Focusing on an Irish ancestor for St Patrick's Day and Women’s History Month leads to researching saloon keepers in Troy, New York at the height of the collar and iron industries.
Around the age of 19, my second great-grandmother, Mary Powell left her home in Ireland. Within 6 years of arriving in America, Mary had married, birthed two children and had lost her husband.
In the 1880 census, Mary Hall (née Powell, later Sullivan) was a 25-year old widow with two children under two years old. (This is similar to another second great grandmother, Annie Tormey who I profiled in this blog post.)
1880 Census for Mary and Her Family
Hall was a fellow-born Irishman likely working for the nearby Burden Iron Works in South Troy and probably died from a work accident. (This provides another potential connection to my other family line in South Troy - a death from injuries sustained at Burden Iron.) As the leading cause of death for Irish immigrants in the late 1800s were work-related accidents, this is not much of an analytic leap. (1)
In 1880, over 8,000 women worked in the collar industry, which consisted of jobs ranging from stitching, to ironing to laundry and finishing work. (2) Collar work typically provided women with a similar salary to men working in the iron industry. Yet lower rungs of the ladder positions, such as working in laundry, would have paid less with harsher working conditions. Mary's neighbors in her apartment building had two teenage daughters employed as laundresses. Mary's oldest daughter, Maggie, would work in the collar industry working as a "collar stamper" in 1900.
Female Saloon Keepers
Yet Mary did not work in the collar industry. Instead, her job title is listed as "keeps saloon", which was intriguing. The term "saloon" invokes pioneer women out west, working behind the counter and serving men. But what did it look like as a saloon keeper in a booming upstate town in the 1880s?
A simple search of the 1880 census results in more than 2,000 men who had the job title of "saloon keeper", compared to only 23 women. One other woman I found was a widow running a saloon and having multiple boarders, mostly working for Burden Iron.
But most women were not running typical establishments you would find today. Instead, female saloon keepers were often running informal, unlicensed "kitchen saloons", run out of their tenements flats. (3) Most were immigrant women, often widows. This fits Mary's profile, a young widow with two young children to provide for and potentially no nearby relatives. Did Mary have any kinship with other nearby widows or other saloon keepers?
Mary's "saloon" was located at 310 Second Street, Troy, NY. One of the units, a 3 bedroom was recently available for rent in 2022.
Mary's "Saloon" and Home in 1880; Screenshot from 2022 Google Maps
Given how informal the business was, I imagine Mary serving local friends and potential family of her late husband. Some of her guests may have attended nearby Troy Trojan games, a then professional baseball team in the National League, who played from 1878 until 1882. Did my ancestor have time to attend a baseball game? Would her saloon have been busier after a game or after payday? The answers to any of these questions can only ever be guesses.
By the 1890s, these rare "saloon kitchens" had all but disappeared, given tougher licensing policies and the appearance of more commercial breweries. (3)
Beneath the Steeple
Mary only lived two blocks away from St. Joseph's Catholic Church, nicknamed the "Iron Workers Church" given its location in South Troy. St. Joseph's Church is still an active parish today and continues to serve the Irish community in Troy. Four years before Mary arrived in the U.S., Troy had its first Irish Catholic mayor in 1871.
Below is how the church would have looked to Mary when she was likely a congregant in the late 1870s through the 1900s. Was she supported at all by the congregants here?
Second Marriage
I would like to think Mary remarried because she found a second love. She remarried less than three years later to another fellow Irishman, Matthew Sullivan, my second great-grandfather. He was 8 years her senior and also worked for Burden Iron. Matthew had been living in the United States since 1864, coming over at a similar age as Mary.
Matthew worked as an “Iron puddler”, described as perhaps one of the higher skilled jobs in the iron profession. An iron puddler would stir molten iron in a furnace to remove impurities and produce wrought iron. (To see an iron puddler, albeit from nearly 30 years later in a different part of the world, see this photo in MoMA's collection.) Despite a higher skilled position, he could not read or write.
1900 Census Showing Job and Inability to Read or Write
Burden Iron was already on a downturn by the turn of the 20th century as steel production increased. In the 1900 census, Matthew is listed as not having employment for 10 months of the year. Between 1885 and 1910, the number of puddlers dropped from 40,000 to 2,000. (4)
Mary was no longer working as a saloon keeper in 1900. Their house location, 352 Second St, which they owned instead of rented, is now an empty lot.
Closing Time
Mary only lived until 1904, passing away at the age of 50. Her second daughter, Catherine (my great-grandmother) would have been only 16 years old. Catherine would herself die at a similar age.
1910 Census Record Showing Matthew is a Widow
Like most of my ancestors of this generation, they are buried in unmarked graves and no photographs exist anymore (to my knowledge). It will remain a mystery if I had any physical similarities to Mary. Would I look more like a Powell than a Sullivan? Would I see any similarities? One mystery I can solve is contacting St. Joseph's rectory for any available records, including burial locations.
Analogizing yourself to people who lived generations before can draw drastic comparisons. By the time I was 25, I had travelled to nine countries, gotten my degree, and had begun a second career. I was married like her, but I hadn’t spent 30 days en route to a location to call home. How different your final destination must feel when you have spent so long seeking it.
Sources:
(1) Barrett, J. (2012). The Irish Way. p. 115.
(2) Berkin, C., & Norton, M. B. (Eds.). (1984). Reconceptualizing family, work, and labor organizations: Working women in Troy, 1860-1890. Review of Radical Political Economics, 16 (2), 1-16.
(3) Powers, M. (1994). The "Poor Man's Friend": Saloonkeepers, Workers, and the Code of Reciprocity in U.S. Barrooms, 1870-1920. International Labor and Working-Class History, (45), 1-15.
(4) Santos, M. W. (1984). Brother Against Brother: The Amalgamated and Sons of Vulcan at the A.M. Byers Company, 1907-1913. Lynchburg College.
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