Although Simcoe County was forbidding in its isolation from the bustling city of Toronto, the settlers found it an attractive area for homesteading. As they had travelled north from the city, the ground had risen steadily to the dividing height of land in the area of Newmarket, from where all streams flowed northwest into Georgian Bay. Within three generations this terrain to the north would become one of the most beautiful agricultural areas of Ontario. Its many creeks and rivers wended their way through pretty valleys flanked by rolling hills. Moraines and drumlins caused by ancient glacial action made picturesque eruptions in the landscape. But not all this land was good for tilling. Glacial debris of sand and stone made the moraines unsuitable for grain crops, and these areas would eventually be used for pasture. But before the crops could be sown, the land had to be cleared of a heavy forest cover, and the debris burned. Cedar and tamarack swamps that dotted the area had to be drained. Although money, tools and labourers were scarce, the settlers had to erect barns, sheds and fences to shelter valuable animals, and build houses for their families. These were not tasks for which the Irish immigrants had been trained. “Forests in nineteenth century Ulster were protected on estates; most immigrants had never used an axe and knew nothing of land clearing.”2 Only by co-operation and sharing could they survive the loneliness, the exhausting physical labour, and the climatic extremes of Ontario’s summers and winters.
During the early 1840s the Irish immigrants continued to arrive in a steady stream, but not in such overwhelming numbers that they could not be absorbed economically into Ontario’s towns and countryside.3 It was in 1846, according to one of Sister Catherine Donnelly’s memoirs, that her grandfather Hugh Donnelly, with her grandmother Mary Ann and their children, emigrated from Armagh to Simcoe County. Little Hugh, Catherine’s father, was still an infant. They had left one of the most thickly populated areas of pre-famine Northern Ireland, and were able to secure land on Lot 1, Concession 5, facing the town line between Tossorontio and Adjala townships. Their farm was located on what is now Highway 89, about four miles west of Alliston. The nearest settlement was the small village of Arlington, a mile south. Most of the Roman Catholic immigrants who had arrived earlier lived in this section of the township, for their church had encouraged them to settle in kinship and religious groups.
The closest Catholic church for the area was St. James at Colgan, eight miles south of Alliston. A swamp separated the North Adjala settlement from Colgan, and so the settlers attended Mass at the home of Hugh Ferguson, one of the more prosperous Catholics in Arlington. A priest from Colgan made regular visits for that purpose. When an additional group of Catholic immigrants came into the area following the Irish famine of the late 1840s, the “house church” was no longer adequate. In 1854 Hugh Ferguson donated two acres of land for the erection of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. The Colgan clergy oversaw the construction of the simple frame building at Arlington, and the church was blessed on 19 July 1857. As the Arlington Catholic population had increased by 1866, the North Adjala parish was separated from Colgan and a new rectory built for the priest next to the church. By 1871 51 per cent of the population of Adjala Township was Irish Catholic. This became a religious and ethnic base on which Catholic culture could thrive and yet not threaten their Protestant neighbours.4
In nineteenth-century Irish farming communities in Ontario it was the custom for the youngest son to take over his parents’ farm, with the understanding that they could live with him for the rest of their lives.5 According to Sister Catherine’s family memoir of 1975, such an arrangement was made by her grandparents with her father Hugh when he was twenty-five years old. In 1876 Hugh married Catherine Donnelly, aged twenty-three, the daughter of Patrick Donnelly of nearby Essa Township. They were not related, and Sister Catherine noted that she was never sure of her maternal grandmother’s maiden name because “she must have died when the children were young. My mother seldom talked about her childhood days, but she seemed to be familiar with facts about people of the Scotch line of Essa township, especially the Haydens and the Ellards.”6
Patrick Donnelly was married for the second time to a young Protestant woman from the nearby village of Everett. As in his first marriage, he again had three sons and a daughter, and they lived on a farm northeast of Alliston, near Everett. It is perhaps for this reason that Sister Catherine’s mother was living with the Ellard family at the time of her marriage.
In a remarkable document, written when Sister Catherine was ninety-one, she listed the names and locations of her three maternal uncles (Patrick, Thomas, Christopher), the names of their wives, the ten children they had produced, and the names and fate of those children’s children! This is followed by a similar listing of the children and their descendants from her grandfather’s second marriage — a total of over sixty people she could proudly claim as relatives on her mother’s side of the family.
Hugh and Catherine Donnelly had seven children: Mary Gertrude, born in 1880, died when she was eleven; Bridget Ellen, born in 1881, died when she was sixteen; Joseph, born around 1882, died in infancy; Catherine Donnelly born on 26 February 1884, lived until she was ninety-nine; Thomas Ambrose, born in 1888, died in 1892 from sunstroke. (He was the only sibling for whom Catherine listed a cause of death.) Elizabeth Theresa (Tess) was born in 1890 and died at the age of seventy-four; Mary Loretto (Sister Justina CSJ), the youngest child, born in 1894, was eighty-seven when she died in 1981. Sister Catherine’s grandparents, her parents, and five of her brothers and sisters are all buried on a knoll marked by a fine tombstone in the little cemetery adjacent to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, within sight of the old farm property.
In addition to raising their three surviving daughters and caring for Hugh’s mother, Catherine’s parents also took Hugh’s nephew and niece into their family. These were little Hugh Donnelly Jr. and Annie, the children of Matthew Donnelly, Hugh’s eldest brother. Matthew’s wife had died when little Hugh was two years of age and his sister Annie was four. “Matthew was an alcoholic … lost his farm and lived alone in Alliston before he died.”7 Such an arrangement was not unusual at that time in the Irish community, for it was the custom to look after their kinfolk if at all possible. This family situation was described in her typical cryptic fashion by Sister Catherine when she was in her ninety-sixth year, in a letter to her nephew:
Little Hugh, my cousin, was a worker — was needed on the farm. His great joy was horses and a dog. He only got an elementary schooling at the local school. My generous mother was good to him and to our grandmother — Mary Ann (Johnson) Donnelly a convert, who never spoke about her life as a young girl …
Little Hugh left when quite young to seek his fortune in North Dakota. After some years of dray work and jobs he handled well, he married a good woman … There was one little child died very young … I went to see Hugh once at Superior, on my way to Fargo N.D. Tess came … It was in the late 40’s or early 50’s.
Hugh was a very lovely man and had worked hard to save and own some property. He made a will and left most to his wife’s close relatives, some of whom had been really good to him.8
Catherine Donnelly’s memoirs, and my own interviews with present residents of the area, emphasize two noteworthy characteristics of the North Simcoe County Irish community. First, although it was a composed of disparate groups of closeknit Protestant and Catholic families which were separated from each other by religion, they lived in relative harmony and goodwill in Adjala Township.9 True, there were annual, isolated raucous incidents. These usually took place on 17 March when the Catholics observed the feast day of their beloved St. Patrick, and also on 12 July when the local Loyal Orange lodges celebrated the 1690 Anglo Protestant victory over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne with parades and fiery speeches. (Some cynical Scots viewed these festivities as religiously permissible party times for the Irish Catholics, giving everyone a break in the long forty-day Lenten fast demanded by the Church at that time; similarly, for the Protestants 12 July was an occasion to take a holiday from their farm labours by holding big neighbourhood, midsummer picnics after the parade.) In sum, it was a community in which there was mutual respect with no serious and permanent rancour between the Catholics and Protestants. This was in happy contrast to some parts