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There’s a lot more to St. Patrick’s Day than green beer – usually imbibed by people who don’t know County Kerry from Marin County. A new state law effective in 2030 mandates that high school students take ethnic study courses in order to graduate. I wonder what “ethnics” will be scrutinized. The usual suspects include, of course, “marginalized” people,” understandable when America’s celebrated melting pot of the past looks more like a tossed salad.
It won’t hurt to remind high schoolers, however, that there was a time when just about everyone was marginalized. St. Patrick’s Day on March 17th is a good place to start finding one’s roots. It may come as a surprise, but there was a time when Irish roots were strong and Irish lives mattered so much. Thousands of Immigrants from the Emerald Isle headed for picnics on the Peninsula.
The number of people is difficult to estimate, but some reports say 15,000 people turned out for the events in Redwood City and San Mateo, while a picnic in Belmont drew about 10,000.
One newspaper account estimated the train carrying passengers to Belmont Park in 1868 was a half mile long, “headed by three or four engines, puffing and blowing like so many thousand savage Fenians eager for the fray.”
The Redwood City picnic of 1870 was front-page news in the San Mateo County Gazette, a veteran in reporting on Irish gatherings, having covered the San Mateo event in 1866, the year the worldwide Irish nationalist group called the Fenians invaded Canada. That’s right, they invaded Canada. Seeking freedom for Ireland, the Fenians also produced the first true submarine in an attempt to end Britannia’s rule of the waves.
Contemporary accounts of the Peninsula gatherings of Fenian supporters were a bit condescending, coming at a time when nativists warned of the Irish three Rs of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.”
“To the credit of the Irish, they disappointed many who anticipated a disorderly riotous rabble,” the Gazette said of the San Mateo picnic. The paper noted there were few drunks, “considering the amount of liquor” involved. There were a few arrests and some fistfights at the donnybrook in Redwood City, which had a population of only 1,000 at the time.
The Fenians, also called the Irish Republican Brotherhood, is one of those militant groups overlooked in American history. They certainly weren’t ignored in Canada, where some historians say the attack by Fenian soldiers, mainly veterans of America’s Civil War, eventually would spur the drive for confederation north of the border.
The San Mateo picnic came a month after Fenians crossed the border at Niagara Falls and met a Canadian force at Ridgeway. The disciplined fire of the 1,500 or so Irishmen was too much for the raw Canadian militia who retreated from the battlefield upon which nine were killed. The Irish fighters then went to Fort Erie and captured a small force whose officer in charge cut off his whiskers and fled in disguise, according to Canadian historian Edgar McInnis. McInnis wrote in his book, “The Unguarded Frontier,” that the invaders became cut off when the United States sent a gunboat to prevent reinforcements. Most of the Fenians were arrested and released. The revolutionaries continued minor raids in Canada, the last in 1871. Why Canada? According to McInnis, the plan was to draw English troops out of Ireland and over to Canada.
The Fenians also had a navy, or at least hoped to have one. They raised enough money to back Irish born John Holland in his quest to build a submarine, which he did in 1881. The 14-foot-long vessel dubbed “The Fenian Ram” never fired a shot in anger because the money ran out. Holland, however, kept building submarines. His final design was sold to the United States and commissioned in 1900 as the USS Holland. The Fenian Ram still exists and can be viewed at a museum in Paterson, New Jersey.
No Irish, No San Mateo County
Does San Mateo County owe its birth to the Irish? A stretch? Maybe not. Consider the year the county was founded – 1856, a year displayed prominently on the county seal. In San Francisco, 1856 is known for something else: It was the year of the Committee of Vigilance. Vigilantes for short. It was a time when angry San Franciscans took the law into their own hands, hands that held guns and ropes, ropes as in hanging.
To this day, historians debate if the main aim of the vigilantes was to crush crime or to rid San Francisco of a growing Democratic political machine run by Irish Catholics that was threatening the established power structure. Probably both.
“Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling seethed through the Vigilantes,” wrote esteemed California historian Kevin Starr in his “Americans and the California Dream. “According to Starr, the Vigilante movements of both 1851 and 1856 were fueled by “anti-foreign reformism on the part of outraged businessmen.”
In 1856, the thinly populated Peninsula was part of San Francisco, which was approaching a population of 60,000. Some lawmakers felt that making San Francisco both a city and county under the consolidation act would end jurisdictional disputes in the prosecution of so-called “toughs,” who were mostly Irish. The “toughs,” a term used in histories written during the era, viewed the Peninsula as a great place to spread their wicked, wicked ways, which included prizefighting, gambling, saloons, and other unsavory pastimes. Their friends in Sacramento agreed to make San Francisco a city and county with the understanding that San Mateo would be born.
So, in 1856, San Francisco became a city and county, giving birth to an independent San Mateo County, an arrangement made to order for San Francisco’s criminal element. The initial San Mateo County election to pick officials as well as the county seat was replete with stuffed ballot boxes and physical intimidation at the polls by what were called “shoulder strikers.” The State Supreme Court invalidated the results of the first election that saw Belmont picked as the county seat. A second election was held and Redwood City became the county seat.
The attempted coup came at a time when Peninsula residents, including many Irish, were trying to live off the land, mainly with farming, dairy and logging, all ventures needed to feed and house the giant city to the north. Eventually, both Redwood City’s police chief and fire chief would have Irish names, but it was the ordinary men and women who formed families of strong faith that wrote the real success story. The faith was so strong that what they started more than a century ago is still a household name in Redwood City – Mount Carmel, as in Mount Carmel area, a name beloved by real estate agents. Virtually all the pastors of the early church – first located east of El Camino and originally named St. Mary’s – were Irish. Today, the church and school are located on – as the old saying about upper mobility goes – the other side of the tracks. A strong indication that the Irish made it into the great melting pot of America.
What’s in a Name?
The melting pot gets stirred every St. Patrick’s Day at St. Francis of Assisi Church in East Palo Alto with a dinner that recalls the area’s Irish heritage. Father Larry Goode said that today the parish is a mix of cultures, including African-American, European-American, Hispanic and Tongan. You can’t miss the area’s Irish roots. Many of the streets bear Irish names. One is Kavanaugh, the family that donated the land for the church.
Menlo Park has several streets named for Irish people, according to Bo Crane, an historian who specializes in all things Menlo Park. Crane said the city was founded in the 1850s by Irish pioneers Denis Oliver and Daniel McGlynn, who both hailed from Menlough, a village in County Galway. How did Menlough get shortened to Menlo? The best bet is that something got lost in translation. There is also the matter of that other Menlo Park, the one in New Jersey that was the home of inventor Thomas Edison. According to a 1941 program marking the dedication of a fire station in the New Jersey town, that Menlo Park was named “for a village in the County of San Mateo” in California. A welcoming gate with Menlo Park arched over the top was dedicated in the “village’ in 2019 on the library corner of Ravenswood Avenue and Alma Street. The ceremony, of course, was held on St. Patrick’s Day.
A few Menlo Park citizens have visited Galway, Menlo Park’s sister city, returning with stories about the ties between the two cities and the tracers left by Oliver and McGlynn. There is even a Menlo Park Hotel in Galway that features a restaurant named “Oliver and McGlynn.”
