Irish Determination and American Ingenuity
Excerpt from my new book, "Color Me Green: Ways the Irish Influenced America."
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It was 1856 when Thomas Benton Walsh and his wife and six children left Holly Brook, County Sligo, Ireland, to come to America.
Lizzie, as their daughter Elizabeth, a tiny, demure little woman, preferred to be called, grew up and married John Charles Smith, a barrel cooper, and settled in the busy little town of Armourdale, Kansas. The Cudahy Packing Company was established there near the stockyards and railhead where cattle herd drives came up from the long trek of the southwest.
Charles and Lizzie had a beautiful little girl with blue eyes in her rosy face and curly dark hair. They called her Hettie. Charles built a nice two story white frame home for his family. All was well. Then Charles died.
Lizzie was at a loss for a means to support herself and her ten-year old child. Other Irish women were maids and housekeepers for the wealthy up on Quality Hill in Kansas City, Missouri, but Lizzie wanted desperately to keep Hettie in their own house. She wanted to raise her bonnie little lass properly with manners and the pretty finery every young lady deserved.
One day, sitting on the porch inside her white picket fence, searching her mind for some means to earn a livelihood, Lizzie took note of the weary men trudging along the street. Most of them were immigrants who worked hard and saved money in order to send for the families they had left in Europe. Many of them were Irish. They were honest working men on their way to their jobs at the stock pens and packing houses and railroad yards. They worked long hours before returning to boarding houses for supper, their only meal of the day.
She thought about her Charles, walking half a mile every day to the barrel factory, carrying a pail stuffed with apples and little meat pies. Lizzie herself made the pies filled with chopped praties and bangers and rashers and onions, everything that made up a hearty Dublin Coddle.
Inspiration!
She hurried into the house and the next morning a sign appeared on the fence, “Coddle Pies for Sale.”
It worked. Before many days, there was a line of working men on her porch every morning buying, for a very few pennies, little hand-size pork pies. Later she offered small fruit pies and buns. The pennies added up!
Because of Lizzie’s Irish stubbornness and hard work, Hettie never lacked any of the proprieties of a pretty young Gibson Girl in early 1900.
Some years later, one of Lizzie’s spunky Irish blood line, a descendant, moved into the upper floor of the white frame house that Lizzie had salvaged from despair. A baby girl was born there -- Me.
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To read more stories like this one about the Irish influence to America, order my new book, "Color Me Green: Ways the Irish Influenced America" by Helen Walsh Folsom.
Over the next several weeks, I will be publishing, with the aid of my daughter, Bettse Folsom, a series of answer & questions & snippets about Ireland that many people have asked me during events where I have attended. If you have a question, please contact me by email and I will be happy to address it.
Thank you for reading my blog!
