Tag: Charles Sheehy

Julia Moriarty Casey

Julia Moriarty Casey, ca. 1900 (Sheehy family collection)

Born in County Kerry, Ireland, Julia was only 14 when she boarded a ship in 1866 called The City of Dublin bound for New York City accompanied by her Aunt Mary Moriarty, who had taken her in after she lost her mother at age 10. Also along on the journey were Mary’s three daughters, all under 18.

The women comprised part of the second wave of Irish emigration, the first wave having peaked during the 1850s in the wake of the Great Famine that devasted Ireland following the potato crop failure in 1845. Unlike the first wave, the second wave was predominately made up of single females, the majority of them under the age of 25.

Irish immigrants approach New York aboard ship in 1893 (photo Museum of the City of New York)

From New York City, the Moriarty women sailed via the Isthmus of Panama for San Francisco, where Julia was briefly reunited with her father, who had left Ireland for America soon after his wife’s death.

Like more than three quarters of Irish female immigrants, Julia found ready employment for five years as a domestic for a liquor merchant and his family in San Francisco. It was grueling employment that most working-class American girls avoided, as domestic service bore a social stigma, preferring jobs as shop girls, mill hands, and seamstresses.

Illustration of a St. Patrick’s Day dance (State Library of New South Wales)

While attending a St. Patrick’s Day dance, 19-year old Julia met a 30-year old Irish bachelor from Petaluma’s Lakeville area named John Casey. Casey had emigrated to America from County Kerry in 1863 with an older brother, Jeremiah, and two sisters, Mary and Catherine. Jeremiah and John established a 120-acre wheat farm on the northern end of Tolay Lake. Mary married a neighboring farmer named George Eades, and Catherine another neighboring farmer named John Gregory.

Site of the Casey Ranch in Lakeville (photo Scott Hess)

After their marriage, John and Julia leased a 160-acre ranch in Lakeville from J.B. Lewis for raising dairy cows. Julia gave birth to seven children, who all attended St. Vincent’s Academy on Howard Street. Soon after the birth of her sixth child in 1887, John Casey died unexpectedly from a bad case of the measles.

With the help of her sons, Julia operated the dairy ranch until 1898, when she moved into Petaluma, purchasing a house at 322 Bassett Street and adjacent empty lot. On the lot she built a two story house at 326 Bassett Street, renting it out to boarders for income before eventually selling it to fellow Irish immigrants Charles and Hannah Sheehy. Sheehy established a painting business on Main Street in 1973. Julia’s youngest daughter Mary married the Sheehy’s oldest son Charles, Jr.

326 and 322 Bassett Street, both built by Julia Casey (Sheehy family collection)

Julia was very involved with her parish at St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, and a founding member and longtime officer of Catholic Ladies Aid Society, established in 1891. In 1922, she replaced her house at 322 Bassett Street with a new modern home built by local contractor Stewart Scott. By that time, three other houses she had purchased on the block were occupied by members of her extended family.

Of Julia’s seven children, none of her fiv e sons married, only her two daughters. Catherine (1874-1925) married John Bennett, a prominent Molino nurseryman during Sebastopol’s apple boom; Jeremiah Casey (1875-1893) died at 19 from lung disease; John (Jack) Casey (1877-1951) was a teamster for the Golden Eagle Mill; William (1878-1968) was general manager of A. Kahn Grocery and grain distribution; James (1886-1928) operated meat markets, including King’s Corner Grocery on Bodega Avenue; George (1881-1972) was ranch manager for Joe Redding in Rancho Nicasio and Shellville; Mary (1887-1969) married Charles Sheehy, Jr., who operated Sheehy Brothers Painting at 128 Kentucky Street until his unexpected death in 1929. Mary supported her two children working for Newburg department store, Tomasini’s Hardware, and for ten years in the office of the Petaluma Creamery.

Julia Casey with granddaughter Betty Sheehy, 1922 (Sheehy family collection)

Julia died at her home surrounded by family members in 1934 at the age of 82. Through hard work, persistence, community engagement, and family devotion, she overcame poverty and adversity to reign as the matriarch of a thriving Irish clan in Petaluma.

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Julia Moriarty Casey was the great-grandmother of the author.

KSRO Interview: Sonoma County’s Irish History

A gathering is held at Jasper O’Farrell’s home near Freestone (Sonoma County Library).

In preparation for St. Patrick’s Day, historian John Sheehy was interviewed on KSRO about the early Irish history in Sonoma County. For those who missed it, below is an excerpt from the transcript:

How the Irish Settled Sonoma County

The Irish were the first large immigrant group to settle in Sonoma County from the time the county was established in 1850 until the 1890s. They came from Ireland on three different paths:

Many following the Potato Famine of 1845-1849 back home, when a million Irish immigrated to America. Others came to California earlier in 1846 as Union soldiers in the Mexican-American War, and then stayed behind after the war ended to mine for gold before settling on farms in Sonoma County. And finally, a number of Irish men been exiled to the penal colonies in Australia by their British rulers after the Irish Rebellions of 1848 and the early 1860s, and then made their way to California, including one of my great-grandfathers, the Fenian Charles Sheehy from County Limerick.

The fact that California had been governed by Mexican Catholics was certainly appealing to those suffering religious persecution under British Protestant rule back home.

The Earliest Irish Settlers: Read & O’Farrell

Sonoma County’s first Irish settler, John Read, arrived in 1827 while the area was under Mexican rule. He built a ramshackle house along Crane Creek near Cotati and planted corn. But the Coast Miwok natives burned his crops, and so he retreated to Mill Valley, where he married a Californio widow—a native of Spanish and Mexican heritage—and so was able to become a landowner of large Mexican land grant, the Rancho Corte Madera. John Reed Elementary School in Rohnert Park is (mis)named in his honor.

In 1843, the man who is perhaps the county’s most famous Irishman, Jasper O’Farrell, a civil engineer from Dublin, came to work in the area as a surveyor for the Mexican government. The Mexicans paid him in land grants, including part of Rancho Nicasio in Marin. He also purchased the Rancho Estero Americano, which included land between Freestone and Valley Ford. There, he established his family estate named Analy after ancestral lands in Ireland (which carried over to the naming of Analy High School in Sebastopol).

After the Mexican-American War ended, O’Farrell was hired to map out the grid for the new city of San Francisco, including its grand promenade known as Market Street, and a street that still bears his name. He made good money surveying, and in the 1850 U.S. Census he was reported to be Sonoma County’s wealthiest citizen.

The Potato Boom

A number of the Irish immigrants in the early 1850s followed a fellow Irishman named John Keyes to the west Sonoma County—Bloomfield, Bodega, Valley Ford—where he began growing potatoes, or “Irish diamonds” as they were known, the county’s first big boom crop. Potatoes were able to keep without refrigeration, which made them transportable on schooners down the Petaluma River to a growing San Francisco. By the mid-1850s, Sonoma County’s potato boom was largely over, a victim of overplanting, soil erosion, and increased competition.

The Wheat Boom

The potato boom in Sonoma County was followed by the California wheat boom. With it came a second influx of Irish immigrants in the 1860s, including my Irish ancestors from County Kerry, the Caseys, many of them attracted by wheat’s reputation as the “poor man’s crop.” It required little expertise or capital, and unlike fruit trees or grape vines that took years to mature, it returned a good profit the first year. Best of all, wheat harvesting was mechanized through the use threshers, and so not particularly labor intense.

Wheat schooner, Petaluma River (Petaluma Historical Museum & Library)

Many of the Irish wheat farmers, including my ancestors, settled in Lakeville south of Petaluma and on the western slope of Sonoma Mountain, an area that became known as “Little Ireland,” somewhat segregated from Protestant-dominated river town of Petaluma. My great-grandfather John Casey farmed 160 acres across the northern end of Tolay Lake, previously a sacred Coast Miwok site, that was drained by a wealthy German settler William Bihler in 1870 for planting potatoes. The old Casey farm is now part of the new Tolay Lake Regional Park.

The wheat boom crashed in the 1880s, after which my ancestors and many other farmers switched to dairy ranching.

Donahue Landing

By that time, a new Irish community had been established south of Lakeville called Donahue Landing. It was actually a company pop-up town of 200 people erected by an Irishman named Peter Donahue, who in 1870 built the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad that extended from Donahue Landing north to Healdsburg.

Steamship moored at Donahue’s Landing, 1878 (Sonoma County Library photo)

His instant town of Donahue Landing featured a two-story hotel, a firehouse, a one-room county school, two laundries, a saloon, and a stable that doubled as a dance hall. Donahue employed only Irish on his crews. Meanwhile, another Irishman, John Frisbee, a son-in-law of Mariano Vallejo, who built a separate rail line through the Sonoma Valley to Healdsburg at the time, employed only Chinese workers. Many of Donahue’s Irish workers stayed on in Sonoma County after the railroad was finished.

Catholic Church Communities

The other impact of the Irish immigrants in Sonoma County was the establishment of English-speaking Catholic Church communities in a county that was largely Protestant in its early days. That included St. Vincent’s parish in Petaluma in 1857, St. Rose parish in Santa Rosa in 1860, and St. Teresa parish in Bodega in 1861. These parishes usually started out in someone’s stable, as in Petaluma, or a hotel, as in Santa Rosa, with visiting priests who rode a circuit from the San Rafael mission until such time as enough money was raised by the parish to build a church and support a permanent priest.

St. Vincent’s Church, Liberty & Howard streets in Petaluma, built in 1876 for the Irish parish (Sonoma County Library)

By 1870, the U.S. Census counted the Irish as the largest single immigrant group in Sonoma County, about a third of the 20,000 people in the county. They also comprised a third of San Francisco’s population of 100,000.