Celtic History
Local Celts
The Celts were here early--a few intermixed with the Dutch in Kinderhook of the 1650’s. They were Scots and Irish and almost certainly Protestant. Later, in the early 1700’s Scottish folk showed up in the Livingston patents in now Ancram,( named after Ancrum of old Scotland), Livingston, and Clermont to work the iron forges and lead foundries brought here by that great baronial family. One of these communities was so filled with Caledonians it was labeled Scotchtown. The Livingstons, themselves originally Scots, were powerful enough at one time to contend for the crown, narrowly missing their chance to form Scotland’s royal house. To this day they continue as a significant clan here in the states and the old country.
In the next century Protestant and now many Catholic Irish gained employment building the Erie Canal built between Albany west to Lake Erie (ca1814-1824). Some of these undoubtedly settled in Columbia County. Of the pre-famine Irish moving here (before 1840), we estimate that perhaps twenty-five to thirty cent were actually Protestants from the north of Ireland—what are usually called Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish, who moved there from Scotland over the years. Lowland Scots and some with traditional highland surnames emigrated to work in the various textile mills sprinkled throughout the county, but particularly in Hudson and Stottville. They labored in all departments of the mills: hence they were weavers, spinners, spoolers, dyers, fullers, carders, and laborers. The woolen factory surpassing all others in size and importance in the county was the Atlantic or Julliard Mill of Stottville,(more correctly mills rather than mill, since the firm was actually composed of a number of buildings.) These factories began in the early 1800’s, started by the Stott family, and remained in business until the 1950’s. At one time they employed as many as eight hundred workers, not a few of them Scots and Irish.
The floodgates to Celtic immigration came down completely in the middle and late 1840’s when thousands of Catholic Irish, doing their best to keep body and soul together in face of one of the worst famines in world history, poured into Hudson and surrounding communities. In the middle 1840’s the potato crop resting in the bins of millions of Irish cellars began to rot from the inside out. This wouldn’t have been so catastrophic had the tuber not formed the main staple for the people. It’s said that the spud made up over ninety per cent of the Irish diet. Soon famine haunted the land. Before it died out one seventh of the people had died; one seventh were forced to emigrate. Fleeing westward over the Atlantic in the dread “coffin ships,” they landed in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. A certain percentage made their way up the Hudson River valley finding work where they could get it. Many helped the railroad lay tracks for the main trunk line going up between New York City and Albany, and later were firemen, engineers, conductors, and station agents in Hudson and Chatham. Irish girls and young women, generally unmarried, increasingly became maids, nannies, and servants to the well to do. This employment pattern lasted well through the century. Martin Van Buren, eighth U.S. president, was just one of their employers, taking on four or five of them at Lindenwald, his retirement estate in Kinderhook.
By the mid-fifties they lived mainly in the city of Hudson containing over eight hundred native Irish Catholics, and the towns of Chatham, Kinderhook, Ghent, and New Lebanon, each holding well over two hundred. Some got out to the more rural townships in the east where they worked the “hot ground” or lead mines in Ancram and the iron ore beds in Copake. Small numbers became farmers, their main occupation in the homeland. By 1855 in Hudson they had come to form well over sixteen per cent of the total population in the city, and about twenty-five per cent in the first and second wards. Desperately poor, often illiterate because they were denied education in the homeland, ready to take any job offered them, they were not always welcomed by their Protestant neighbors. As an example, occasional advertisements would appear in local papers with the listing: “Wanted, Protestant Maid.“ Some had come not directly from Ireland but rather from New York City, perhaps from the Five Points section in lower Manhatten, considered one of the poorest and most violent slums in the country. This was the place where the terrible draft riots of 1863 were to begin, eventually killing hundreds of people during the Civil War. The culture clash between the Catholic Irish and their new almost universally Protestant neighbors was palpable. Records indicate that between 1830 and 1850 the largest number of incoming Roman Catholic Irish were from the western counties of Donegal and Roscommon, both largely Irish speaking at the time. Later, they were more likely to hail from eastern areas outside the sphere of Gaelic—Cork or Tipperary, for instance. It is probable then that many Irish new to the area could speak little English, and even when they could it was often difficult for others to understand them. Some may have worn what old line Americans must have seen as passing strange, a kind of dress, a kilt like affair, said to have the added advantage of warding off evil fairies.
The Protestant Scottish-Americans and Scots–Irish, vastly outnumbered after 1830 by the Catholic Irish, were probably as mixed in their attitude towards the immigrants as any other group of county residents. Most Scots had been here in the county for a fairly long time and even though the new immigrants may have been fellow Celts the social differences were too great for the development of easy relations between the two groups. So much time had passed that they seemed to inhabit different universes.
By the time the second generation came along in the 1870’s, the Irish, after performing admirably in the war, still formed the largest number of foreign born in the county, but had become far more acculturated to America, working their way into better jobs, such as service positions as police and firemen. They were now better off, but along with African-Americans still the poorest of all ethnic groups in Columbia. But they were now at least upwardly mobile, many rising from manual labor jobs to the middle class. They went into politics especially in Hudson, where they formed the core of the Democratic Party, electing their first Irish-American aldermen in the 1870’s and the mayor in the 1890’s. Some became businessmen, teachers, clerks, and managers.
After 1875, the numbers of native Irish and Scots living in the county decreased sharply in comparison with a great influx of east and southern Europeans, but these two Celtic groups continued to make their mark in other ways. Many an Irish-American family sent pennies and nickels home to bring their kinfolk over to America. Appeals were put on in Catholic parishes to help the poor of the motherland and to rid the country of the British. In this last instance, some took stronger action than merely passing the hat. Some Hudson Irish lads got involved with the Fenian uprisings of the 1870’s and 1880’s, brave if ill fated attempts to achieve home rule for Ireland. The Fenians attacked Canada because that country was still controlled loosely by the hated British monarchy of Queen Victoria. The Hudson contingent met in a building not far from the parish church, and heard Fenian speakers from the old sod imploring them to join the cause of Irish freedom. They took the rails to Buffalo to join the fighting. In reality the risings were put down quickly, but not before they excited much consternation and comment on either side of the border. Though they failed, they helped to set a template upon which others, like Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera were to use to eventually achieve full independence for the nation.
Scottish-Americans continued their upper mobility. Originally from mainly rural areas like Antrim in northern Ireland and in Scotland, more urban places, such as Lanarkshire, near Glasgow, they were usually literate and often well educated. They frequently became skilled workers and craftsmen, landowners, civic leaders, and entrepreneurs.
