Wexford-Savannah Axis

A key reason for Georgia Southern University’s selection of Wexford Town — the administrative seat of County Wexford, Ireland — as the site for its first overseas campus is the historic trade-and-emigration relationship between the county of Wexford (“the model county”) and the city of Savannah (“the hostess city” or “the forest city”). The connection’s most active period was between 1845 and 1855.

Within the above span is the five-year period from 1848, which is notable for constituting the height of Irish immigration into Savannah. During that “prime time,” approximately 56% of direct Irish newcomers originated in County Wexford, then the only part of Ireland with regular, non-stop sailings to Savannah. Already possessing an active Irish community (the Hibernian Society of Savannah had been established in 1812; the first public St. Patrick’s Day Parade had occurred in 1824), Savannah became an even more Irish city. The US federal census of 1860 revealed that around 23% of the non-slave residents — or 14% of the total residents — of Chatham County (which Savannah dominated) had been born in Ireland. Of the foreign-born residents of Savannah in 1860, the Irish constituted 63.3%, with the next most represented nationality being the Germans (16.7%), followed by the English (8.4%) and then the Scots (3.4%).

Much of the initial research concerning the Wexford-Savannah link was conducted by Monsignor Lory Kehoe (1935-2017), a beloved Roman Catholic priest who, during more than 50 years, ministered in the Diocese of Ferns, an ecclesiastical zone almost coterminous with County Wexford. With enthusiasm and generosity, Father Lory supported the next phase of the inquiry, conducted primarily by undergraduate students working under a joint initiative by two Georgia Southern University entities: the Center for Irish Research and Teaching (CIRT) and the Honors College.

This module consists of thee units, the first of which identifies the Wexford-Savannah Axis as originating with trade in 1845. The second unit highlights the emigration pathway that, from 1848, emerged out of the trade connection. Partly by offering a series of mini-biographies, the third unit acknowledges some key aspects of Wexfordians in Savannah as a unique Irish-American diaspora.

Transatlantic Trade

Three Wexford Companies, Plus Savannah’s Low & Co.

¶ From the mid-1840s through the mid-1850s, three County Wexford-based shipping companies maintained direct sailings across the North Atlantic to Savannah, the oldest city in — and principal port of — Georgia, the so-called Empire State of the South. The sailings occurred during the fall and winter, and a typical port-to-port voyage took around 40 days.
¶ Vessels belonging to William Graves & Son, a mercantile shipping company of New Ross, County Wexford, pioneered the connection. The Graves sailing craft relied heavily on a Savannah business, Andrew Low & Co., to procure cargos; organize port logistics and paperwork; obtain ship’s stores; provide cash advances to captains; and be the immediate payor of sailors’ hospital expenses.
¶ In addition to Graves, the other County Wexford shipping concerns to participate in the Savannah route — which skirted the Azores and Bermuda — were Howlett & Co. of New Ross and R., M., & R. Allen of Wexford Town (but with a footprint in New Ross, too). The initials in the latter firm’s name refer to Richard, Maurice, and Robert Allen, three Quaker brothers. Once Stateside, both the Howlett and Allen companies also employed the services of Andrew Low & Co.
¶ The first Savannah-bound Graves vessel left Ireland in 1845, the opening year of the Great Hunger or potato famine. That vessel was the barque (or three-masted sailing craft) Dunbrody, undertaking its maiden commercial voyage. Georgia Southern University undergraduate researchers discovered that its outbound cargo was ballast, useful for paving and wall-building in sandy Savannah. On its return trip, the Dunbrody carried Georgia timber. (Today, a full-scale reproduction of the Dunbrody is a popular New Ross visitor attraction.)
¶ While the initial years of the link focused on trade in goods — principally timber for the Irish market — by the late 1840s significant numbers of emigrants were availing of what we now call the Wexford-Savannah Axis.

More Details, Including A Liverpool Connection

¶ Savannah owes its founding (in 1733) to General James Oglethorpe, an English military officer and social reformer. His mother, Eleanor Wall, was born in County Tipperary, Ireland. A Catholic of Norman stock, she actively supported the Jacobite cause. Oglethorpe established the city on a bluff above the Savannah River, about 18 miles inland from the river’s mouth at Tybee Island, an Atlantic barrier island. Today, Savannah’s port is the fourth largest and the fastest growing in the United States, specializing in container shipping and capable of handling giant cargo ships.
¶ Although the Georgia colony originally banned slavery, by the 1840s the State of Georgia’s economy was deeply dependent on agricultural (especially cotton and rice) slavery. At that time, Savannah’s principal factor — or middle-man merchant — was the Scottish-born Andrew Low II (1812-1886), whose wealth permitted his construction of a John Norris-designed mansion in the city’s Lafayette Square.
¶ Low’s Savannah business traded as Andrew Low & Co. In addition, he maintained an operation — called Isaac, Low & Co. — in Liverpool, England, a major destination for cotton shipped from Savannah. Many poor Irish labored in the cotton mills (factories) of the city of Manchester and county of Lancashire, near Liverpool.
¶ In Liverpool, Low intersected with representatives of William Graves & Son, whose headquarters building was the Block House on the quayside (docks) of New Ross, a deep-water port on the River Barrow in western County Wexford. A tidal journey of approximately 18 miles carries one from New Ross to open water — specifically, to where the Hook Lighthouse overlooks the Celtic Sea portion of the Atlantic Ocean. Graves & Son dispatched vessels to multiple international destinations, not least: Peru for guano (bird droppings), used as a nutrient-rich fertilizer; Odessa and other Black Sea ports for grain; and Québec and other Canadian St. Lawrence River ports for timber.
¶ For Graves & Son, timber was the trading proposition that made Savannah attractive. Andrew Low was able to convince the Graves patriarch of the availability at Savannah’s port of oak and pitch pine, harvested primarily in the Ogeechee River basin and transported to the docks by means of the Savannah-Ogeechee Canal, which had opened in 1830 (having been built with African-American slave and Irish immigrant labor).
¶ Ireland’s experience as a British colony contributed to its deforestation; thus, New World timber was an in-demand commodity. Savannah could capitalize on that demand during winter months, when ice on the St. Lawrence River rendered Québec, the traditional supply-port, inaccessible.
¶ William Howard Graves (1787-1859) and his eldest son, Anthony Elly Graves, ran the core business, while the second-born son, Samuel Robert (“Rob”) Graves, developed an affiliated shipping concern in Liverpool. In 1860, S.R. Graves became the first Irish-born Mayor of Liverpool; subsequently, he served as Member of Parliament for the city. Obituaries noted that, had he not died unexpectedly from a heart attack (in 1873, at age 54), S.R. Graves likely would have been appointed a Conservative Party cabinet minister. The Illustrated London News of January 25, 1873, eulogized him as “one of the prominent members of [Liverpool’s] great mercantile community.”
¶ As well as overseeing significant international maritime interests, S.R. Graves was a director of the London and North-Western Railway. He also engaged with the New Ross company’s development of the link to Savannah, meaning that we should factor Liverpool — a hub port of the British Empire — into our narrative.

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 Direct Emigration Pathway

Push And Pull Factors

¶ Savannah proffers a fascinating example of county-specific emigration from Ireland. According to Edward Shoemaker, between 1848 and 1852, “the peak [five] years of Irish arrivals” into Savannah, 56.1% of “direct arrivals … identified Wexford as their point of origin” (Strangers and Citizens: The Irish Immigrant Community of Savannah, 1837-1861 [1990], p. 42).
¶ This phenomenon accounts for the disproportionately high number in Savannah of family names associated with County Wexford: Corish, Doyle, Kehoe, Redmond, Rossiter, Stafford, and more. No other North American city is as Wexfordian as Savannah. Evidence of Savannah’s Wexford connection abounds in the city’s Catholic (or Cathedral) Cemetery, established in 1853. Many gravestones include the legend “Born in Wexford” or a similar phrase.

¶ By 1848, Graves and Howett of New Ross and Allen of Wexford Town — the three shipping enterprises operating the Wexford-Savannah route — had determined to diversify by rendering the outbound voyage an emigration service. They targeted prospective emigrants by marketing Savannah’s advantages, especially its robust jobs environment, in the twice-weekly Wexford Independent newspaper. Graves & Son also ran Savannah emigration advertisements in the Waterford Mail and Kilkenny Journal, the principal newspapers in two regional cities.
¶ From the late 1840s through the mid-1850s, the direct Wexford-to-Savannah emigration pathway functioned in the fall-winter sailing seasons. During that period’s spring-summer seasons, the companies directed many of the same vessels to either Québec or New York, again as emigrant carriers.
¶ Page 3 of the Wednesday, September 24, 1851, edition of the Wexford Independent, features a Graves & Son advertisement for “Emigration to Savannah” from New Ross aboard the company’s “Splendid First Class Packet-Ship” called the Glenlyon. The advertisement highlights the ready availability in Savannah of employment at for both “Tradesmen and Labourers.” It also draws attention to Georgia’s opportunities for “the Agriculturist” or farmer, as well as the ease of connectivity into such “interior” regions of the US as “the Valley of the Mississippi.”

¶ Although the Wexford migration to Savannah coincides with some of the Great Hunger — the potato famine of 1845-1849 — Wexford was less affected by the catastrophe than any other Irish county. Both the Wexford Independent and Savannah daily newspapers of the time commented on the socioeconomic attainment and/or the healthfulness of the steerage-class Wexford emigrants to Savannah.

¶ Rather than food insecurity, a major push factor for Wexfordians was frustration over land tenure: the terms and conditions of renting farms. Most Irish of the period were tenant farmers, renting family-scale holdings from large landed estates. The majority of landlords (i.e. owners) of those estates were members of the Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry, referred to as the Ascendancy. Some resided as absentees in Britain, leaving management of their Irish estates to a class known as agents.
¶ In general, County Wexford contains excellent land, and its moniker, the Model County, derives in part from its progressive approach to agriculture. Wexford tenant farmers were perennially disgruntled over having to cede to the landlords a large proportion of their profits, as well as most of the value of improvements they made to their rented holdings (such as new buildings and new drainage schemes). If landlords or their agents observed signs of prosperity, they often increased the rent, a practice known as rackrenting.
¶ Advertisements for emigration to Savannah often appeared in the Wexford Independent close to articles about efforts to advance tenants’ rights. After the establishment of a nationwide Tenant Right League in 1850, the newspaper endorsed local branches in such Wexford towns as New Ross and Gorey. (In fact, even before the Great Hunger, Wexford tenant farmers had organized into reform-seeking campaign groups.) This legacy of political activism likely helps explain the leadership that many Wexford immigrants and their descendants exhibited in Irish and other entities in Savannah. Consider, for example, how, in October 1859, the Wexford-born Patrick Rossiter co-founded the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, initially to advocate for the rights of Savannah longshoremen. While a white, Irish-dominated body, it cooperated with the black Workingmen’s Union Association.
¶ Although tenant farmers’ anxiety over land tenure was a major push factor for most emigrants from County Wexford to Savannah, only a few newcomers ended up acquiring agricultural land and becoming independent farmers in Georgia. With its port, railway terminals, iron foundries, and retail sector — as well as its market for female domestic servants — Savannah made the bulk of newcomers from Wexford into urban dwellers.

Arrive Alive

¶ Of note about the Wexford-to-Savannah ocean passage was its health-and-safety record. The received narrative about Irish emigration during and immediately after Great Hunger is that the transporting vessels degenerated into “coffin ships.” Undoubtedly, there are sad truths to acknowledge. Peter D. O'Neill's Famine Irish and the American Radical State (2017) tells us that "[t]he rate of [transit] deaths in the Famine’s worst year [1847] was 20 percent out of 214,000 Irish emigrants” who departed for North America (p. 33). However, Wexford craft on the Savannah route present a contrasting account, regularly registering zero deaths — an outcome rehearsed in emigration advertisements for Savannah. One reason for this was the relative good health of most Wexford passengers as they boarded; another was the programmatic care, including rations, extended to the emigrants by Wexford captains and chief officers.

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Savannah’s Wexford Citizens

Not “No Irish Need Apply”

¶ One trope of the Irish emigration story is “No Irish Need Apply” — in other words, hostility towards the newcomers on the part of the host country’s established communities. In general, that notion is contradicted by the experience of those who arrived from County Wexford into mid-nineteenth-century Savannah. This fact is perhaps the more surprising given that Savannah was a majority Protestant city.
¶ Very quickly, the Wexford diaspora gained a reputation for possessing a strong work ethic and making valuable contributions to civic life. As early as December 1850, we find Savannah’s Daily Morning News offering an editorial comment about the “respectable” character of 125 Wexford steerage-class immigrants while wishing them “prosperity and happiness” in Savannah.

Selected Wexford-Savannah Narratives

James Palmer Graves

¶ In response to the success of the maritime link between County Wexford and Savannah, William Graves’s fourth and youngest son, James Palmer Graves (1822 - 1901), established himself in the Southern port city, residing there between 1848 and 1856.
¶ With Bay Street as his business address, he sold Irish export goods dispatched (along with emigrants) on Graves & Son vessels from New Ross. However, his principal work was the management of those vessels at the Savannah docks, a role that Andrew Low & Co., the leading Savannah factor, had fulfilled for the Graves family in the early, trade-centered years of the Wexford-Savannah connection.
¶ J.P. Graves determined to compete against Low & Co. for Savannah port-agent business. He built a client roster of ships, barques, and other vessels from a variety of international ports.
¶ When advertising the emigrant passage to Savannah in Irish regional newspapers, William Graves & Son underscored that J.P. Graves could help newcomers secure employment in Savannah.
¶ Wexfordians and other Irish settled or settling in Savannah could purchase from J.P. Graves’s Bay Street office tickets that would permit their relatives and friends still in Ireland to join them by means of Graves & Son sailings out of New Ross.
¶ In common with his father (and a considerable number of other Irish Protestant males of their class), J.P. Graves took a keen interest in the amateur study of ancient Ireland, a form of antiquarianism. Upon its founding in 1849, both father and son joined the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, based in the city of Kilkenny (about 25 miles north of New Ross). In 1890, having moved its headquarters to Dublin, it became the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. 
¶ Published in 1851, the third issue of Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society demonstrates that J.P. Graves maintained contact with the organization from his Savannah base. In a section of the publication titled “Donations to the Museum,” the third item registered is “Specimens of Pottery from the Sepulchral Mounds of North America.” The donor appears as “James Palmer Graves, Esq., of Savanna, U.S.” (One sees several unusual spellings of Savannah in nineteenth-century Irish texts; consider, for example, “Savannagh,” which reflects that the fact that “gh” is often silent in Irish place names.)
¶ Currently, we can but speculate as to the location of the Native American mounds. Such structures are comparatively rare in coastal Georgia, although the now-destroyed Irene Mounds, on the banks of the Savannah River five miles northwest of downtown Savannah, constituted an important example. Of course, J.P. Graves could have traveled in pursuit of archaeological artifacts.
¶ Wednesday, May 7, 1856, found Graves at a place called Midway, near Milledgeville, the then-capital of Georgia, approximately 160 miles inland from Savannah. On that occasion, his goal was not antiquarian, however. He was accompanied by Rev. John T. Pryse, a Welshman, who served as a missionary member of the Episcopal clergy of Savannah.
¶ At the Midway home of the Fish family, Pryse performed the marriage of Sarah Morgie Fish and James Palmer Graves. Soon after, the couple moved to the Newtown district of the city of Waterford, Ireland, where Graves would establish a new headquarters for his family’s business and become a Borough Magistrate.

R.J. Nunn And The Yellow Fever Epidemics Of 1854 And 1876

¶ A major challenge for Wexfordian and other Irish newcomers was the yellow fever or “black vomit” epidemic that affected Savannah in 1854, killing 650 people. Caused by the female Aedes aegypti mosquito, its impact was greatest in August and September, but new cases continued to emerge until the first frost in mid-November. Hardest hit were the two working-class districts abutting the river on either side of the city’s commercial and upscale-residential core (the present-day Historic District): Yamacraw-Frogtown in the west and, even more, Old Fort in the east. In those districts, the Irish were concentrated, together with Free Blacks and enslaved but independently housed African-American slaves.
¶ According to research by Tim Lockley, PhD, of the University of Warwick, over half of the epidemic’s total fatalities were Irish immigrants, who (by contrast with many of their black neighbors) had no immunity. Thus, yellow fever was termed a strangers’ disease. (See Tim Lockley, “‘Like a clap of thunder in a clear sky’: Differential Mortality during Savannah's Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1854,” Social History, vol. 37., no. 2 [2012], pp. 166-186.)
¶ Embracing all of Georgia and a portion of Florida, the Catholic Diocese of Savannah had been founded, out of the Diocese of Charleston, in 1850; and it had established Catholic Cemetery, Savannah, in 1853. That burial site received many Irish victims of the 1854 epidemic, including the Dublin-born founding bishop of Savannah, Rev. F.X. Gartland, and his friend, the Waterford-born Rev. Edward Barron, who came south from Philadelphia to help address the health crisis, having had missionary experience in the West African region that is now Liberia and the Ivory Coast, where yellow fever was endemic. (Monuments to Barron exist in the narthex of Savannah’s Catholic cathedral and outside Waterford’s Catholic cathedral.)
¶ While Garland and Barron are interred in identified plots, many Irish victims of the 1854 yellow fever epidemic were placed in the portion of Catholic Cemetery known as the Free Ground (whose location was discovered by a Wexford-Savannah Axis researcher from Georgia Southern University).
¶ One Wexford immigrant victim added to the Free Ground on August 31, 1854, was the 47-year-old Daniel Kehoe, one of whose sons, William, would become a leading Savannah entrepreneur (as discussed below). Together with his wife and their children, he had arrived in Savannah less than two years earlier.

¶ Wexford excellence is apparent in the highly significant, Savannah-based medical career of Richard Joseph (“R.J.”) Nunn (1831-1910), a Protestant native of Wexford Town who successfully negotiated emigrant passage to Savannah aboard the sailing of the William Graves & Son vessel Glenlyon that departed from New Ross on October 7, 1851, with 220 emigrants. The son of a doctor and intent on committing to that profession, Nunn proposed supplying on-board medical services for a fee.
¶ The Christmas Day 1851 edition of Savannah’s Republican newspaper advertised for sale in the city some of the Irish export goods that the Glenlyon carried on that voyage: “finest quality Irish potatoes, in hampers”; “prime Irish Double Stout Porter” from the Davis, Strangman brewery, Waterford; and “handsome Marble Mantle Pieces” from the Marble Works, Waterford.
¶ Having begun his medical training in London and Dublin, Nunn became a member of the first graduating class of the Savannah Medical College, receiving his MD (along with five other men) on March 2, 1854. For some time, his place of business was “on York street, third door east of Bull street,” Savannah.
¶ During the yellow fever epidemic of 1854, Nunn, not yet a six-month graduate, seems not to have been in Savannah; however, he was one of a cadre of Savannah doctors sent by the city to assist and he would perform similarly during the Disaster of 1876, the worst recorded yellow-fever episode in Savannah’s history, which resulted in 1,065 deaths. (He also helped during the September 1855 yellow fever outbreak in Norfolk, Virginia.)
¶ In May 1879, Savannah’s City Council voted to adopt a modified version of a report authored by Nunn for its Health and Cemetery Committee. Endorsed by the Georgia Medical Society, it concerned “the diminution of the mortality in the city [Savannah] and county [Chatham]” and “the amelioration of the condition of the sick poor.” Among other outcomes, the report precipitated the city’s decision to hire two physicians to attend to the sick poor. Nunn was particularly worried about a “most damning record” with respect to the disproportionately high death rate among Savannah’s African-American population, which he attributed to “the want of proper food … shelter … [and] hospital accommodation.” He also called for stricter enforcement of the city’s public sanitation laws.
¶ As part of a scholarly paper he presented to the 1887 International Medical Congress in Washington, D.C., Nunn analyzed changes over time in Savannah’s regulation of wells, sewerage, drainage, and street-width. The paper also contrasted the higher proportion of Savannah’s African Americans who perished in the yellow fever epidemic of 1876 than in that of 1854.
¶ Due to his engagement with yellow fever, Nunn took on a leadership role in the American Public Health Association (founded in 1872), bringing its annual national meeting to Savannah in 1881. In his keynote address on that occasion, he promoted the “science of sanitation,” insisting that “no caste, no creed … no color” should be denied the right to sanitary living conditions.
¶ Nunn’s tombstone in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery proclaims, “Born Wexford Ireland”; and it contains three key nouns: “Scholar Physician Freemason.”
¶ Nunn’s influence in freemasonry was extensive, and for a period after his death, a Savannah unit of the movement called itself the Richard Joseph Nunn Consistory. When he died, he was Inspector General for Georgia and South Carolina of the Scottish Rite of Free Masonry and a member of the Supreme Council 33.
¶ In its obituary for the Wexford native, Transactions of the American Microscopical Society (volume 29; pp. 189-190) remembered Nunn as “a man of exceedingly tender heart and gentle nature.” It concluded: “It is literally true to say that he was loved by all who knew him, his broad charity and gentleness attracting to him people in all fields of life. His funeral was one of the most largely attended ever held in this city [Savannah].”

The Kehoe Family

¶ Interred in Catholic Cemetery’s “free ground,” one victim of the yellow-fever epidemic of 1854 was Daniel Kehoe, who had arrive in Savannah — probably aboard the Allen brothers’ barque Brothers, out of Wexford Town — less than two years earlier, together with his wife, Johanna (née Rath), and their children.
¶ The Kehoes were from the townland (district) of Mounthoward Lower, near the town of Gorey, in northern County Wexford. That place was home to Esmonde Kyan, a famed rebel leader of the bloody United Irish Rebellion of 1798. 
¶ The youngest Kehoe son, Simon, advanced professionally due to Savannah’s growth as a rail nexus. However, he died in 1877, aged just 31, when the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad (also known as the Albany & Gulf Railroad) freight train he was driving overturned, likely due to separation of the rails. Page 3 of the Thursday, April 12, 1877, edition of Savannah’s Morning News reported that he perished “instantly” as the bar of the reverse lever “pierc[ed] his body … crushing the bones and mangling the flesh.” The piece further remarked, “The deceased was a worthy man, and leaves a wife and child to mourn his loss.”

¶ Born in 1842, another son, William Kehoe, lived to be 87. Having apprenticed as an iron moulder, he rose to such prominence in the iron industry and other commercial and community endeavors as to be eulogized as “one of [Savannah’s] most widely known and beloved citizens.” That opinion appeared on page 8 of the January 4, 1830, issue of the Bulletin, the organ of the Catholic Laymen’s Association of Georgia, an organization Kehoe co-founded in 1916 to counter calls by a resurgent Ku Klux Klan for a boycott of Catholic businesses across Georgia. Its stated mission was “to bring about a friendlier feeling among Georgians, irrespective of creed.”
¶ When Kehoe died, in December 1829, the flag on the gold-domed Savannah City Hall was lowered to half-staff.
¶ At Trustees’ Garden in Savannah’s Old Fort district, Kehoe developed Kehoe’s Iron Works (formerly Phoenix Architectural Works). The February 1916 edition of the trade publication Iron Tradesman profiled the complex, which, employing around 150 men, covered approximately 10 acres and had river access.
¶ Characterizing Kehoe’s Iron Works as “the largest and best equipped plant south of Newport News,” the great shipbuilding center in Virginia, page 4 of the Iron Tradesman article enumerated its principal buildings: “foundry, machine shop, boiler shop, blacksmith shop, pattern shop, store rooms, offices, repair shops” and “marine railroad.”
¶ Reaching up from the river, the marine railroad facilitated ship-repair. However, manufacturing was the dominant activity. The Kehoe name could be found on sugar mills and boilers, manhole covers, architectural railings, and multiple other iron, brass, and steel items. 
¶ Page 6 of the article commended Kehoe and the four of his adult sons working for the company as “real men … standing for good citizenship, clean business, home building, and moral ideals.”

¶ Kehoe became a diversified entrepreneur, taking a lead role in the development of Tybee Island not just as Savannah’s recreational beach but also as “the great summer and winter seaside resort of the South Atlantic.” That effort included the construction of the Savannah-Tybee Railroad, in which he held the first share certificate, Script #1.
¶ From humble tenant-farmer stock in northern County Wexford, William Kehoe generated sufficient wealth to construct two residential mansions on Columbia Square in Savannah’s Old Fort. Still extant, both homes highlight the architectural potential of iron. Erected in 1893 to designs by Andrew Dewitt Bruyn, the second is a red-brick edifice in the Queen Anne Revival style. Today, it operates as the Kehoe House, a luxury inn that regularly tops the list of best places to stay in Savannah.
¶ Kehoe engaged extensively with Savannah’s Irish community, belonging to such non-sectarian organizations as the Hibernian Society of Savannah and a Savannah branch of the Irish National Land League.
¶ As a parishioner of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, he was also active in numerous Catholic charities. After a fire destroyed much of the cathedral in 1898, Kehoe served on the rebuilding committee and also contributed a new font.

Michael Cash

¶ One member of the Savannah branch (No. 38) of the Catholic Knights of America was Wexford-born immigrant Michael Cash, whose obituary on page 3 of the August 18, 1880, edition of Savannah’s Morning News identified him as a “highly esteemed [Savannah] citizen and well known contractor” who had “accumulated” in the city “a handsome [professional] competency” and “made many friends among all classes of our people.”
¶ Founded in 1877 in Nashville, Tennessee, the Catholic Knights was a benevolent society that used members’ dues to help cover sickness, funeral, and other expenses. Four months after Cash died, William Kehoe, as a trustee of Branch 38 (Savannah), facilitated a death-benefit payment to Cash’s family of $2,000 (perhaps around $45,000 today). Cash was also a member of an Irish-American benevolent society indigenous to Savannah: the Irish Union Society, established in 1847.
¶ A native of Blackwater, County Wexford, about a dozen miles north of Wexford Town, Cash maintained a business premises on Indian Street, a low-lying street near the river in the then heavily Irish Yamacraw district on Savannah’s west side. He advertised himself as “Stone Mason, Paver, and Slater.”
¶ Indian Street was a mixed-use area. In addition to businesses, it contained residential buildings. A 2017 study by graduate student Sarah A. Ryniker of Georgia Southern University’s Wexford-Savannah Axis research project examined the composition of the street’s inhabitants in 1860, the year of a federal census. It identified 78 dwellings and 96 heads of household, of whom 81.25% were Irish-born. Almost half of the total residential population originated in County Wexford, including the women recorded as running the street’s five boarding houses.
¶ Michael Cash received numerous city contracts. The most notable was what the Morning News obituary calls “the bluffs along the river front” — that is, the series of retaining walls for the natural escarpment that overlooks the Savannah River, upon which the city’s core developed. Known as the Factors’ Walk Wall and composed primarily of ballast rocks, the complex is three-quarters of a mile in length. With an average height of 19 feet, it consists of spans of wall separated by sets of cobblestone ramps and stone steps, designed to facilitate access to shipping.
¶ Cash and his crew constructed the retaining walls, intended primarily as an erosion barrier, between 1855 and 1869. At intervals, the Wexfordian emplaced seven carved markers, each bearing the legend “M. Cash Builder.”

The O’Connor Family

¶ A litany of influential Savannahians of Wexford birth or descent can readily be produced. Responding to his death, page 8 of the February 16, 1887, edition of Savannah’s Morning News recollected that Daniel O’Connor, “born in Wexford, Ireland,” had built his business on West Broad Street (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard) into Savannah’s largest wheelwrighting, blacksmithing, and wagon-making operation. The paper characterized him as “one of Savannah’s most prominent Irish citizens”; a man “prominently identified with public affairs [in Savannah]”; and a charitable donor “to all objects worthy of support.”
¶ Daniel had emigrated with his brother, Patrick, whose Savannah-born great-granddaughter, Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), owns a place in the front-rank of American letters.
¶ Daniel O’Connor and his Wexford-born wife Mary Sinnott O’Connor’s second son, Patrick Joseph (“P.J.”) O’Connor, attended the prestigious Georgetown University Law School in Washington, D.C., and then forged a thriving legal practice in Savannah. He served as national president of both the Catholic Knights of America and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, proving pivotal in the reconciliation, in 1898, of two factions within the latter, America’s oldest and largest Irish-Catholic fraternal organization.
¶ On July 4, 1881, when just 21, he delivered the keynote address to an assembly at Tybee Island in support of the Irish National Land League, which had several Savannah branches. The guest of honor was the Irish-born John Howard Parnell, who owned and operated the 700-acre Sunny South Fruit Farm, a pioneering peach-growing enterprise in Alabama, near the Georgia line. His politician brother, Charles Stewart Parnell, was regarded as Ireland’s “uncrowned king” for his leadership of both the Land League and Home Rule movements.
¶ Upon P.J. O’Connor’s death, the Ancient Order of Hibernians eulogized him as “one of [the] most brilliant ornaments” of “the Irish race in America”: high praise, indeed, for the son of two of Savannah’s Wexford immigrants. One factor in that assessment was O’Connor’s centrality to the Order’s fundraising to endow the Chair in Celtic Language and Literature (i.e. Gaeilge, Ireland’s indigenous language) at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., by means of a $50,000 check (around $1.5 million today), presented by O’Connor at a ceremony in the University’s Assembly Hall on October 21, 1896.
¶ From 1950 to 1956, O’Connor’s son, Monsignor P.J. O’Connor, Jr., served as the director of and a crucial fundraiser for the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on the campus of Catholic University, the largest Roman Catholic house of worship in North America.

Rev. Peter Whelan

¶ The emigration associated with the Wexford-Savannah Axis ceased in the mid-1850s. Since then, by contrast with such northern U.S. cities as New York, Boston, and Chicago, no significant coterie of Irish has settled in Savannah.
¶ The principal reason for the cessation was the tensions that precipitated America’s Civil War (1861-1865). Numerous Irish residents of Savannah served in Confederate units, including such Wexfordians as Richard Joseph Nunn; William Kehoe’s eldest brother, Patrick; and Michael Cash.
¶ Of Savannah’s Wexford-born citizens, the one who gained most renown in the conflict was a Roman Catholic priest, Rev. Peter Whelan. His reputation rests above all on his humanitarian service to Union prisoners-of-war in the Confederates’ Fort Sumter military prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, around 200 miles west of Savannah.
¶ Fort Sumter operated for 14 months, beginning in February 1864. Essentially a 16-acre site with makeshift shanties and a perimeter stockade, its prisoner population reached a high of almost 31,700. The atrocious conditions led to around 13,000 deaths. After the war, the camp commander was convicted of war crimes and executed.
¶ On episcopal orders, Whelan ministered at Fort Sumter between June and October 1864. Then in his early sixties, he was Vicar General of the Diocese of Savannah. His exceptional efforts earned him the moniker “Angel of Andersonville.”
¶ Among other actions, Whelan took out a loan of $400 (the equivalent of around $6,700 today) to purchase bread for desperate Union soldiers.

¶ Born in 1802, Whelan was raised in a farmhouse (which remains in the family) in the townland or district of Loughnageer in southern County Wexford.
¶ Around 1824, he emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina, apparently responding to a call for trainee priests issued by the Diocese of Charleston, which had been established in 1820 with Rev. John England, a charismatic Irishman, as the founding bishop. Initially, that diocese encompassed much of the southeastern United States, including the State of Georgia.
¶ In 1837, Whelan was appointed parish priest at Locust Grove, Georgia’s oldest Catholic community, about 170 miles northwest of Savannah. He remained there for 19 years, a span that saw Georgia, together with a portion of Florida, become a new diocese — the Diocese of Savannah — in 1850.
¶ The yellow fever epidemic of 1854 changed Whelan’s ministry. He was summoned first to Augusta and then to Savannah, the worst affected Georgia cities. The former was served by two other Wexford priests — Rev. John Barry (from Oylegate) and his assistant, Rev. Gregory Duggan (from near Murrintown) — both of whom, like Whelan, had been ordained in Charleston by Bishop England (“the steam bishop”).
¶ The founding bishop of Savannah, F.X. Gartland, perished in the 1854 epidemic; and when Barry succeeded him, the post of Vicar General of the diocese went to Whelan.
¶ In November 1859, Barry died; and Whelan administered the Diocese of Savannah until the appointment of a new (third) bishop in September 1861, several months into the Civil War.
¶ On November 24, 1861, Union forces began an advance on Fort Pulaski on Cockspur Island in the Savannah River, which guards the seaward approaches to the city of Savannah. From at least that time, Whelan voluntarily performed the role of chaplain to Catholic soldiers in the Confederate garrison at the fort, many of whom belonged to Savannah’s Montgomery Guards, a primarily Irish unit.
¶ The greater garrison consisted of five Confederate infantry units, commanded by Colonel Charles H. Olmstead, a Savannah native. The Union effected a 112-day siege of the fort, intent on starving the garrison into surrender. It supposed that, being seven-and-a-half feet thick, the structure’s solid brick walls would be invincible. However, the siege ended with a successful Union bombardment over a 30-hour period on April 11 and 12, 1862. The Parrott rifle-cannon, patented in 1861, proved crucial to the Union victory, which resulted in the closure of the port of Savannah.
¶ From at least early February 1862, Whelan embedded at Fort Pulaski on a full-time basis. His care towards men of all faiths earned him respect across the garrison.
¶ That care continued after the surrender, when he and many of the garrison’s members were transported, by sea, to the Union prison on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor. Although granted parole on May 11, 1862, Whelan chose to remain at the facility. He communicated with Catholic priests in Manhattan and elsewhere to procure food and clothing for the prisoners.
¶ When a prisoner exchange was negotiated, he accompanied the veterans of Fort Pulaski as they returned to Savannah during August 1862. But these experiences would only serve as prelude to the horrors of Andersonville.
¶ On February 6, 1871, the 69-year-old Whelan died. Four days later, his funeral procession proved the largest ever witnessed in Savannah. Crowds lined the streets as 86 carriages and buggies accompanied his body, contained in an elaborate iron casket, from the cathedral to Catholic Cemetery.
¶ On the day of the funeral, page 3 of Savannah’s Morning News asserted that Whelan “had so endeared himself to our citizens by his life of purity and active benevolence that his loss will be generally felt and deplored.”

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