By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I attended a lecture last week in my hometown Salt Lake City about the Irish workers who helped build the transcontinental rail. The nation recently observed the sesquicentennial of the completion of the line at Promontory Point in Northern Utah. Some O’Briens labored on it, but none of my known relatives. Still, the lecture’s tales of triumphs and tragedies echoed my own family’s stories of working on the railroad.
At the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the railroads provided great work and economic opportunities for young Irish Catholic men in Vermont, from which most of my family hails. One such man was my maternal great uncle Sylvester “Bat” Sullivan, who may have been the most colorful of our many family railroad workers.
Bat was a fireman and worked munitions for the Central Vermont Railroad Company, which built and operated tracks connecting various Vermont towns, Montreal, and New York City. His brother Michael (my great grandfather) and nephew Martin both worked for the railroad too.
Born in 1877, Bat Sullivan was tall and slender with brown hair and eyes. Even at an early age, he liked to drink and scuffle. He was arrested at age 26 for intoxication and assault, admittedly hitting an annoying neighbor with a fence picket. A news story said he was missing one shoe and still in a “fighting mood” when the Burlington police hauled him in afterwards.
His 1907 marriage to Bessie Hennessey calmed him down a bit. He seemed content to work and raise their two young sons, until Bessie died unexpectedly in 1912. Within a few more years, he also had lost his brother Michael and father Patrick too. These events derailed his promising life.
The archives of the Burlington Free Press show he was arrested for public intoxication about ten times thereafter. He paid fines or served jail for bootlegging during Prohibition (possessing one gallon of alcohol, half a pint of gin, and two kegs of “home brew” beer) and even for undescribed “lewdness” with a divorcee named Cora Corrigan, whom he later married and who also died before Bat did.
His devoted sister Mary Agnes (“Mamie”) Sullivan, who was a bootlegger too, raised his two boys, bailed him out, and even asked the court to give him a second chance, after he had hit her, due to his “periodical alcoholism.” One of the final news stories about Bat involves a young boy reporting he saw a “dead man” down by the tracks. It was Bat, but according to the newspaper, he was not deceased, just “dead drunk.” Today, we might have more accurately said he was “self-medicating.”
Another interesting railroad man is Frederick McCarthy, born in Burlington in 1889, and my paternal-side cousin. His father Frank, distraught from the loss (to tuberculosis) of his wife Mary in 1895, left Fred in the care of Frank’s parents who lived in the old North end. There Fred joined his younger cousin, Donald O’Brien (my paternal grandfather), who also had just lost a parent to tuberculosis.
Fred and Don grew up like brothers, a bit wild at times, but under the watchful eyes of Don’s widowed mother Annie O’Brien, their spinster aunt Mary (“Mame”) McCarthy, and their grandparents Jeremiah (“Jerry”) McCarthy and Alice Fitzgerald McCarthy, both of whom emigrated from Ireland to America during the potato famine. Don was the best man when Fred married Catherine Coonerty in 1913 in Nashua, New Hampshire. Fred’s new daughter Phyllis joined the family in 1914.
Fred supported his young family working as a brakeman for the Boston & Maine Railroad. One day in October 1916, while working in the yard in Ayer, Massachusetts, the train he was on lurched and threw him off. He landed on the tracks and the rail car ran over him. He died soon after from shock and hemorrhage. Over the next several days, the family made a sad pilgrimage to the Nashua home of Annie’s and Mame’s sister, Nellie, who held the wake for the young husband, father, cousin, and nephew.
Not all the family railroad stories are dark or tragic. My grandfather Don O’Brien told some of the lighter yarns years ago in his regular column- “Vermont Vignettes”- published in the Burlington Free Press. My favorites are Don’s recollections of his railroad engineer grandfather Jeremiah McCarthy (1836-1903). Don wrote how Jerry was “a master of the fanciful yarn,” especially about alleged bear fights. One such fight ended, according to Don, “when Grandpa reached down the animal’s throat, got a good grip and turned the grizzly inside out.”
Don also recalled a railroad-related family legend from his childhood days, “As the story goes, after the tunnel under North Ave. was finished the railroad folks were wondering who’d dare drive an engine through it. It appears there was considerable fear the thing would cave in under vibration. The word went out, ‘Get Jerry McCarthy.’ They did. He climbed into the locomotive cab and drove her through!”
One of the great sagas of American progress is the building and operation of the railways. It would not have happened, however, without the determined labors and devoted sacrifices of persons like my hardworking Irish Catholic forebears. Some of them were undocumented and unwanted immigrants, which perhaps is a vivid reminder that we need the blood, sweat, and tears of all Americans, old and new, to develop the great stories of our nation.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. He blogs at http://theboymonk.com/.
