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Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 20 The Acre

Brigid’s World

When Lyddie visited Brigid in the Acre, she walked into a world vastly different from what she knew in rural Vermont or the mills of Lowell. By now, Lyddie had become accustomed to life in the boarding house, the opportunities for shopping and learning, and being paid a wage that afforded her some form of independence. But life for the Irish living in the Acre was far different.

The Irish, just like their Yankee counterparts, came to Lowell for the chances the new mill city on the Merrimack River could give them. For the most part, the Irish were given the jobs that required little skill, paid low wages, and were often dangerous. While the Irish men were engaged in digging canals, building the mills, and performing backbreaking tasks such as moving machinery and bales of cotton, Irish women, if they could find employment, were often domestic servants or mill hands, like Brigid.

What would Lyddie have seen when she entered the Acre? Descriptions of what life was like in the Irish enclave are tough to find. Those that do exist were written by their Yankee counterparts and often show their bias. Why didn’t the Irish write about their own lives? The Irish living in Ireland were under strict penal laws inflicted by the English who ruled Ireland at that time. One of those rules greatly limited education so that many Irish who came to America could not read or write. Another reason the Irish in the Acre did not leave written records was that their lives were consumed by work, at least twelve hours a day, six days a week.

The descriptions we are left tell about the lives of those residing in “Paddy Camps.” The term “Paddy” is a derogatory term for the Irish. “Paddy Camps” had huts, also called shanties, made of whatever wood residents could find. Chimneys were made of wooden flour casks, which often led to fires that could quickly spread throughout the wooden homes. Oiled paper, which left just enough light in, served as windows. The houses were close together and with sanitary conditions so poor that diseases spread rapidly. A Yankee once complained that pigs ran wild through the muddy streets. Another wrote that the Irish in Lowell are, “seldom employed in the factories, having a better reputation for hard drinkers and good fighters than for industrious workmen.”

One hint we have of life in the camps are the records that have been left behind in the Catholic Burial Ground. They show that over 50% of the deaths recorded were children under the age of 5. The causes were mostly influenza and measles (both easily medicated today) and something called malaise, a catch-all term when the doctor could not diagnose the problem and the patient had no identifiable condition but just grew weaker. Women were the next highest in death rate. Most often, they died from childbirth or consumption, also called “the wasting death.” Many men also died from consumption, brown lung, or by accident in the workplace such as “crushed by stone,” “drowning,” or loss of limb.

I was privileged to peek into Brigid’s world when I took part in an archaeological dig in the Acre a few years ago. The artifacts uncovered revealed a clearer picture of Brigid’s life. The most amazing find was the outline of one of those shanties, left in the soil. Often called a “10 footer” because of the 10 x 10 footprint of the shack, these shanties housed an entire family with many children, or, multiple families would live under one roof together. We also found shank bones of cows that tell us that the residents of the Acre were eating cuts of the poorest meat, scraping every bit of flesh off the bone. Bits of broken redware pottery remind us that these people could not afford the china that Lyddie ate from in the boarding house.

The Irish lived outside of the carefully planned mill community of Lowell, with its grand boarding houses and organized streets. The Irish were the new people, the outsiders. The Acre today remains a home in which the “new people” settle. Today, the Acre neighborhood is made up of many families who come from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and a myriad of other Hispanic cultures, as well as families from Vietnam and Cambodia. They too seek the opportunities in America, just as those first Irish immigrants.

The names and faces have changed, but the story continues.