Irish settlement of Beaver Island

Migration

Date

1856

Kind

Migration

Eras

Irish era

Concepts

migrationIrish eracatholicismfishing

Within

Beaver Island

Media

The Beaver Island memorial at Lough Thoir, Arranmore, County Donegal

Summary

After James Jesse Strang’s assassination in June 1856 and the expulsion of his followers, Beaver Island was resettled predominantly by Irish immigrants and their Mackinac-area Irish-American neighbours, many of them from Arranmore Island, County Donegal. The newcomers built the island’s fishing economy, founded Holy Cross Catholic Church, and gave Donegal Bay its present name. The island is still locally and promotionally known as “America’s Emerald Isle,” and the connection to Arranmore is maintained today through family “clans” and an annual Irish heritage festival.

History

Strang was mortally wounded on 16 June 1856 and died 23 days later; in the disorder that followed, a mob from the mainland drove the remaining Strangite Mormons from the island.¹ Among the returning and newly arriving settlers were Irish families who had been living on Mackinac Island, drawn by the island’s now-vacated, productive fishing grounds.¹ Elizabeth Whitney Williams – who had lived through the Strang period and returned to the island herself (see Elizabeth Whitney Williams) – names one of these arrivals directly in her 1905 memoir: “our genial friend Capt. Roddy, so well known all over Northern Michigan,” who “bought the land and made [himself a] home.”² Her book also names William Gallagher as “the pioneer pound-net fisherman of the island” and William Boyle as an established island businessman by the time of her writing – both surnames that remain prominent among Beaver Island’s Irish-descended families today.²

A large share of the new arrivals came specifically from Arranmore Island, County Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland; the modern Northern Islander states that “in one wave alone, 40 Arranmore families settled on Beaver Island.”¹ Irish settlers “farmed, fished, built boats, and logged,” and “taught school, provided medical care, ran stores, operated transportation services, and served in religious, community, and government roles.”¹ Holy Cross Catholic Church (see Holy Cross Catholic Church) became the parish home of this community; its Gaelic-language liturgies, continuing until the 1890s, are direct evidence of the settlers’ Irish-speaking origin.³ Donegal Bay, on the island’s east side, carries the settlers’ County Donegal origin in its name; it had previously been called Mount Pisgah Bay, one of Strang’s biblical toponyms.⁴

A later family account gives a more detailed, but explicitly source-bounded, version of one arrival chain. Clementine McCauley wrote that her grandparents Conal McCauley and Mary Gallagher left Arranmore for Canada during the famine era, married in Toronto, and later joined a group that chartered a vessel for the Beavers, with Conal as pilot.⁵ She remembers the group as either five or seven families and names a McDonough couple, a Boyle family, and Connaghans, while treating the possible Bonner identification as uncertain. The account says the newcomers arrived about three months after the Mormons’ departure, used abandoned houses until they could take homesteads, and combined lumber-mill work, fishing, and farming. It also describes relatives sending for family members in later decades, including the McDonough chain that brought Mary to the island in 1884.⁵ These details enrich the migration record but do not establish a complete passenger list, homestead sequence, or the claimed first “gentile” birth on the island.

The same family correspondence continued in August and September 1972. The August reprint described James Napper Tandy Gallagher as an ancestor who had come to Beaver Island and connected him to the Gaelic song; McCauley’s September correction says he never crossed to Beaver Island, drowned off Arranmore before the family’s departure, and was the husband of the song’s “Granny.”⁶ The correction also changes the claim that McCauley was the only clan member to visit Arranmore to a claim that she was the first known visitor, naming other possible visitors without asserting their descent.⁶ These records are kept separate so the Beaver Island settlement event does not absorb an ancestor who never arrived.

The island’s Irish identity, and its specific tie to Arranmore, are still being renewed. Since 2019 the Beaver Island Irish Heritage Group has run an annual Emerald Isle Irish Féile, drawing performers and visitors directly from Arranmore, and the island promotes itself as “America’s Emerald Isle.”⁷⁸ Modern descendant “clans” (Gallagher, McCafferty, Martin, McNamara, Boyle, Gillespie, Connaghan and others) are recognized annually at the festival’s “Calling of the Clans” event. The most recent island-Arranmore exchange recorded here is a 2024 gift of a handcrafted baton from a sixth-generation islander to an Arranmore musician.⁹

A contemporary Irish-side record of the migration mechanism was found in the Freeman’s Journal (Dublin) of Thursday, June 9, 1881, p. 3 (“The Position at Arranmore Island”, from the paper’s Arranmore correspondent): “On one part of the island in particular—I believe in the townland known amongst them as Aphort—Mr. Charley paid the passages of the families who at one time inhabited a part of it to Beaver Island, in America, and took up the land into his own hands.” John Stoupe Charley became Arranmore’s landlord in 1849, per the same article. This documents landlord-assisted passage from a named Árainn Mhór townland (Aphort, on the island’s south side) directly to Beaver Island, alongside the family-chain migration recorded in the McCauley account (Beaver Beacon, March 1972, held). This 1881 Freeman’s Journal report is held as a citation-copy screenshot only, under its Newspapers.com/ British Library Board rights restriction, not for reproduction. Three further period matches (Liverpool Mercury 26 Jul 1884; Southern Cross (Adelaide) 26 Oct 1917; Escanaba Daily Press 7 Jun 1918) remain unexamined leads.

Significance

The migration replaced Strang’s theocratic settlement with the community that has defined Beaver Island’s demographic and cultural character for the century and a half since, and it is the direct ancestor of the island’s present-day population, institutions (Holy Cross Catholic Church) and named places (Donegal Bay). The tie it created runs to a single origin community – Arranmore Island, County Donegal – rather than to Ireland generally. Arranmore commemorates that tie with a memorial standing in Lough Thoir, flying an Irish tricolour and a U.S. flag side by side, erected around the 2000 twinning of the two islands (see Beaver Island–Arranmore twinning celebration).

Sources

Full citations, matching the sources: block above.

Added 28 July 2026 · revised 3 August 2026. Recent changes