection by her careful arrangements.

03/04/2026

The Debut of Irish Women's Sports in New York, 1911

When it was first proposed in a number of letters directed to one of the weekly New York Irish-American newspapers, the project to form women's hurling teams in the city was met by many with shock or sometimes laughter. The idea of women playing sports in public on the playing fields of Celtic Park in Queens was certainly a novel idea, although women within the recent few years had been playing hurling (or camogie) in Dublin.

The first New York team was organized by exiles from rural Ireland, initially young women from County Limerick. On April 9, 1911, four ladies' teams made their debut at the park, not without some snickering from among those jamming the spectator stands. The first match was between Limerick and Kilkenny, followed by a game between Clare and Dublin. The first goal was scored by Limerick, and in the end the ladies from the county of the Treaty Stone became the celebrated winners of the first women's Irish hurling contest ever played in America. The event was remembered as part of the folklore of New York's Irish and a few -- mostly terrible -- pieces of poetry were composed to mark the occasion.

"Here we shall see at dear Celtic Park,
Fair maids from our Erin gone,
With of eyes of blue and to Ireland true,
As any God's sun shines on,
From Limerick round to Dublin town,
the excitement grows apace,
and the Green Flag flies over colleens sweet,
on this field of the Irish Race."

--Stephen Faherty, "Hurrah, 'Tis Ladies Day at Celtic Park"

03/03/2026

March is Women's History Month! The Roundtable will observe it by posting photos and short histories of Irish women's activities in New York City.

Women march in the St. Patrick's Day Parade - 1918

For the first time in the history of the New York St. Patrick's Day Parade, a group of women, 2,500 members and supporters of Cumann na mBan (League of Women), marched up Fifth Avenue. World War I was still raging in Europe, and the women's contingent was a timely addition to a parade that had been weakened by the loss of young men to the military. The women's group carried signs relevant to the struggle for Irish freedom. Many members were clad in ancient Irish costumes, but all members carried intertwined American and Irish flags.

02/23/2026

Celebrate St. Patrick's Day a bit early with some new reading material. Check out the Book Day at the Irish Arts Center.

Visual Arts Feb 10 - Jun 20 Brian Maguire: Portraits—The Failure of the State Curated by Maolíosa Boyle and Jonathan Cummins Information & Tickets

02/20/2026

During President's Day week and the 250th celebration of our nation's birth,
we thought we could share how the Irish have contributed to America since its inception.
Take a look at what the Quarter Master Journal says about Colonel Stephen Moylan, an Irish Catholic immigrant and right hand man to General George Washington during the American Revolution.

Colonel Stephen Moylan served as the 2nd Quartermaster General from June 1776 to September 1776.