In 1908, Benard Daly, "a graceful young Irish comedian with a marvelous tenor voice," took the stage at the Towle Theater in downtown Hammond to sing Irish ballads and perform John Murphy's play "The Kerry Gow."
An ad in The Hammond Times exhorted people "not to miss the most realistic race scenes ever produced on any stage" with thoroughbred racehorses and a flock of "wonderfully trained" carrier pigeons.
It was entertainment straight from the old country in an era when Irish immigrants flocked to Northwest Indiana.
"In terms of Northwest Indiana, it's a unique area for Irish immigration," said Nicole Martinez-LeGrand, the multicultural collections coordinator for the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis. "Indiana was populated from the bottom up. The capital was first in Corydon and then Indianapolis, so you initially started to see Irish farmers coming to that area. It wasn't until the late 19th century that you started to see an Irish population come in Hammond as it became more industrialized with packing houses. George Hammond built packing houses that rivaled the stockyards of Chicago, Inland Steel was built in East Chicago and then you started to see Irish immigration in Northwest Indiana."
Irish immigrants settled all across Northwest Indiana after it industrialized, including in Chesterton, where there are still several Irish pubs, and the unincorporated community of Leroy, which still has a sign bragging it was "one of Lake County's first Irish settlements." The Region even once had a neighborhood known as Little Ireland. Lake County's The Friendly Sons of Erin have given out Shamrock and John F. Kennedy awards for public service every year for decades.
The group of Region residents of Irish-Catholic extraction formed after the yellow stripes in the middle of Broadway in downtown Gary were mysteriously painted green allegedly "by Leprechauns" on the eve of St. Patrick's Day in 1959, prompting a Chicago Tribune story with the headline “In Gary Even Broadway Is Wearing Green."
The Friendly Sons of Erin normally observe St. Patrick's Day with traditional Celtic music, Irish folk dancing and other festivities at Avalon Manor, but it's on hiatus until 2022 because of the pandemic. Many Northwest Indiana communities normally stage annual St. Patrick's Day parades, including Crown Point, Michigan City, and Hammond's Hessville neighborhood.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates about 728,310 Hoosiers, or more than a tenth of the state's population, has some Irish ancestry. Neighboring Illinois is even more green with more than 1.44 million residents of Irish descent.
A roundabout route to the Region
The Irish started to flee Ireland in droves during the Great Potato Famine in the 1840s, landing on the East Coast and later the South Side of Chicago. South Side Irish started to move a little further southeast to Northwest Indiana in the late 19th century as industries, businesses, farms and shops popped up around George Hammond's meatpacking plant in what was then known as State Line Slaughterhouse.
By the early 1900s and 1920s, Irish societies like the Knights of Columbus were forming in Northwest Indiana, Martinez-LeGrand said.
Lake County had one of the highest Irish populations in the state at the time. The 1900 U.S. Census found 573 Lake County residents were born in Ireland, or about 2% of the population. Within a decade, an estimated 729 Lake County residents were Irish-born.
The Indiana Historical Society estimates the Irish populations grew in Northwest Indiana during the 1920s, while it declined in other parts of the state, as people flocked to work at the mills.
"While U.S. Steel brought in a lot of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, there were quite a few Irish from the beginning," said Northwest Indiana historian and Indiana University Northwest Professor Emeritus of History James B. Lane. "They were often foremen or skilled workers brought in from mills in Pennsylvania."
The Irish played a prominent role in the rise of the Democratic Party to power in Lake County, Lane said. They had representation such as Joseph E. Finerty, who served as Gary mayor in the 1940s, and Ray J. Madden, who represented Northwest Indiana in Congress from 1943 to 1977.
"The Irish were a major part of that coalition," Lane said. "The Irish came for the mill opportunities at a time when they sought immigrants willing to work for less and endure an 80-hour work week. U.S. Steel was specifically going to places where people were eager to come here and work even under the worst conditions."
'Little Ireland'
A 1923 Hammond Times article about a telephone exchange in Whiting had the headline "Irish hello girls high strung, says telephone expert." The story, archived by the Indiana State Library, opened with the lead: "German and Polish girls make the best telephone operators. Irish girls learn quicker than the others but are high-spirited and talk back to patrons."
The Irish were among the first settlers of Whiting even though it's generally thought of as a Slovac and Eastern European community, said Gail Kosalko, curator of the Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society Museum. In the lakefront city's early days, Irish immigrants used to march in St. Patrick's Day parades down Center Street.
"The Germans and the Irish were the first to settle in Whiting," she said. "The Irish came with the railroads."
Whiting at one point had as many as six Catholic churches, each serving its own ethnicity. St. Michael's was long the Irish church and school in town.
"Even if you lived next door to another church, you would travel across town to the Irish church," Kosalko said. "There are a few Irish families left in town but it's very mixed now. Having specific ethnic churches doesn't make sense anymore. But it was an interesting time. The Croatian church had a big lamb cookout every year that everybody in town went to. It was a nice kind of crossover where everybody got invested in everybody else."
St. Luke was long the Catholic church and school for the Irish community in Gary.
"Many referred to the surrounding neighborhood as Little Ireland since a great number of residents were of Irish descent," John C. Trafny wrote in "Gary's East Side." "There were 125 original members and the young parish saw to the spiritual and educational needs of all East Side Catholics. In time adult religious and social organizations were founded and athletic programs were set up for the school's students."
'Push, pull and stick'
Many Region residents can trace their roots to Irish immigrants, which they're discovering as genealogy gains in popularity thanks to websites like MyHeritage and Ancestry.com, Martinez-LeGrand said.
"My family came to Indiana Harbor nearly a century ago, as did the Irish to be close to industry," Martinez-LeGrand said. "With immigration, it's push, pull and stick. Something has to push them out of wherever they're coming from, pull them here and make their family stick so they have roots."
The Irish helped shape the Calumet Region, but were just one of many ethnicities from the world over to do so.
"You have German farmers. You had the Dutch in Demotte, Highland, Lansing and South Holland. There's the saying, 'if you ain't Dutch, you ain't much,'" she said. "Northwest Indiana always has been, and continues to be, a fabulous mix of cultural backgrounds. I've often talked to people who said growing up in Northwest Indiana prepared them for foreign service. It's internationally diverse."