In an article titled “The Irish Come to Hampton” published in the March 1993 Gazette, Jim Robertson chronicled the arrival of the first group of immigrants to our town. The article quoted a man from Hampton who in 1845 wrote home while traveling in England to report news of the “great fear of a famine in Ireland”, claiming he saw 1600 people in Liverpool waiting for a ship. “The price of passage used to be $15 but it is now $25 including water and a pound of bread a day”, he reported. “You have no idea how miserable they are, crowded into a ship, often 300 and 400, and as the ship leaves the dock and they bid adieu to a crowd of friends who come to see them off and whom they will never see again, the sight is distressing.”

What the man observed was the beginning of a massive wave of immigration bringing 1.5 million Irish to America during “The Great Hunger”, when Ireland’s potato crops, which the Irish depended solely upon, were blighted. The “Potato Famine” caused approximately twelve percent of the population to starve to death, and over a quarter to emigrate. The Irish, under cruel English governance, were legally precluded from owning land and therefore unable to raise another crop, to hunt, or to fish. English landlords used the famine as an excuse to further persecute the Irish, evicting them and burning the thatched roofs of their dwellings to avoid “disease”. Today, places like Achill Island’s Deserted Village of Slievemore, where small stone homes remain in desolate rows, are reminders of the devastation of those times.

The Irish arrived in our town more than a century after others settled here. According to the article, “Like all small towns, Hampton was the last place to attract the immigrant because the possibilities for work were few and the land was already occupied and expensive.” In 1850, ten percent of Connecticut’s population was comprised of immigrants while only two percent of Hampton’s was. The Census that year reported sixteen Hampton residents from Ireland. Ten years later, while Hampton’s overall population was on the decline, the number of Irish immigrants increased to 25. In another 20 years, 25 percent of Hampton’s total population was Irish, either immigrants, or the children of immigrants. “The Irish,” Mr. Robertson wrote, “were permanently established in town.”

After the famine ended, the Irish continued to arrive in great numbers. “They were met by growing anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudices,” the article stated. “For most Americans, the Irish were ‘different’ enough in their speech and their behavior, as well as their religion, to be very noticeable.” Most of us are familiar with signs of the era which announced: No Irish Need Apply. Too poor to afford land to cultivate their own crops and raise their own animals, Irish immigrants provided cheap labor on farms and in households. They were also illiterate, as “the English rulers of Ireland refused to provide public education for the Catholic Irish populations.”

In Discovering Hampton, Janice Trecker wrote of the role of the Irish in the building of railroads, across the nation and here in town, calling the job “back-breaking…grueling labor”. With tracks running all the way through town, she wrote, the railroad company was a significant employer of Hampton men. A 1963 article in the Hartford Courant that chronicled the development of the railroad in Hampton mentioned two early Irish families who were generationally involved. Martin Navin reported that his grandfather “helped lay the original track”, and James Fitzgerald worked as a foreman. Both families lived near the train depots at Clark’s Corners and on Station Road, and members continued employment with the railroad company through three generations.

One of the many contributions of the Irish to our town was the establishment of Our Lady of Lourdes Church. Embraced by these and later immigrants, the Catholic Church was received far less enthusiastically by others who lived here. The late arrival of immigrants to small towns like Hampton didn’t deter residents from adopting what Mr. Robertson described as “anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudices.”

Up until 1850, Jesuit priests from Massachusetts met the spiritual needs of Catholics in northeastern Connecticut, however the surge of immigrants required local Catholic churches. The first Pastor of St. James in Danielson, Father Michael McCabe, a Dubliner, served mass alternate Sundays at the home of John Reilly, the original “Howard” house, as in “Howard Valley”, and most recently where Peggy Fox lived. In 1860, Reilly and his Irish neighbors, Thomas McLaughlin, Jon McMahon, and their pastor, Father Thomas Preston, proposed the establishment of a Catholic church here. “The established protestants greeted this idea with no little resentment,” Mrs. Trecker wrote, “and the church was sited, not on the main street, the usual location of village churches, but around the corner.”

Governor Chauncey Cleveland donated an acre of land on Cedar Swamp Road, southwest of the newly built Center School and Town Hall, to site the Greek Revival Church. According to Mr. Robertson’s article, “the church was built there because Hampton’s ‘town fathers’ did not want it on Main Street. They gave the land and even gave trees to plant around the church so that it would not be visible from Main Street.”

“The pretty church is now clearly visible….thanks to the destruction of the pines in the hurricane of 1938,” Mrs. Trecker wrote, “but its position off the Main Street of town is a reminder of the religious, social, and political divisions of the nineteenth century.”

Mass was first served in the church in 1877 with Father John Murphy, who boarded at the Chelsea Inn across from the Congregational Church, presiding. “At the time the church was dedicated to the Our Lady of Lourdes in 1877,” Michael Winters wrote in a 2017 Gazette article commemorating the Church’s 140th anniversary, “it was one of the first churches to be so dedicated in the entire country. The apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous in the small French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains had occurred only nineteen years earlier.” In 1896 pastoral care of the churches in Danielson. Brooklyn, and Hampton was given by Bishop Michael Tierney to the LaSalette Fathers, a religious order founded in France. The first child to be baptized at Our Lady of Lourdes was Mary Ann McLaughlin, born on January 26, 1877, the first wedding was on Christmas Day, 1879 between Mary Navin and Daniel Leary, and the last parishioners to pay pew rent, at ten dollars a year, were Mary Ann Reilly, Mary McMahon and James Fitzgerald.

Though our Catholic Church has not seen as many changes as our Congregational Church, which celebrates its 300th anniversary this year, beginning with its conversion from a colonial meeting house to the Greek Revival remodeling with its columned portico and steeple, Our Lady of Lourdes has experienced continual renovation and growth through the years. The interior of the church was decorated in 1918 with Father Julian Ginet accomplishing most of the work himself, notably the ornate stenciling on the walls. The building was wired for electricity, a furnace was installed, the confessional was built, the horse carriages were removed and a parking lot paved, the shrine to Our Lady was landscaped, the Ambrose Crane Center was constructed, the bell tower was erected, and the entrance ramp was installed. Clubs were organized to raise funds for improvements.

Though the Irish were the first parishioners, as more and more immigrants arrived on American shores, eventually reaching the rural corners of New England, the surnames of a variety of heritages start to appear. Records and relics reveal Our Lady of Lourdes as a sanctuary of ethnic diversity and cultural richness. One hundred and fifty years after those first immigrants arrived, a 2019 poll the Gazette conducted at the Hampton Harvest that year, asking residents to identify their cultural heritages, listed so many countries that a few people referred to themselves as “Heinz 57”; however, the largest percentage of those polled claimed Irish descent.

Most of our Christmas traditions come from other countries, the tree from a German legend, the poinsettia from a Mexican one, carols and cookies from several cultures. As the luminarias and farolitos of the southwest symbolize a lighted path for the Holy family to follow on Christmas Eve, candles in the windows also have religious roots. A lit candle placed in a window in Ireland was a secret message from Catholic families, forbidden by the English to practice their religion, asking a priest to bring the Blessed Sacrament into their homes at Christmastime. Today, the candles that twinkle in many of our Main Street windows during Christmas — including those of the Congregational Church and the Community Center –beautifying our village and creating an aura of charm and tranquility, originated with this Irish tradition.