Complicating the Rural to Urban Hypothesis Among Irish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historians have long noted that the majority of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine (1845-1852) came from rural areas in Ireland and, surprisingly, settled in American cities, quickly becoming an urbanized population. Explanations for this phenomenon have centered on social factors, which are certainly significant, but they have neglected the physical landscape and often assumed all areas of American cities were highly urbanized. Using the nation’s largest city—and what by 1860 was dubbed “the most Irish city in the Union”—as a case study, this paper takes a closer look at the particular locations and environments in New York City in which mid-19th-century Irish immigrants clustered. It combines evidence from documents, folklore, and archaeological excavations to consider the features that likely attracted Irish immigrants to certain locations and how they utilized local resources, including continuing rural practices of plant cultivation and animal husbandry.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow