The Irish “Wave” in the Green Mountains
Location: Moore Free Library Gallery, 23 West Street, Newfane
Beginning in the late 1840s and lasting through the 1860s, thousands of Irish immigrants, escaping the potato famine in their homeland, settled in Vermont. They arrived in the Green Mountain State just as Vermont was undergoing a mini industrial revolution—a revolution based on railroad construction, the quarrying of slate and marble, and on textile production. Vince Feeney, author of the recently published history of the Irish in Vermont, Finnigans, Slaters and Stonepeggers, tells the little-known story of the impact of Irish immigrants on Vermont life in the middle of the nineteenth century. (Sponsored by the Historical Society of Windham County and the Moore Free Library.)