After John Gillespie Sr. came to what is today Donegal Township in 1796, he built a simple cabin and returned to his previous residence to retrieve his few worldly possessions. Among those possessions were his young children, whom he “packed … on either side of [his] horse in huge bags or sacks especially prepared for this purpose.”

Gillespie was one of the many Irish Catholics who would call the region home. And he was not the only one to transport his children via saddlebag, according to the 1883 History of Butler County by Waterman, Watkins, & Co.

Thomas Haggerty arrived in 1798 with a bucket of dishes and an “old horse” carrying his young sons, “one on each side of the horse, and their heads protruding from the bags.” Meanwhile, his wife walked, “driving a cow and carrying in her arms her baby and the rim of her spinning wheel.”

Named after the northernmost county in Ireland from which the settlers or their forebears came, Donegal Township offered rolling hills with rich soil and natural resources, including coal, which pioneers could use for domestic heating and small trades.

Today’s residents may share names with some of the early pioneers who made this region home. Through hard work, the Barnharts, Duffys, Dugans, McCues, O’Donnells, Stewarts, McElroys and other families gave the township a reputation “as the home of an industrious, enterprising and progressive people.”

Arriving before the lands were cleared for farming, settlers subsisted on small gardens and game. Bears, wolves, panthers, rattlesnakes and deer provided sustenance—and fodder for many an early huntsman’s tall tales.

With farmlands cleared, residents of Donegal Township raised crops and pursued the simple pleasures of life. Families worshipped and worked together. When time and weather permitted, settlers gathered for “frolics” and dances. Young people fell in love and got married, children played in the fields and the old folks were laid to rest in country graveyards.

With few roads and little money, residents of Donegal Township worked for the necessities of life and “made do” with what they had.

“Their poverty was painful,” Waterman wrote, but “aristocracy then being unknown,” children and adults went barefoot in good weather. They worked and wove fabric. Simple goods were considered “good enough.”

And settlers were innovative. They constructed the furniture and equipment they needed to make homes and to till the land: wooden plows, straw horse collars and hair bridles, and “treadle” wagons with wheels sawed from large trees.

Donegal’s first distillery was operating in 1802 or 1803, even before its first grist mill opened in 1805.

As in other parts of the county, women were adept at frontier life. Mrs. Haggerty, for example, used firebrands to drive wild animals away when they threatened her children. Women harvested crops with a sickle, split rails, processed grain and wove fabric to keep their families clothed and fed.

Neighbors looked out for neighbors. History notes that Donegal’s better hunters provided meat to those “who were not skillful sportsmen” and their families.

Preserving their Catholic heritage, residents of Donegal Township hauled lumber for miles over unfinished roads to construct the modest St. Patrick Church east of Rattigan, just over the county line in Sugarcreek Township, Armstrong County.

The green fields, fresh air and hard work made the settlers hardy. Many had large families, and some of those who lived to adulthood enjoyed long lives, well into their 80s. Patrick McElroy, for example, was said to have lived to be 106, and was reported to have walked the 28-mile roundtrip to Butler in one day, just one year before he died.

Chicora, founded as Barnhart Village and then known as Millerstown, was the community hub of the township, with banks, hotels, merchants, schools, churches and social societies thriving throughout the 19th century—but it was not the only town.

As in other parts of Butler County, the discovery of oil in the 1870s brought the promise of riches to obscure corners of Donegal Township.

St. Joe Village was one of those boom towns.

Born “within the space of a month, almost as if by magic” at the crossroads of St. Joe-Landgraf Road and Game Reserve Road, the village was home to about 1,000 oil speculators, laborers and merchants who hoped to strike it rich. The village boasted 250 new residences, a telegraph office, opera house, post office, “three large hotels, grocery and dry good stores, restaurants, etc., etc.,” according to the 1883 history.

For five years, 1874-1879, “all was life, activity and bustle in this village, and people were full of bright anticipations,” Waterman wrote. But the area was abandoned when the wells tapped out.

Today’s residents can only imagine life in other Donegal villages like Plummer, a commercial and residential town three miles from Millerstown; Danville, a village near St. Joe where oilmen could “indulge in less healthy exercise at will;” Greer, at the railroad station just east of the junction of Route 68 and today’s Medical Center Road; and Rattigan, in the southeast corner of the county, at the corner of Rattigan Road and Conerty Road, along the banks of Buffalo Run.

“We’re a pretty quiet township,” said longtime resident Leslie Stewart, Donegal Township’s secretary and treasurer. “We don’t have a lot of new businesses, churches, schools.”

Stewart lives in Rattigan, a hamlet she likes to call a “suburb of Chicora.”

Stewart said the township is home to many longstanding family farms, keeping the district agricultural throughout the 20th century.

“It’s next to impossible to find land in Donegal Township,” she said. “People like to stay. Once they have land, they like to keep it forever.”

In this quiet, family-oriented, peaceful place, she said, it will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Katrina Jesick Quinn is a contributing writer for the Butler Eagle and a professor at Slippery Rock University. She is an editor of “From the Arctic to the Orient: Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age” (McFarland) and “The Civil War Soldier and the Press” (Routledge).