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COPYRIGHT 2000 The World of Hibernia, Inc.
Father Sarsfield O Sullivan is a retired priest who still lives in Butte, Montana. He remembers hearing from his father Sean who emigrated to Butte from Bere Island that one year he had two cousins living in Butte, and the next he counted 42 cousins from County Cork.
More than 55 percent of the Irish who settled Butte, Montana came from County Cork's four parishes. By 1900, Butte had 12,000 residents of Irish descent in a population of 47,635. One quarter of the population was Irish, a higher percentage than any other American city at the turn of the last century, including Boston. Of 1,700 people who left the parish of Eyeries to emigrate from 1870 to 1915, 1,138 ended up in Butte. Members of 77 different families of Sullivans left Castletownbere in Cork for Butte and in 1908 there were 1,200 Sullivans in Butte.
John T. Shea worked in Butte's mines all of his life, first underground and then later in the Anaconda Company's Berkeley open pit mine except for a brief vacation during World War II. As he left for War, his father assured him that he would return home safely to his family. Then he told him of his own leaving from his home village in Cork. When he was 15, he and his twin brother Pat were made to understand that it was time to take their places in the world apart from their childhood home. For them and for thousands of others from West Ireland, that meant joining relatives in Butte, Montana.
When they arrived, they found that Butte had as much in common with West of Ireland as did the moon. Butte is situated high in the Northern Rockies beside the Continental Divide, 600 miles from the coast, frozen in winter by sub-zero temperatures and Arctic winds, and baked in summer by withering heat with little rain. It was a hard life in a hard land. But, they found one distinct similarity--the...
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