RIBRISTO-L Archives

From: mhook <>
Subject: Bristol Research Books
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 1999 20:39:32 -0700

Hi All - Chris' post re books prompted me to post this excerpt and add some
other books. I don't have these books, but my Mom consulted them when she did
Bristol/Warren research in the 1970s-80s. I have Father McCallion, James
Duffy and A. P. Nerone mentioned below on my family tree. Regards, Maryl
http://www.avana.net/~mhook
researching in Bristol/Warren - CONNERY (CONROY), TOBIN, NERONE, BOWEN (BOHAN)

Bristol, RI, A Town Biography by M.A. DeWolf, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1938

History of Bristol, RI, The Story of the Mount Hope Lands (Providence, 1880)

Tales of an Old Seaport (Princeton, 1917)

>From Mount Hope, a New England Chronicle by George Howe, New York Viking Press
1959, p.276: "There were no Irish in town until the potato famine of 1846
drove thousands from the old country. In 1847 a New England committee raised
money to send food to Ireland and bring back as many immigrants as could crowd
aboard the relief ships. Usually the men came alone, to try out the new life
for a while before risking their families in the unknown country. James
Duffy, for instance, came out by himself in 1847. By the next year he had
made enough in the Bristol onion fields to send for his wife, his five
children, and his brother-in-law. They came out in the steerage of the
clipper Mortimer Livingstone, Liverpool to New York in 28 days, with their
crockery and bed quilts, and took packet from there to Bristol. By that time
there were 13 Irish names on the tax rolls, but only a single complete family
besides their own. . . . There was no priest. Mass had not been said in town
since 1817. . . . The newcomers had to walk five miles to Warren for the
Sacrament, for none of them owned a horse, and the stage did not run on the
Sabbath. If there was snow on the ground, the men trudged ahead to break a
path for the women and children. By 1852 there were three hundred Irishmen in
town. So many of them had to make the Sunday journal that Father McCallion of
Warren offered to drive his gig down, and they set him up an altar on
sawhorses in an empty house behind a saloon on Thames Street. It was not
until 1855, the year of the railroad, that the first Catholic church was
built. The men worked as coachmen or farmers for the Great Folks, at no
higher wages than the freed slaves had got, and their wives and daughters
hired out for housework. Madame Colt herself employed three Irish girls at
Linden Place. The Yankees, far from being worried by the increasing numbers
of the Irish, welcomed a new supply of cheap labor that could speak their own
language (which the Portuguese could not), and regarded them as lovable and
comic characters. Some of them were, indeed. There was no abashing an
Irishman." "As late as 1912 it was regarded as an outrage that A. P. Nerone,
the respected Irish-Portuguese shoeman, sued Senator Colt for an unpaid
bill." Mom's notes say: true A. P. was respected, not true that he sued
Senator Colt.

"The first generation of Irish wore itself out with work and childbearing, as
the early Yankees had. The second never raised the same big families, but
rose to eminences never dreamed of by Madame Colt or her sons. It seems
impossible that within living memories Irishmen were called foreigners. The
last immigration was Italian and it arrived expressly because of the rubber
works."

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