A Part of History

Take Sr. Mary Erigina’s hand and touch almost two hundred years of Irish American history. She will celebrate her 107th birthday this year, but her memory reaches back to pre-Famine Ireland through the stories told her by her great-grandmother, Honora Kelly, who as a 30-year-old widow escaped the Great Hunger and brought her seven children to Chicago in 1849. Sr. Erigina lived with her great-grandmother, and remembers her well. 

“She wore a white fluted bonnet and smoked a clay pipe,” she said. “One or other of the children was always knocking it to the floor. It would shatter. Then I would run to one of the taverns on Archer Avenue and buy a new one for her for two cents.” 

This was the Archer Avenue of Peter Findley Dunn’s Mister Dooley, the main thoroughfare of Bridgeport and the end point of the canal system that drew Irish laborers to the prairie town of Chicago. The Kelly boys went to work there, and the girls found jobs too: “Laundry workers first, then milliners.” 

One of Honora’s grandsons, Edward Kelly, went from digging ditches for the Department of Streets and Sanitation to become the Mayor of Chicago, and was the founder of the great machine that produced mayor  Richard Daley. 

“Both my great-grandmother and grandmother spoke Gaelic,” Sr. Mary Erigina remembers. “They used it when they didn’t want us kids to understand what they were saying. But we studied the language at our school, St. Brigid’s. Every year the parish priest held a contest for the best Irish speaker and every year Joey Lombardi, who was one hundred percent Italian, won.” 

In fact, the mixed nature of the south-side Irish stronghold, Richard Daley’s home turf, shatters a clique of immigrant insularity. 

“We had Polish, German and Italian families living near us on Hillock Avenue,” Sr. Erigina recalls. The 1990 census bears this out, and lists many families where the father and mother come from different countries. “But the Kellys,” she says, “well, my grandmother was a Kelly, she married a Kelly, and my mother was a Kelly who married a Kelly.” 

She remembers the women gathering at the street-level shop around the pot-bellied stove, sharing stories. “One lady, Mrs. O’Reilly, if you would ask how she was, she always answered `Fine, with Pat working, thank God.'” 

The work was key, and Chicago provided a lot of it. As the city rebuilt after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, life was organized around the parishes. 

Sister’s baptismal name was Agnella, after one of her mother’s teachers at St. Brigid’s, a sister of the Irish order the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or BVMs. The Order, founded in Dublin by Mary Frances Clark, took root in the prairies of Iowa and then spread to the cities of the midwest. Agnella entered that Order in 1906. She came to the mother house in Dubuque, Iowa, carrying an envelope from the pastor of St. Brigid’s: “I would like Agnella Kelly to be called Sr. Mary Erigina, in honor of Ireland’s great medieval philosopher,” the note read. Mother Superior acquiesced, although “it was not a name I liked,” says Sr. Erigina. “But it’s grown on me.” 

She spent more than 70 years teaching first grade, devoted to her “buttons and dolls” at Gesu School in Milwaukee and in Chicago parish schools. Pat O’Brien was her pupil, and there are hosts of Chicago’s priests, judges and politicians who remember this “tall blue-eyed woman who would hug your tears away,” as one of the “buttons” recalls. 

Mason City, Iowa was her home for many years, and now she lives at the BVM mother house in Dubuque where she attends Mass every day. She can still recite the Irish prayers she learned as a child, but “there is no sing left in me,” she says with regret. “I can sing the songs in my mind, but I can’t make music.” 

She remembers her Uncle Mike, soaking his wooden flute, and her Uncle Mart, tuning his fiddle for the musical evenings that drew the neighborhood. There they were, the survivors of the Great Hunger, saved by the greatest rescue effort the world has ever known. It was mounted not by governments, or even by organized charities or religious groups, but by themselves. One by one, family by family. 

Sr. Mary Erigina remembers them. She danced for her great-grandmother on those nights more than a century ago, and can still see Honora tapping along to the music. Touch her hand, and suddenly a long time ago is not very far away.