The Callans and McClarys, by John Edward Callan - Callanworld

Chapter 6.
A seminarian falls in love
We will end the story of this
next generation with a certain
Bernard Callan, a seminarian
born in Ireland, who was destined
to sweep a teenager named
Mary Anne Magill off her feet in
a Seneca Falls rectory.
But we begin in 1791, when
Thomas Magill was born in
Dowdstown near Ardee, County
Louth, the northeastern part of
Ireland. Thomas was a farmer
and owned a cottage-type farmhouse
with several outbuildings.
He married a woman named
Mary McGuire, also born in
1791. Thomas and Mary lived in
Dowdstawn and raised six
children: Bridget, Michael, Alice,
Mary, Anne and Catherine.
Sadly, in 1835, Mary, the mother
of these six children, died at the
early age of forty-four.
To make matters worse, in
1847 the potato crop failed In
Ireland. The population of
Ireland was reduced by onequarter
within five years. At least
one million Irish people died of
starvation and disease, while
another 1.5 million fled the
country, in the year 1847 alone,
258,000 Irish set sail for North
America. Thomas Magill and his
family were among them.
With his wife gone and the
potato famine threatening the
rest of his family, Thomas Magill
decided leaving Ireland was their
only chance of survival. They
packed up their belongings and
said good-bye to the old farm.
They departed the Ole Sod
on March 17, 1847. At Dublin
they boarded the “Henry Clay,”
a sailing vessel bound for New
York. While they were crossing
the Atlantic, the ship was buffeted
by severe storms and
sprang a leak. For weeks all
those on board had to bail water
each day to stay afloat. Miraculously
it finally reached the New
York Harbor. There the wet and
bedraggled families parted for
various sections of the New
World.
The Magill family took
passage aboard a packet-boat to
Albany and then through the
Erie Canal system to the “Flats”
of Seneca Falls, where they
disembarked. At that time
Seneca Falls was already a
booming manufacturing town
noted for its pumps, barrels, fire
engines, knitting products, etc. It
was a busy town and that was
probably why the Magills chose
to settle there. But along with the
rapid industrialization came a lot
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The Callans and McClarys
of social upheaval in Seneca
Falls. New work patterns were
changing the roles of men and
women. There were religious
revival movements and agitation
against slavery, drinking and
immorality. It was in this context
that the Women’s Rights Movement
erupted in Seneca Falls just
as the Magill family arrived.
The year 1847 was the
same year a very famous woman
came to live in Seneca Falls. Her
name was Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. She is now considered
the founder of the Women’s
Rights Movement. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton insisted on using
her maiden name, Cady, as part
of her proper name. She also got
the minister who witnessed her
wedding to drop the “1 will
obey” part of the vows. Both of
these things were unheard of in
those days. Within a year of
arriving in Seneca Falls, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton succeeded in
pulling together such notable
The Packet Ship Henry Clay
It’s hard to imagine what passage from Ireland to America was like in the 1800s, but it may help to read a little bit about the ship that
brought the Magills to NewYork. The following is excerpted from the book Queens of the Western Ocean Page 258:
“Other fine two-deckers were soon afloat,but it was not until 1845 that the construction of three-deckers was resumed. In
that year Brown & Bell launched the Henr Henr Henry Henr Henry
y y y Cla Cla Clayyyyy Cla Cla for Grinnell,Minturn & Company`s Liverpool Line. Her depth of hold was
29 feet, 8 inches and her registered tonnage was given as 1207 tons, although it was actually somewhat in excess of 1400
tons. The New York Herald for March 26,1845, gives the following account of her launching.
“The new packet ship Henry Clay was launched yesterday morning from the yard of Brown and Bell,on the East River. She
is 189 feet and 6 inches in length ,38 feet and 6 inches in breadth, and 1402 tons in bulk. She is, probably the longest, broadest
and deepest merchant ship now floating on the ocean. In a word, the ship is a monster of the deep. The launching was
beautiful and a highly sucessful one. It was witnessed by nearly ten thousand persons.”
The Henry Clay was a well known packet ship, built for Grinnel & Minturn’s Swallowtail Line. In 1846, she went ashore on the beach
at Barnegat, New Jersey, under the command of Captain Nye, with the loss of six lives but was refloated. She was later burnt out, her
charred hulk bought by Spofford & Tileston in 1852, rebuilt and sailed for many years on their Liverpool Line. She carried a crew of
Master, four mates, carpenter, cook, steward, 30 seamen and two boys.