Patrick Cooper Hunt: An Irish Refugee's Story

In 1848, a young lad named Patrick Cooper Hunt fled a starving land - a boy refugee desperate for a chance to live. 

His story is the story of America and the promise of prosperity offered to immigrants and refugees for more than 200 years. St Patrick's Day is not about Ireland, it is about immigrants who weren't wanted, refugees who had not choice but to flee.

Patrick Cooper Hunt left Westport in County Mayo, Ireland in 1848 at the height of the Great Famine.

Gorta Mór killed a million Irish and sent a million more fleeing across the seas in search of something better. 

One third of the population of Ireland was gone when the famine finally ended. The British landlords blamed the poor for their poverty while exporting crops to England.

It was the young that had the strength to leave, to seek a better life than starving while growing crops you can't eat. 

Many died never touching shore. Packed as they were aboard the coffin ships, two-fifths died at sea of disease and starvation.

Patrick was lucky to have an uncle in Lambertville, NJ so he worked in England to scrape up the fare and he sailed from Liverpool, for the port of Philadelphia aboard the ship Wyoming.  

He was just a teenager, sailing alone. Or he may have been 22 - it depends if you trust his headstone which says 1833 or the ship's manifest which lists him, and a dozen other young immigrants as 22. It might have been a wee lie about one's age that meant the difference between life and death when it came time for the ship to sail.  

In America he found work for his uncles who had sponsored him. He found opportunities he would never have had in an Ireland occupied and oppressed by England.

Yet by 1850, more than a quarter of the population of Philadelphia was Irish and the flow of Irish Catholic refugees created resentment and discrimination as well. "No Irish Need Apply" was a familiar sign by 1851 -- a door slammed in a man's face, when he sought only pay for a day's work and food for an empty belly.

The ship Wyoming, part of the Cope Line of Philadelphia.  Constructed in 1845 By John Vaughan & Sons of Philadelphia, the Wyoming would have been newer and perhaps quite a bit more seaworthy than many of the "coffin ships" that brought Irish immigrants to America. (source Wyoming Trails and Tales) 

Secret societies and an entire political party emerged in opposition to Irish immigration. The Irish were the "wrong religion" because they were Catholic. Nativists believed their religion was incompatible with American Values.

 Sound familiar? 

The Know Nothings used fears of Irish immigration and conspiracy theories of Papal armies to gain power in statehouses and Congress in the 1850s. The Know Nothings electing governors, over 100 congressmen and ran a Presidential candidate that got 20 percent of the vote. They enacted laws to restrict voting rights of the Irish. 

Mobs of Know-Nothings dragged priests out of churches and attacked immigrants with deadly violence as they became emboldened by their rising political power. 

As Christopher Klein writes,

Abraham Lincoln was among the many Americans disturbed at the rise of the nativist movement as he explained in an 1855 letter: “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

The civil war over slavery overshadowed the nativist political rise, but it has always remained in the background. As the Irish gained political power, they gained pride and marched in the streets. 

St Patrick's day celebrations that we know and love are born out of a stubborn resistance to nativist forces that tried to exclude and oppress the immigrants of the Emerald Isle.  The first parade was in New York, not Ireland. The Friendly Sons of St Patrick Society was formed in Philadelphia in the 1700s to provide aid to Irish immigrants. 

"Yes, the Irish transformed the United States, just as the United States transformed the Irish. But the worst fears of the nativists were not fulfilled. The refugees from the Great Hunger and the 32 million Americans with predominantly Irish roots today strengthened the United States, not destroyed it. A country that once reviled the Irish now wears green on St. Patrick’s Day."

In America Patrick Cooper Hunt found a girl named Mary Malone. She too had emigrated from County Mayo. She too had seen the Great Hunger of Gorta Mór and survived. Together they made a life. They had five children and went on to become upstanding Americans. 

Patrick Cooper Hunt and his children did well in the US. He found work in a Lambertville rubber mill. 

 His eldest son John got skilled work as a Boilermaker - a union job that required skill and paid well.  His grandson, Charles started out on the railroads as a teenager, then served in World War I as a pharmacist's mate caring for sailors felled by the Spanish Flu. After the war, he became a state transportation engineer and taught college in New Jersey well into his 80s.

From Irish immigration to jetpacks in Space. Patric Cooper Hunt's great grandson helped design the MMU. 

Patrick Cooper Hunt's great - grandson worked for NASA on Apollo and Skylab as well as for the military designing things that go into space, and things that go boom. My father, John Hunt designed a lot of other things too, of course. He even designed that grocery checkout scanner that you find in every store.

And of course, that Irish refugee's great great grandson is writing his story today. 

So on this St. Patrick's day, dress in your green and lift your glass, but take a moment too to remember those refugees that America took in. Those men and women fleeing political and economic oppression, who found a new life in this land of opportunity and hope -- and made the country better by their presence. 

Because that is what St. Patrick's day is all about. 

It is a story of refugees coming to America because they could no longer survive in their beloved homeland. 

It is a celebration of immigration and an act of defiance by the immigrants and refugees that could not know freedom until they came to America.

                                                                               -30-

Required Reading:
The Irish Refuge Crisis
How the Know Nothing Party Change America

What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly

Immigrant Song

My grandmother came to the US on the Gripsholm.
She was just 18 years old. 

The natives have been complaining about the immigrants for a good 500 years at least.

The first explorers didn't stay long and so they weren't too much of a problem. They would come when the weather was nice, but one winter was about all they could take.

My people first arrived on these shores in 1644. The Gagné brothers had packed up their families and sailed across the Atlantic to New France. They were the early French colonizers of the New World - which, let's face it, was someone else's old world at the time.

Unlike the Coureur des bois, Voyageurs and soldiers that had come to Quebec before them, they were coming to stay, to colonize the King's few acres of snow. They were to be a counterbalance to the growing population of English and Spanish colonizers.

Pierre did not live long after his arrival, but Louis carved out a farm above the St. Lawrence river. Both brothers had sailed from La Rochelle with children and pregnant wives in tow. Louis and his wife Marie leased the land from a corporation, but by 1650 a different corporate land owner --Company of Beaupre -- gave him a land grant provided that he build a house on the property by the following year.

If you go to the town of Sainte Anne de Beaupre in Quebec today, you will find a house built on those stone foundations. This house measured just 24 by 22 feet, but the walls are two feet thick.

The home the Gagne brothers left behind in France
(source Gagnier History Website)

The Gagne bothers were pioneers -- immigrants sent by the King to make a new life in a strange world. They braved a dangerous journey with their young children and pregnant wives in search of a better life with hope of a brighter future than they faced back in Ige.

Some were welcoming in the in the land they found, but not everyone. Louis was one of eight people killed and captured by Mohawks in during the Beaver Wars in 1660.

His widow, Marie, was 41 years old and the mother of eight children at the time of his death.

Despite the passing of Pierre and Louis, the Gagnes were fruitful and multiplied in the new world. One of Louis and Marie's sons -- Ignace Gagne born in 1656 in Quebec -- is the father of a long line of "greats" leading directly to my Pépé.

My grandfather, Joseph Gagné was born in Quebec more than two centuries later in 1911. He grew up, for a time at least, as a migrant worker. Moving back and forth across the northern boarder with his family to the United States to work in the textile mills of New England.  When he was 18, he decided to stay in the United States and found work as a mechanic. Eventually he became a chauffeur for a well-to-do family in -- ironically -- New Rochelle, New York. There he met a recent Swedish immigrant named Edith Marta Palmgren who worked as a cook in the big house.

Edith had left her family behind and boarded a ship to the New World when she was still a teenager. No one was calling it the New World by that time, but America still was a land of hope of a better life. Many people watched their children sail across the seas to find a better life.

They were married, had children. During World War II, Joseph -- still a Canadian citizen -- continued his job for Electric Boat building submarines. On the 4th of July 1943, their daughter Alice was born.

Alice is my mother. My mother tells the story of how they didn't bother getting their US citizenship until much later - until after their children had graduated high school.

Patrick Cooper Hunt fled Ireland in black 1849. Starvation was all he left behind. He had an Uncle in New Jersey, so he sailed for the Port of Philadelphia in search of a better life. He was 19 years old. Ireland at the time was occupied by England. The native Irish were oppressed. The legal system did not recognize their language. Indeed, family lore has it that Hunt was just an anglicized version of the Gaelic -- since his Gaelic surname would have been made illegal .

Patrick Cooper Hunt and his children did well in the US. His great - grandson worked for NASA and military designing things that go into space, and things that go boom. My father John Hunt designed a lot of other things too, of course. He even designed that grocery checkout scanner that you find in every store.

Researching my family history left me with a lot of great stories to tell. Sure, I have roots that go deep on American soil.

Yet the idea that strikes me most is how my story is a story of immigrations. Centuries apart, young fathers and mothers, teenagers often, gambling on the unknown in hopes of improving their lot.

That is what immigrants bring -- the search for something better. They struggle, risk, strive and hope for a better life.  They come to the United States -- often exploited, working long hours at the worst jobs -- sacrificing to create a future for their children. They build businesses, they invent things. In so doing, they help the economy of the entire nation.

Given the short sighted nature of our politics and our nation's failure to invest in the education and infrastructure that will build a better world, a little immigrant thinking is not such a bad thing.

-30-

Further Reading:

Studies have shown that immigration helps the US Economy

Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Vital for American Innovation