utopias

In 1838, a handful of immigrant families stepped off the Boston docks onto a steamboat bound for a new Irish utopia in Aroostook County, Maine. They hoped the County’s rich farmland would offer a better life than did the filthy waterfront shantytowns and hostile Yankees of Boston.

During the years before thefamine (1845-1852), most Irish immigrants were young, single men. They had few skills and could only get the most backbreaking, dangerous jobs, digging canals and building railroads. The saying, “An Irishman is buried under every railroad tie,” reflected their short life expectancy. They died from the cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox and typhoid epidemics that swept through their crowded sllums. They died on the job, crushed by crates on the docks or blast injuries from dynamited rock. Exhaustion and malnutrition made them vulnerable to disease and accidents.Protestants of all classes harassed, attacked, and humiliated the newcomers

As historian Thomas H. O’Connor wrote, it was the one city in the entire world where an Irish Catholic should never, ever set foot.

Their Catholic bishop, Benedict Fenwick, had agonized over the plight of his Irish flock.  He dreamed of giving them a fresh start in a sanctuary of fresh air and green fields. And so he began to plan his “New Jerusalem.”

A City That Hated Them

Irish people had lived in New England since well before the Revolution. By 1834, roughly 70,000 Irish ad settled in Boston. Like the Irish in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, they came because work was available digging canals, building railroads, paving streets and erecting factories and houses.

Boston, however, proved to be a poor choice. The city had an insular, Yankee population with a long history of hating the Irish and loathing Catholicism. Worse, Boston offered little opportunity for unskilled laborers.

Before the Revolution, Boston had celebrated “Pope Night,” a street pageant mocking Roman Catholics. It only got worse for the Irish over the next few decades. They lived under constant threat of violence. Popular media depicted them as apelike, criminal, immoral drunks.

A Bishop’s Resolve

Benedict Fenwick, a former president of Georgetown College, took over as bishop of Boston in 1825. The scion of a prominent Maryland family, he had an aristocratic bearing and could have mingled easily with Boston’s Brahmins—if they had let him. Instead, he devoted himself to the city’s poor Irish, ministering to them in their hovels during epidemics of tuberculosis and cholera.

Boston’s Yankees viewed him as an agent of the pope’s plot to take over America. Threats were made on his life. Then, on Aug. 10, 1834, the Protestant minister Lyman Beecher came to Boston and delivered sermons railing against “the despotic character and hostile designs of popery.”

Over the next two days, a mob burned and pillaged an Ursuline convent in Charlestown. The nuns and young girls inside fled for their lives.

 

Irish Catholics throughout the region vowed revenge, but Fenwick tried to keep the peace. He dispatched priests to calm Irish workers who were planning to take the train to Boston to seek retribution. Fenwick then asked the Legislature to repay the diocese for the ruined convent. Lawmakers soundly defeated the proposal.

Police arrested 13 of the perpetrators, but a jury acquitted 12 of them. The governor pardoned the one found guilty.

“Great rejoicing in Charlestown on Saturday among the mob in consequence of their acquittal,” Fenwick wrote in his diary.  “Fifty guns were fired on the occasion! Thus iniquity has prevailed at last.”

Clearly, Irish Catholics in Boston had a problem. But what to do about it?

One popular solution was to send the Irish to the new territories in the West. The elite viewed the frontier as a safety valve for the immigrants flooding into eastern cities. Governor Edward Everett even sent a letter to the Anglican archbishop of Dublin suggesting the western territories could absorb the unskilled Irish as they had other European immigrants.

But Fenwick looked east instead.

An Irish Utopia

Reform and self-improvement filled the air in the 1830s. Idealists like Joseph Smith established little utopias where like-minded people could live together in harmony. Smith started United Order colonies in Missouri, Ohio, and Utah. Protestants founded the New Philadelphia Colony in Pennsylvania and the Oberlin and Community of United Christians colonies in Ohio. Throughout New England, a dozen Shaker villages thrived.

Fenwick decided to locate his utopia in the isolated North Maine Woods near the Canadian border. He would call it Catholic Township.

With diocese funds, he bought 11,000 acres (17.2 square miles) for $13,597. He had the land divided into 50-, 80- and 100-acre plots and offered it for sale: $2 an acre near the road, $1.50 an acre away from it.

He published ads in Boston’s Catholic newspaper, The Pilot. One sought “those industrious Irish families who wish to retire into the country from the noise and corruption of the cities in order to devote themselves to agriculture.” Another read, “No care will be spared to render this little colony one of the most happy and flourishing of the Catholic Church.”

Fenwick then made the arduous journey to the place he called “Catholic Township”—a trip he would make often. He traveled by steamboat, then rode a horse or took a wagon or oxcart along a rough military road cut through the woods (now Route 11).

Over the next few years, Fenwick supervised the dredging of a canal and the building of a sawmill and a church. He also drew up plans for a Catholic college and seminary, which he would name Holy Cross.

Arriving at the Irish Utopia

In 1838, about 250 settlers arrived in Catholic Township, soon renamed Benedicta in the bishop’s honor. They began clearing land for farms. During the winter, they cut down trees.  Then in May or June they burned the land over and planted potatoes, which emerged as a major crop in the County.

Fenwick always made sure the little church had an Irish priest, and the Benedictans attended Mass regularly.

But the settlers suffered through harsh winters, a short growing season and profound isolation. Stories of hardship reached the ears of the Boston Irish, and Bishop Fenwick could not persuade many more families to join his experiment. By 1842, he had to concede defeat. He began making plans to build his college and seminary west of Boston, and in 1842, he bought land in Worcester for the future College of the Holy Cross.

A Legacy of Resilience

The little community of Benedicta struggled on. It incorporated as a town in 1872, growing slowly to a peak of 500 residents in the late 19th century.

But by 1907, its population had fallen to 350. A Catholic missionary congregation, the Society of the Divine Word, tried to put a positive spin on life in Benedicta. The Christian Family reported: “It is 40 miles from the nearest town and 100 miles from a railroad, and yet, Benedicta has electric light service, municipal water supply, macadamized roads, two hotels, several fine buildings and all the conveniences of a thoroughly modern city… Vice is unheard of in the town, which was, in part, founded to save victims of drink.” (The nearest liquor store was 44 miles away.)

The population continued to dwindle, despite what The Christian Family called its “prosperity, peace and plenty.” In 1975, its elementary school closed, and two years later, so did the Sisters of Mercy convent.

In 1987, Benedicta dissolved its formal government structure and reverted to an unorganized territory.

That same year, a reporter for United Press International visited what remained of the would-be utopia: little more than a general store, a church, and a few wood houses standing in an immense green valley.

“Remaining families have clawed out a living while surviving the constant winds and heavy snows that further isolate the remote community 70 miles north of Bangor,” he reported. Residents worked on dairy or potato farms, as woodcutters, or in the paper mills of Millinocket, 30 miles away.

Still, the 225 people of Benedicta took pride in their unique heritage and planned a Fourth of July celebration with a big family reunion. Most of the 45 families traced their ancestry to those first Irish settlers and still practiced the Catholic faith.

“About 70 percent of the townspeople flock to the white clapboard church for Mass,” he reported.

End Notes

Images: Featured image illustration created by ChatGPT. St. Benedict Church courtesy Google Maps. Fenwick Hall By GuardianH – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=131933682. Potato field: Delano, Jack, photographer. Potato farms in Aroostook County, Me. Maine Aroostook County United States, 1940. Oct. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017877410/.