When the O’Shea family arrived at the Cliff Mine location in 1857, 13 year-old Timothy O’Shea had already seen a great deal of the United States, their industrial complexes, housing, oil-fueled street lamps — and the attitude of Americans toward Irish immigrants.

The O’Sheas, like thousands of other Irish immigrants, arrived in Boston from Ireland in 1856. It was not a good time for an Irishman to be in Boston, and worse, a bad time to be Irish and Catholic.

Boston was colonized by the Puritans in the 17th century, another of the Protestant reformer sects who followed the teachings of John Calvin, who declared that the Church of England must be purified of anything Calvin deemed unscriptural and/or Catholic.

Oliver Cromwell, who seized the British government and executed King Charles I in 1649, the same year he invaded Ireland. By the time Cromwell had finished the military aspect of his conquest of Ireland, more than 15% of the Irish population was dead. Cromwell wasn’t done with Ireland yet. He and his Parliamentarians then confiscated almost all of the lands owned by Irish Catholics and distributed them to English Protestants. Other Catholic landowners were exiled to Western Ireland, and some 50,000 more Irish citizens were forced into indentured servitude and shipped to British colonies in America.

Whatever citizens of 19th century Boston thought about Irish Catholic immigrants was nothing new to the arrivals. Bostonians were not a threat. Particularly during the famine period, Irish arrived in Boston by the thousands.

PBS’s American Experience feature article “Boston Immigrant Population,” states that most of the Irish arriving in that city were the poorest classes of Ireland and did not have the skills of previous immigrants to Boston. Based on historical documentation, it can be argued that the O’Sheas were among the poorest classes of Irish, but at the same time, they were not unskilled. Timothy, his brothers, and their father were already experienced and skilled hard rock miners when they left Ireland. Because of that, after their arrival in Boston in 1856, they remained there less than a year.

Finding employment working on the Hoosac Tunnel in Boston, the historical record suggests they worked there only long enough to raise the funds to continue their journey to the Lake Superior copper region. In 1857, they arrived at the Cliff Mine, a deep-shaft, hard rock mine carved out of the U.S. northwest frontier just a decade before the O’Sheas arrived.

There were stark contrasts between the Cliff Mine location and the West Cork mines. Most notably was the contrast in living conditions.

Back in Beara, the O’Sheas had almost certainly lived in typical Irish housing of the time. An often quoted 1841 census used to describe housing conditions in west County Cork, states, in part:

“Most of the houses are of the most miserable description, far surpassing in that respect what I have seen anywhere else — they have neither windows nor chimneys, and when you enter them, you are in almost complete darkness, with an atmosphere around you that you would not leave a pig in.”

The Skibbereen Heritage Centre states that these single-room dwellings were built cheaply using whatever materials were available, usually sod, clay or stone, with necessary timbers dug from nearby bogs and the thatch for the roofs harvested from local fields. Often, the human inhabitants shared the living space with a pig, according to many accounts.

Similarly, at the Lake Superior district locations, dwellings were made from locally sourced materials.

Methodist missionary, Rev. John H. Pitezel, in his memoir, Lights and Shade of Missionary Life, described the dwelling the company allowed him to use while he was conducting missionary work at the Cliff Mine in 1847.

“This was a cabin built of round logs, a story and a half high, divided below into two apartments by a board partition,” Pitezel wrote, “with a wood-shed made of rough boards.”

While the Cliff houses did not have cellars, they did include plank floors. Pitezel noted the houses did not have chimneys, they did have pipes to exhaust the smoke from a cook stove and a heating stove. Pitezel also noted, however, that his house was, in fact, “much better than some of our neighbors had.”

While log houses could be constructed cheaply, it was more a matter of expedience than cost. In 1846-47, when the value of the fissure vein increasingly proved its worth, more and more men were immediately hired to work it and housing had to be provided as quickly as possible.

The houses at Clifton did have windows, something homes in Ireland almost always lacked. The company seems to have used one standard plan for constructing their log houses. In addition to being a story and a half high. Each side of the house contained two windows, one in the loft area and one on the main floor. There was also one window in the front of the house, in the room adjacent to the home entrance. There were no windows in the rear wall of the houses and no back door.

In addition to housing that few in Beara, Ireland dreamed of, at Clifton, in 1858, construction began on the Roman Catholic St. Mary’s Church. When Timothy O’Shea and his father arrived at the Cliff in 1857, there was already a sizeable Irish community there as well as many Canadians and German Catholics.

Reverend Henry Louis Thiele attended the missions at the Cliff and Eagle Harbor. He also attended the missions in the Ontonagon district, including the Minesota, Maple Grove, and Ontonagon.

In the spring of 1858, Rev. Thiele contracted with Nicholas Grasser to build the church at Clifton. It was not cheap. The contract was for $1,860, according to Volume 1 of the History of the Diocese of Sault Ste. Marie and Marquette.

Like the Ontonagon district, Keweenaw Point contained a large percentage of Irish, Canadians and Germans. Rev. Thiele was valuable on the frontier, because he spoke English, French and German.

There is an old saying: “Forbidden fruit is the sweetest.” In contrast with Ireland under English religious oppression, at Clifton the Irish residents were absolutely free to worship according to their Catholic faith and practice without fear of English Anglican persecution, even though there was an Anglican church at Clifton, just up the road from the site of the new Catholic church. That is not to say that the Catholics did not receive similar bias to that found in England.

Pitezel, in his memoir, had nothing good to say about Catholicism, sounding more like a Calvinist than a Methodist:

“Here we found an influence which is deadly against the spread of a pure Christianity,” Pitezel wrote. “It is Catholicism.” He went on: “They wear the cross and count the beads, but are kept in ignorance of the Bible.”