Krista Luttrell

If you stand on Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine, and look towards the Casco Bay waterfront, you’ll see the brick and stone remnants of the old Portland Company rising up from Fore Street. In the 1800s, this was the city’s biggest employer, a large factory that made locomotives, steam engines, and other heavy machinery. Most of its workers were Irish immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic, hoping for a better life than one filled with famine, oppression, and extreme poverty in the one they left behind.

While Portland had two major Irish neighborhoods, these Irish immigrants settled in the one on the lower half of Munjoy Hill and at its base. Here they were close to the busy factories where they worked and to one another. Their neighborhood became a replica of the various communities in Ireland they came from, filled with familiar faces, a shared mother tongue and dialect of English, and a shared memory of where they had come from and why they had left.

Ireland is an island country about the same geographical size as the state of Maine. And, like Ireland, Maine was and still is predominantly rural. The majority of Irish refugees left agricultural work in quiet, green landscapes to settle in noisy, rapidly growing cities, like Portland, during the era of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1850s, my ancestor, Michael J. Burke, was one of them. He joined several older siblings and his mother, who had arrived in America a few years before him, and it was they who likely paid for his ocean passage.

Jobs at The Portland Company were tough and exhausting. Irishmen worked long hours, often with little time for anything else, and their meager paychecks were just enough to support their families and cover living costs. They didn’t have much to give, but they still shared whatever little extra they had. And, they were proud to do so. Charitable organizations, such as the Irish American Relief Association, established by the Irish community, also popped up. These organizations assisted in collecting remittances to aid struggling members of their communities in Maine and to send funds to loved ones struggling across the Atlantic. Most of these workers didn’t come to America alone in spirit, even if they traveled by themselves. They kept their families close in their hearts and minds, and they felt the hardships of those still in Ireland. For the families, friends, and neighbors back home who received the remittances, that money could mean the difference between going hungry and having a meal, or between losing their small cottage and keeping a roof over their heads.

If remittances went towards a ship’s passage, a paper ticket to America may have offered the greatest chance of survival for some loved ones, such as a brother, a sister, a parent, a cousin, a friend, or a neighbor. They, too, made the same ocean passage and embarked on a new life journey of their own. One person would arrive, find work at The Portland Company, the Railroad, a factory or mill, or elsewhere, oftentimes settling down into the same neighborhood on Munjoy Hill, and then begin the same cycle of saving and sending until another loved one could follow. And then another. And then another still.

Chain migration to Portland, this was. In this way, the Irish community on Munjoy Hill grew steadily over the decades, knit together not just by proximity but by the extraordinary lengths its people went to support one another. They understood, from their own experience, exactly what it meant to arrive in a strange city in a foreign land with little more than desire in their hearts and a belief they too would make it. And so they reached back, again and again across the Atlantic, to bring others forward with them. Chain migration across generations, and, in some families, as in Michael Burke’s, lasted well into the next century and was fully supported by an honestly earned day’s pay at the Portland Company.

Thank you for reading.

♥︎ Krista

Feature Photo: Remnants of The Portland Company. © 2024 K. Luttrell