Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a monthly series on the history of ethnic and religious groups in our area.

When Tyrone native Mike McNelis first pulled up to his hotel in Ireland, he didn’t expect to be roped into a wedding party.

But, McNelis said, once he got there, he stumbled upon some distant relations who insisted he and his wife join in on the festivities.

“We crashed it, he said with a laugh. “There was probably about 12 cousins that came out … We made a connection.”

McNelis descends from one of the original Irish settlers in Tyrone, Patrick McNelis, in whose diaries much of the early history of the town was recorded. The shamrock, an image commonly associated with the Irish, is not an uncommon sight in the borough. It adorns the signs welcoming visitors in and hangs on drapings next to street lights.

The fact that there’s a region in Ireland called County Tyrone, where some of the original settlers came from, can also hardly be a coincidence, said Alice Mulhollan, one of the key organizers of the annual Irish Heritage Festival.

Beyond Tyrone, plenty of other parts of the area can feel the impact of the Emerald Isle. According to data from the 2000 Census, about 12 percent of people in Blair County at that time claimed some kind of Irish ancestry. The only European group more-represented were the Germans, according to the data.

McNelis said he thinks the folks that can trace their heritage back to Ireland have much of the same pride in that lineage as their ancestors did.

“I know the people that are Irish, they’re very proud of that,” he said. “When I think about what they came from in Ireland … it just amazes me. I just wonder if I would have had the same gumption that they did.”

Building a life

The story of the Irish people who helped found Tyrone and other towns in Blair County echoes that of the millions of others who left their life in Europe behind to come to America.

According to immigration data from the Library of Congress, Irish immigrants accounted for more than one-third of all people coming to the United States between 1820 and 1860. Many of these people crossed the Atlantic in hopes of finding a better life in the wake of the Potato Famine, which began in 1845.

In the 1840s, at the height of the famine, close to half of the immigrants coming to the U.S. were from Ireland.

All told, as many as 4.5 million people made the voyage from Ireland to the U.S., according to the Library of Congress.

Much like other groups that moved to central Pennsylvania, the Irish immigrants were drawn here by the railroad industry, said Nancy Smith, president of the Tyrone Historical Society.

“They came to do hard work because they were starving in Ireland,” she said.

Many Irish immigrants began at the bottom of the “occupational ladder,” according to the Library of Congress, leaving hard labor among the few options they had.

Job discrimination against Irish immigrants was commonplace, and many businesses hung signs blatantly refusing them work.

“When they left, all they wanted was to work and find a place of their own,” Mulhollan said. “They were greeted with signs like ‘Don’t hire the Irish.’ They worked through it.”

According to archives in “The Daily Herald,” published in Tyrone, there were more people of Irish decent working on the Pennsylvania Railroad system by 1850 than there were of any other group.

Mulhollan, who has visited Ireland several times, said there’s a museum in Northern Ireland she’s visited that really put things in perspective. Called the Ulster American Folk Park, it traces the steps of the people who left home to come to the United States.

First, it starts with a replica of a mid-1800s Irish town, Mulhollan said, complete with the shops and a version of a cottage. After traveling through that, she said, visitors enter one of the ships the immigrants would have taken across the sea and get a feel for the often-cramped spaces they traveled in.

Then, visitors emerge on the other side in Ellis Island before visiting a recreation of Irish settlement in the U.S.

Mulhollan, who runs Alice’s Garden floral shop, said it’s her dream to see something similar brought to Tyrone.

“It would be so great to do something similar here, even if we just had a replica of a cottage,” she said.

Even without the cottage, the borough has since 2007 hosted an Irish heritage festival around St. Patrick’s Day each year, which allows people to get in touch with their roots a bit, Mulhollan said.

A lost settlement

People traveling between Tyrone and Huntingdon will pass by the Birmingham Bridge, which goes over the Little Juniata River. The clover shapes above the bridge attest to the history of that particular part of the area.

Over the bridge was once a collection of homes called Irish Flats. According to “Daily Herald” archives, the little town was originally set up by the Johnstown-based Cambria Steel Company to accommodate employees at the limestone quarries the company mined there.

In its heyday of the late-1800s, 25 homes for employees, a store, a train station and living spaces for the quarry superintendent and clerk made up the little town.

Today, only one of the original buildings remains, as the rest were wiped out during the St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936.

Though the majority of the buildings in Irish Flats no longer remain standing, Smith brings out photographs and newspaper clippings about the settlement each year during the heritage festival.

The story, she said, gives an image of what the life of an immigrant laborer at that time was like, whether they were Irish or not.

The people at Irish Flats are not the only similarity between some historical Irish people and the region today.

Mulhollan said that the borough likely taking its name from County Tyrone in Ireland is appropriate, too, as the geography of the area speaks to that of its Irish counterpart.

“It looks so much like County Tyrone,” she said. “I was in the interior, and you have rolling hills and the streams, and it looks so much like it that it only stands to reason that the name is definitely suited.”

Other regions in Blair County also take their name from regions in Ireland. Newry earns its moniker from the town of the same name in modern-day Northern Ireland, according to the World Heritage Encyclopedia.

Much like Tyrone, Newry’s growth flourished thanks to the jobs brought by the railroad system, according to the encyclopedia.

A number of landmarks there today bear Irish names as well, according to the encyclopedia. St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the borough has a twin in its Irish counterpart, St. Patrick’s Church, a Church of Ireland congregation.

Honoring the past

McNelis said most of what he knows about Patrick, his ancestor, has been passed down from the generations before him.

“I remember the stories, my grandfather telling me and his family. They passed those stories down,” he said. “So I guess I’m next in line to try and pass it on to my kids.”

He said he makes sure to take the time to talk with his relatives about their shared lineage, and he’s more than willing to share stories with people outside the family, too, who just want to learn a little bit more about some of the first visitors to Tyrone.

He said getting the chance to connect with his ancestors across the pond was something he’ll never forget.

“It was neat, coming back and making the connection,” McNelis said. “We said, ‘We try to come back every 160 years or so to make sure you’re doing OK.'”

Mulhollan said exploring heritage can help people better understand why certain things just seem to be instilled in some people. She gave the superstitions and faith-based culture of her Irish ancestors as an example.

“There’s just things that become natural to you, and they’re instilled from when you’re a child,” she said. “When we have our heritage, we kind of found out why we’re that way.”

People may forget that their “ancestors are what built” them, Mulhollan said.

“If you think of your life as a building, your heritage is the foundation,” she said. “You really need to get that base – you need to know where you came from.”

People across the pond, too, took an interest in personal heritage, and people from both countries were able to share in that same legacy.

Mulhollan said it doesn’t matter what ethnic group that someone traces his or her heritage back to, they will feel some kind of connection when they return to their ancestral home, just like she did when she first visited Ireland.

“You step on the soil, and it feels like home,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re Slovak, if you’re Italian, or whatever else, the second you step on your home soil, it feels right.”

Mirror Staff Writer Paige Minemyer is at 946-7466.