seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: County Armagh


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Black Thursday – The Molly Maguire Executions

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On June 21, 1877, a day that will long be remembered as Black Thursday, ten members of the Molly Maguires, an Irish labor organization, are executed in Pennsylvania, the first of twenty executions that make up the largest mass execution of any group by the U.S. federal government in history.

The Molly Maguires is an Irish 19th-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool, and parts of the eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania. The Mollies are believed to have been present in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania in the United States since at least the Panic of 1873.

Members of the Mollies are accused of murder, arson, kidnapping and other crimes, in part based on allegations by Franklin B. Gowen and the testimony of a Pinkerton detective, James McParland, a native of County Armagh. Fellow prisoners testified against the defendants, who were arrested by the Coal and Iron Police. Gowen acts as a prosecutor in some of the trials. The Molly Maguires become largely inactive following the executions of 1877 and 1878.

On June 21, 1877, the first ten executions take place. Six Mollies – James Carroll, James Roarity, Hugh McGehan, James Boyle, Thomas Munley, and Thomas Duffy – are hanged in the prison at Pottsville, Pennsylvania. The sheriff hangs them successively two-by-two rather than build special gallows to accommodate six. An immense crowd gathers covering the surrounding hills. Boyle carries a blood-red rose and McGehan has two roses in his lapel. Carrol and Roarity declare their innocence from the scaffold. In County Donegal, McGehan’s relatives meet in the kitchen and, it is said, the sky blackens at the moment of hanging.

On the same date, Alexander Campbell, John “Yellow Jack” Donohue, Michael J. Doyle, and Edward J. Kelly are hanged at a Carbon County prison in Mauch Chunk for the murders of John P. Jones and Morgan Powell, both mine bosses. Here gallows have been erected to accommodate four hangings and the four are hung at the same instant. Campbell, just before his execution, allegedly slaps a muddy handprint on his cell wall stating, “There is proof of my words. That mark of mine will never be wiped out. It will remain forever to shame the county for hanging an innocent man.” The handprint remains to this day.

Ten more condemned, Thomas Fisher, John “Black Jack” Kehoe, Patrick Hester, Peter McHugh, Patrick Tully, Peter McManus, Dennis Donnelly, Martin Bergan, James McDonnell, and Charles Sharpe, are hanged at Mauch Chunk, Pottsville, Bloomsburg, and Sunbury over the next year. Peter McManus is the last Molly Maguire to be tried and convicted for murder at the Northumberland County Courthouse in 1878.


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The Armagh Rail Disaster

armagh-rail-disaster

The Armagh rail disaster occurs on June 12, 1889, near Armagh, County Armagh, when a crowded Sunday school excursion train fails to negotiate a steep incline. The steam locomotive is unable to complete the climb and the train stalls. The train crew decides to divide the train and take the front portion forward, leaving the rear portion on the running line. The rear portion has inadequate brakes and rolls back down the gradient, colliding with a following train. Eighty people are killed and 260 are injured, about a third of them children. It is the worst rail disaster in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century and remains Ireland’s worst railway disaster ever.

Armagh Sunday school organises a day trip to the seaside resort of Warrenpoint, a distance of about 24 miles. A special Great Northern Railway of Ireland train is arranged for the journey, intended to carry about eight hundred passengers. The railway route is steeply graded and curved.

Asked to provide a train to take 800 excursionists, the locomotive department at Dundalk sends fifteen vehicles however instructions provided to the engineer are that the train is to consist of thirteen vehicles. The engineer objects to the use of fifteen vehicles. Witnesses say that the engineer asks for a second engine if the additional carriages are added but his request is refused by the station master as no additional engines are available.

Initially, the train progresses up the steep gradient at about 10 mph but stalls about 200 yards from the top of the gradient. To prevent the train from rolling back, the brakes are applied. The chief clerk directs the train crew to divide the train and proceed with the front portion to Hamilton’s Bawn station about two miles away, leaving it there and returning for the rear portion.

After uncoupling the rear portion, the engineer attempts to proceed on with the front portion. Initially, it rolls back slightly, jolting the rear portion which begins to roll back and gathers speed down the steep gradient back towards Armagh station. The train crew reverses the front portion and tries to catch the rear portion, but this proves to be impossible.

The line is operated on a time interval system so there is no means at Armagh of knowing that the line is not clear. The following scheduled passenger train leaves Armagh after the required 20-minute interval. It is proceeding up the gradient at about 25 mph when the engineer sees the approaching runaway vehicles at a distance of about 500 yards. He brakes his train and has reduced speed to 5 mph at the moment of collision. The two rearmost vehicles of the excursion train are utterly destroyed, and the third rearmost is very badly damaged.


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Birth in Belfast of Ian Paisley

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Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, loyalist politician and Protestant religious leader from Northern Ireland is born on April 6, 1926, in Armagh, County Armagh.

Paisley becomes a Protestant evangelical minister in 1946 and remains one for the rest of his life. In 1951, he co-founds the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster and is its leader until 2008. Paisley becomes known for his fiery speeches and regularly preaches and protests against Catholicism, ecumenism and homosexuality. He gains a large group of followers who are referred to as “Paisleyites.”

Paisley becomes involved in Ulster unionist/loyalist politics in the late 1950s. In the mid-late 1960s he leads and instigates loyalist opposition to the Catholic civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. This leads to the outbreak of The Troubles in the late 1960s, a conflict that engulfs Northern Ireland for the next thirty years. In 1970, he becomes Member of Parliament for North Antrim and the following year he founds the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which he leads for almost forty years. In 1979, he becomes a Member of the European Parliament.

Throughout the Troubles, Paisley is seen as a firebrand and the face of hard-line unionism. He opposes all attempts to resolve the conflict through power-sharing between unionists and Irish nationalists/republicans, and all attempts to involve the Republic of Ireland in Northern affairs. His efforts help bring down the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974. He also opposes the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, with less success. His attempts to create a paramilitary movement culminate in Ulster Resistance. Paisley and his party also oppose the Northern Ireland peace process and Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

In 2005, Paisley’s DUP becomes the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, displacing the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which has dominated unionist politics since 1905. In 2007, following the St. Andrews Agreement, the DUP finally agrees to share power with republican party Sinn Féin and consent to all-Ireland governance in certain matters. Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness become First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively in May 2007. Paisley steps down as First Minister and DUP leader in May 2008 and leaves politics in 2011. Paisley is made a life peer in 2010 as Baron Bannside.

In November 2011, Paisley announces to his congregation that he is retiring as a minister. He delivers his final sermon to a packed attendance at the Martyrs’ Memorial Hall on December 18, 2011, and finally retires from his religious ministry on January 27, 2012.

Paisley dies in Belfast on September 12, 2014. He is buried in Ballygowan, County Down on September 15 following a private funeral and a public memorial for 800 invited guests is held in the Ulster Hall on October 19. An obituary in The New York Times reports that late in life Paisley had moderated and softened his stances against Roman Catholics but that “the legacies of fighting and religious hatreds remained.”