Going way back 1st county festivities were in 1856
St. Patrick’s Day and Butler County go way back, at least until 1856.
“I can tell you this, the first place in Butler County to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day was in Coylesville in Clearfield Township in 1856,” said Luanne Eisler, genealogist at the Butler Public Library.
She’s got the paperwork to prove it. An article in the Democratic Herald dated March 19, 1856, states:
“We learn that on the 17th inst. Saint Patrick’s day was celebrated in Coylesville, this county, with much interest. A large number of persons were present and, after forming into a procession marched to the village church where services appropriate to the day were performed.
“The assemblage then returned to the town with the stars and stripes waving over them where meeting was organized and an address delivered by L.S. Cantwell Esq. of Kittanning. Mr. Cantwell’s address was spoken of as being both eloquent and beautiful.”
The church spoken of in the Herald article, according to Eisler, is St. John, but before its construction many of its congregants attended St. Patrick’s Chapel, Sugar Creek.
Eisler said in 1795 a group of Irish settlers from County Donegal moved into an area 10 miles west of Kittanning that is still called Donegal Township.
The community’s 36 families’ spiritual needs were tended to by an itinerant priest until 1803 when land was set aside for a priest’s log cabin and a log church.
However, by the time the church, St. Patrick’s Chapel, Sugar Creek, was finished in 1806, the Donegal settlement had expanded across Butler County borders, so St. Patrick’s was firmly in Armstrong County.
Wherever they landed, churches were a logical outcome of a wave of immigration that began during the Revolutionary War and continued in such numbers that, according to Michael O’Brien writing in the Journal of the American Irish Historical Society XVII (1919), pages 198 to 204, “some of the villages and settlements of Butler County were among the most populous rural communities in the state.”
Butler County, itself, was named for Revolutionary War veteran Major-General Richard Butler, a native of Dublin.
And where the Irish settled, they built schools, according to O’Brien.
One of the first schoolmasters in the county was Irishman James Irvine, who settled in Adams Township in 1796 and taught school for several years.
O’Brien writes the Irish settled and set up schools in nearly all of the early townships of Butler County.
James A. McKee’s 1909 “History of Butler County” states that many of the early Irish schoolmasters “were better educated and, as a rule, all did their work well, as is sufficiently attested by the great statesmen, writers and orators of the middle of the nineteenth century, many or most (of) them graduates of the pioneer schoolhouse.”
However, their methods of instilling excellence in their students probably wouldn’t pass muster with today’s educators.
McKee writes “The early school-teachers were Irishmen and usually fond of showing their authority. Few are remembered who were noted for their mildness and none can be charged with sparing the rod unduly.”
Irish emigration to Butler County continued well into the nineteenth century as documented by the 1850 county census figures.
All of the townships reported a significant percentage of their populations were born in Ireland, with the most, 9.2 percent, in Mercer Township.
