October 1850
Dear Children,
It was the first crisis in my adopted village after I arrived here in April, 1845. The town was a hive of activity. To walk down the street was to be at the most exciting circus carnival. Spring and summer were spent acclimating to my new strange world, but things were going well. November 13, 1845 started out as a lovely fall Sunday, when just after midnight fire broke out. It burned all through November 14th and didn’t stop until early the next day. We ran down to the wharf to see the ship “Thames” consumed by flames. The whale oil seeped into the deck made the flames roar like the ocean that was just over the horizon. When the fire was over 100 buildings were burned to the ground. Our fire department, the first in New York State, could not begin to handle such an inferno.
It was the most spectacular sight I have ever witnessed in my life, and the most horrifying. I had been here six months, enough to love my new home almost as much as I loved the Emerald Isle. All the magical luck inhabiting this special place seemed to evaporate. I asked myself if God cursed this town and my place in it. Had we made a terrible mistake coming here, leaving everything and everyone we knew and loved? Despair was not too strong a word for the feeling that overcame me on the morning after the two-day fire had finally spent its fury.
Our Irish luck did not desert us entirely, as the east end of town was where all the destruction occurred, and I was living with my brother John and his wife Elizabeth west of Division Street, the dividing line down the middle of town. It was not the fancy side of town, and we did not have much to lose. What little we had we gladly shared with our less fortunate neighbors, thankful to God that we had a home. John’s friends and fellow recent Irish immigrants, Tom Kiernan and Parker King, both lost their businesses. It was a bitter irony as we were inordinately proud of their success as though it were our own. The first families of Sag Harbor were very hard hit, as the majority of businesses, no matter how prosperous, were gone.
The world was transformed. The fine Yankee families were suddenly not so high and mighty. They were asking us for help, to bring blankets, meals and woolens. People who had never spoken to us before came up on the street to talk about what happened. I was hugged and wept on by mere acquaintances that adversity had soldered into neighbors and fellow survivors. We spent all day digging, sweeping, and piling up charred ruins of furniture, household goods, and merchandise from the stores. The past had to be dispensed with as fast as possible. The future started today.
In the weeks that followed, I saw another transformation. People brought low and impoverished, were rising up with renewed energy. They were vowing to rebuild, not just what was there before, but new buildings, bigger and better. This attitude was a revelation to me. In Ireland, when despair set in, it was for a very long time, maybe permanently. The rebellion of our parents and great grandparents against the English oppressors was seeping out of us. We became tired and more than a little hopeless against endless opposition. Yet here in this young village, the determination was raw and fresh. There was no cowering and complaining, just a “roll up of the sleeves” energy to fight back.
For the first time I felt like I could and would become an American. I was more like my Yankee neighbors than I was like the farmers back home. I could fight too! I wasn’t afraid and I had plenty of energy. That night we all went to church to pray for the new Sag Harbor, the one that would rise up and be even better than the last. We knew it to be a place where opportunity was just a strong pair of hands and a long day’s work away. In only a few short months the town of Sag Harbor and I had been through something monumental together, and I was never to be a stranger again. I was a full participant, not a lonely foreign girl away from home for the first time, on the outside looking in. In the fire, I had found my new home.
