OLEAN — Monday is St. Patrick’s Day, and the greater Olean community has several festive events in store this weekend.
Southern Tier Catholic School will host its annual St. Patrick’s Day Party and Raffle tonight at its 921 N. Union St. campus. The event runs 7 to 11 p.m. and hosts more than 500 guests.
The party and raffle includes 50/50 drawings, games and other raffles with the chance to win the grand prize of $20,000. Other cash prizes throughout the night include $2,500, $1,000, four $200 prizes and five $100 prizes. More than $25,000 in cash prizes will be awarded throughout the evening and announced at 10 p.m.
Tickets to the event can be purchased for $100 for two attendees 21 or older and entitle eligibility for all cash prize drawings as well as food and beverages. Tickets can be purchased at the school or from any student or faculty member.
Talty’s Irish Pub at 535 N. Union St. is hosting holiday events all weekend long, starting Saturday with The Bog Drivers performing live from 4 to 7 p.m.
Then on Sunday, start the day off with a traditional Irish breakfast beginning at 11 a.m., followed by a live music session from Beat City and Friends from noon to 2 p.m. The celebration wraps up Monday from 3 to 6 p.m. with live music from Gerry Dixon.
To burn off some calories either before or after your corned beef and cabbage, take part in the Olean Area Runners’ St. Patty’s Day Fun Walk and Run at 9:30 a.m. Sunday. Gather in Lincoln Park.
All these celebrations are fitting for this area because Olean and the surrounding communities have a strong connection to Ireland.
Bagpipers march along Fifth Avenue during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade March 16, 2024, in New York.
Many Irish emigrated to the United States in the 19th century, and the Irish joined ethnic groups like the Italians and Polish who moved inland from the coastal cities of the Northeast to find better opportunities, not least in digging New York’s canal system and, soon after, the railroads.
Olean, along with Salamanca, became important railroad cities where Irish found jobs on railroads and other growing industries, such as lumber yards and tanneries. There was also the establishment of a tiny hamlet called New Ireland by a group of “Famine Irish” families on what is now a fringe of Allegany State Park near Limestone.
In 1845, the devastating potato blight struck Ireland, where its people were already suffering under their British overlords. An estimated one million Irish died during the famine, and another estimated two million Irish emigrated to America, most of them in the squalid holds of the “Coffin Ships.”
In their 2005 book, “The Legends and Lore of Allegany State Park,” Paul T. Lewis and Bob Schmid wrote: “It was under these conditions that the families of McCarty, Carmody, Murphy, O’Laughlin (three brothers), Hogan, Fall, Spellacy, Townsell, Cory and Keating eventually came to settle in a beautiful spot within the boundaries of today’s (park). It would be here that they would find the freedoms only known in their dreams. Along with this they found what must have seemed like endless acres of fertile land that helped give them a new chance at life and survival.”
The authors noted: “This particular group of Allegany State Park Irish found a booming lumbering business and a huge tanning industry clamoring for more and more workers. While these 12 Irishmen would all find some sort of gainful employment in one of the local industries, each would fall back on their love of the land to maintain a subsistence farm in New Ireland itself. As time passed each family would expand its farm acreage.”
In a few short years they also found themselves at the center of the oil industry in the area: “Again the ‘Luck of the Irish’ seemed to have followed their paths, as one of twelve families wound up with six working oil wells on his property, while several others became very skilled oilmen and would eventually leave their beloved New Ireland to follow the rapidly moving oil industry, first to West Virginia and then finally to Oklahoma.
“The men and women of New Ireland found themselves confronted with almost insurmountable obstacles yet had somehow overcome them and in reality became wonderful examples of the fulfillment of the ‘American Dream.’”
In their research, Lewis and Schmid found that several young Irish boys from Father Baker’s Home in Lackawanna were sent to New Ireland, where they could live and work in the fresh air on the farms of other families.
“It would be one of these same boys that would 70 years later drive across the United States to get one last look at his beloved New Ireland only to find himself lost in the woods that exist there now. Searchers found his body a few miles from his adopted home … at the side of the trail with a peaceful serenity about him. It was as if he had come home to a place he had loved so well.”
