Shadow of the Phoenix - Sheboygan County Historical Research ...

Excerpt from PLOUGHS AMONG THE ESKERS
A story of the settlement of the Kettle Moraine
By Bernard Michaels
The Thomas and Mona Scanlan Heraty family standing in front of their cream city brick
home. The homestead was located on County Highway V about one-half mile south of Hwy
67 in the town of Mitchell. Heraty was an influential part of early immigrant life in the area
known as “The Kettles”, acting as an insurance agent, justice-of-the-peace and postmaster.
The Irish came to the Kettles
poorly equipped to begin farming
in the wilderness. Land buying
had all but exhausted their meager
funds and now they were faced
with the expense of outfitting.
Common to the era, equipment
prices were high in the frontier
villages. In Sheboygan a yoke of
oxen sold for between fifty-five
and sixty dollars, a wagon brought
fifty-four dollars, cows were sixteen
dollars a head, a plow cost
ten dollars and a harrow, four dollars.
Many settlers walked to their
Kettle "holdings" carrying little
more than an axe and grub hoe
with which to establish their new
livelihood.
The first recorded Irish settler
was Dan Murphy who settled on
section 18 in 1846. He was followed
by the John O'Reilly family,
lately of County Meath, who
settled on the town line of Scott
and Mitchell in the fall of 1847.
They were joined the following
year by Michael and Ann Murray who "took land" east of Butler Lake. Within a decade, a hundred families from the
"Old Sod" had gathered among the eskers and kames of the area. By 1860 those parts of Scott, Mitchell, and Osceola
included by today's forest boundaries had become an Irish enclave.
In 1854, the settlement built a log church on a small hilltop of section twenty-one. The Congregation of St.
Michaels was served by a circuit-riding priest until being assigned its first pastor in 1859. The rapid influx of Irish settlers
soon gave need for a larger church and in 1861, the timber-frame structure serving today's parish was completed.
The weathered inscriptions in the churchyard cemetery provide the origin of many of its early members. While the Gaelic
place-names represent all corners of Ireland, most are from the counties west of the River Shannon, the region affected
most severely by the famine.
Although many of the Irish migrated to the Kettles in family sized units, two mass arrivals to the region also occurred
during the 1850s. One of these was a group of fifteen families from New York state who had been previously
engaged in digging canals in that area. Settling on adjacent holdings along the east shore of Long Lake, they included
such names as Quinn, Franey and Gilboy. In 1857, a crew of Irish laborers, with their families, was brought into the
northern Kettles to build the Sheboygan-Mississippi Railroad. When rail construction was temporarily halted for a year,
the workers were forced to turn to the land for survival, some finding work with farmers, others buying land of their
own. Later when the railroad was finally completed, many of these people remained in the community.
The Irish immigrants brought to the community their love of social gatherings, music, dancing and just plain
"visiting" which even the tragedy of the famine had not diminished. More than any others they showed a preference for
working in groups. As settlers in the moraine area, they raised their buildings, cleared the land and picked the everpresent
stones with the help of their neighbors. These community work gatherings often numbered scores of men, many
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