Monday was a bright sunny day at Waterplace Park, in Providence. Speeches and ceremonial cannon fire were the order of the day as Rhode Island's lieutenant governor, tourism officials and passersby gathered by the river to mark the 175th anniversary of the Blackstone Canal.
Three days later, North Main Street in Woonsocket was the site of a different sort of gathering. About 150 other people were at St. Charles Borromeo Church to get free food from the church and the Rhode Island Food Bank.
Michael Reddy, dead and buried 125 years ago, had a hand in both.
Reddy was one of the Irishmen who came to Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the early 1820s to dig the Providence-to-Worcester Blackstone Canal, and he wound up staying when his work was done.
He helped build the canal, a long-cherished dream of the rich and powerful of 19th-century Providence. And as the first Irishman to move to Woonsocket, he helped found St. Charles Borromeo, which is helping to feed the hungry generations after the canal has become a riverside ruin.
The arrival of those Irish canalers -- or "navvies," from navigation, by the slang of the day -- in the towns and villages of northern Rhode Island created the first permanent Irish Catholic enclaves in the English Protestant Blackstone Valley. They helped launch the tradition of the American melting pot that continues to this day.
The Irish immigrants of the 1820s were different from the waves who would arrive later fleeing the potato famines of the 1840s. The so-called pre-famine Irish weren't dislocated farm workers. They were skilled tradesmen who built canals, among the most advanced technology of the day.
"They weren't just labor. They weren't just brawn," the Rev. D. Bryan Finerty, pastor of St. Charles Borromeo, said of the scores of 8- or 10-man gangs that came to dig the canal.
"It was sophisticated labor," Father Finerty said. ". . . They built canals and railroads and bridges. They were not just some sort of 'thick Mick,' the idea that we've been given of the Irish. They were engineers."
A canal's sides had to be angled just right to hold the proper amount of water at the right depth. The granite blocks in the walls of the locks had to be precisely cut.
"They had forearms like trees," said National Park Service Ranger Chuck Arning, producer of a series of award-winning documentaries on Blackstone Valley history.
"If you wanted it done quickly," he said, "you hired these guys."
The Blackstone River drops 438 feet between Worcester and Providence, and a canal, with its boat-lifting locks and channels, was the only way boats would be able to travel north.
After the canal company's stock offering raised $750,000 -- about $14 million in today's money -- it hired Benjamin Wright, the chief engineer on the almost-finished Erie Canal, to oversee the work.
But the merchants couldn't wait for Wright to finish up on the Erie. They hired local laborers who wasted most of 1824 making no progress. When he returned in 1825, Wright recruited Irish work crews, and within two years nearly 90 percent of the approximately 1,000 workers on the canal were Irish.
The canal was finished in 1828 and enjoyed about five years of success before the Boston-Worcester Railroad -- also built with Irish labor -- opened in 1832.
When the canal company went bankrupt in 1847, its creditors stripped the metal and granite from the locks Reddy and his countrymen had built. But by then the Irish workers who had settled along the route were already changing the social landscape in more enduring ways.
REDDY IS PART of the lore of the canal. In 1823, at the age of 17, he got off a boat in Boston and settled in the city. He could find work only as a manual laborer.
"Being strong of limb and resolute in mind, he took to the highway and walked from Boston to Woonsocket and from Woonsocket to Providence," according to the 1900 History of the Catholic Church in Rhode Island, by James W. Smyth.
The story goes that Reddy was walking down the road outside Pawtucket when he met up with the chief of the Blackstone Canal Co., Edward Carrington.
The two men hit it off, and Carrington hired the 19-year-old Reddy to work on the canal in Providence. Reddy stayed with the canal company until it reached Woonsocket in 1827, and he decided to settle there. Two city histories and Reddy's newspaper obituaries credit him with being the first Irish resident of Woonsocket, which was then part of Smithfield.
After helping build Carrington's canal, Reddy and other Irishmen in Woonsocket began building a community for themselves. In 1828, Reddy and 10 others organized the first Catholic church in Woonsocket.
In the century before unemployment compensation and Social Security, a church was more than just the place you went for an hour on Sunday. It was a way for the Irish to preserve their identity, a place to go for help when times were hard.
Catholic priests at the time would ride the circuit, visiting different enclaves of Catholics week to week. Reddy and his group were able to put together $50 -- $943 in today's dollars -- to bring the Rev. Robert D. Woodley to celebrate Mass in Woonsocket in the fall of 1828.
Reddy and his fellow congregants couldn't afford to build their own church yet, however. Walter Allen, a local Quaker, granted them the use of his house for Masses.
At some point in the 1830s, Reddy returned to Ireland. He came back to Woonsocket with a wife, Catherine, and a daughter. His second child, a son named Patrick, was born in Woonsocket in February 1839.
In 1840, he bought a 75- by 100-foot lot overlooking the Blackstone River -- and part of the canal -- on what is now Front Street, for $125. As was the custom of the day, the Irishman's deed forbade the sale of intoxicating liquors. In September of 1846, Reddy bought another 100- by 75-foot lot on Front Street for $70.
He also, on at least two occasions, bought properties that he turned over to the Bishop of Boston for a dollar. The land records also indicate his friendship with Carrington was more than folklore. In December 1846 -- 18 years after Reddy left the canal works -- his old boss sold Reddy land on Logee Road for $100 "in hand and well-paid."
Reddy died of typhoid fever in 1878, and his passing was front-page news, noted even in Providence. An article in the Woonsocket Patriot called Reddy an "acknowledged and shrewd leader" who "always identified himself with the law, and in the indoctrination of his own people into the country's institutions, he became their champion."
MICHAEL REDDY was willing, at age 17, to leave the country he grew up in and take a chance in a new world. His sons -- who spread out across the United States along with waves of other children of Irish immigrants -- were no different. In 1861, Patrick and Edward "Ned" Reddy, ages 22 and 17, left the mill life in Woonsocket to seek their fortunes in the silver and gold mine boomtowns of California.
Robert Palazzo, a California lawyer and author of The Fighting Reddy Brothers of the Eastern Sierra, said Patrick and Ned ricocheted from town to town in the west of the 1860s, looking for the opportunities that those fast-growing times created.
Ned participated in at least three gun fights, in which he killed two men and wounded three others. Patrick's luck turned bad in early 1864 when he was ambushed by a saloon keeper in an alley in Virginia City, Nev. His right arm was shot off at the elbow, ending his careers as a miner and gunfighter.
While Patrick was convalescing he began to study law.
He eventually became one of the best defense lawyers in the business, Palazzo said.
Patrick was elected to the California Senate in 1882 and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1885. In 1890, he was appointed director of the state prison system and got Ned a job as captain of the guard at San Quentin prison.
When Patrick and Ned decided they didn't like their chances in Woonsocket, they could leave. But for a woman in 1800s Woonsocket, the options were more limited. All four of the Reddy daughters stayed in Rhode Island.
If Patrick and Ned's lives in the Wild West were the exciting side of the immigrant experience, the life of their older sister, Catherine, back in Woonsocket, showed how hard it could be.
Catherine was living with her father when he died in 1878, and he left her most of his estate.
About a year later, she died at age 41 of tuberculosis. She dictated her will from her sickbed, ". . . while I have thoughts and capacity so to do make public this my last will and testament."
She left all her property to her three daughters, and the income from the land her father left her to her husband, "as long as he remains single and takes good care of my children. . . ."
The husband, Martin Corcoran, died of pneumonia seven years later, in 1886, still single.
The safety net that Michael Reddy helped weave in 1828 caught his granddaughters six decades later, when the court appointed the Rev. Michael McCabe, pastor of St. Charles Borromeo, as their guardian.
THE CANAL the Irish immigrants built was out of business less than two decades after it was finished. But along the river in Albion, a village in Lincoln, a fragment of their labor still remains today. The granite-lined waterway once traveled by cargo boats loaded with the commerce of two states has withered to a quaint ruin favored by weekend canoeists.
The 1820s Irish left another legacy, one that's still alive on North Main Street in Woonsocket. Like the canal they built for the merchants of Providence, the church that Woonsocket's immigrants built for themselves is made of granite, too.
"Not granite-faced," Father Finerty gently and proudly points out, "granite through and through."
Father Finerty was raised in England by Irish parents, and his presence as pastor means there still is an Irishman at St. Charles Borromeo. Last week, as he walked through the ornate and cavernous church his countrymen built two centuries ago, his brogue echoed softly off the walls.
Embedded in the walls on each side were 3-foot-high, hand-painted sculptures, one for each of the 14 Stations of the Cross. Beneath each statue scene, bolted to the wall, was a small wooden cross. The crosses signify that the church has been consecrated, Father Finerty said. Only a church that is made of stone and is free of debt can be so blessed, he said.
A consecrated church can only be used as a church or for another religious purpose, Father Finerty said. Those crosses mean that the church that Reddy and his fellow Irishmen started can never be sold.
Said Father Finerty, "It is permanent."
