Sailing in my car along the leafy curves of scenic Route 23, I passed a hand-painted sign on the right: “St. Joseph’s Chapel, The Oldest Catholic Church in the Catskills.” An oval in the center read, “Circa 1800.” As a Catholic woman who seeks out monasteries, holy sites, and shrines, I was thrilled at my good luck in passing this place by chance, and immediately pulled a U-ie to investigate. I parked my car and climbed up the steep brick stairs.
The sign that compelled me to turn my car around. (All photos by the author except where indicated.)
The sort of sacred spot I am always seeking.
Though oddly isolated along a rural route, a frilled purple wreath hung upon the blue cross on the front door and told me this chapel was recently, and perhaps even lovingly, maintained. It radiated sweetness and charm, and when I turned, the view of the newly-spring mountains was spectacular. That is when I beheld the granite marker.
Somberness in the center of the churchyard.
Shaped in a shamrock. As a woman with Irish Catholic ancestry, I knew the shamrock symbolized a link to St. Patrick. I read the inscription, and was instantly thunderstruck: though in an idyllic setting, I was poised above a mass grave. The message on the massive stone was carved in both English and Irish:
IRISH COLLEENS
In loving memory of the 14 Irish girls who came from Ireland
in the 1800’s and who tragically lost their lives in a fire
They are buried here in a mass grave, may God bless and
hold them in the palm of His hand
In order to read the engraving, you stand atop the “Colleens.”
I exhaled hard, sat down on the stairs and wove my hands together. Perhaps these nameless Irish Colleens overlapped with the “Bridgets”—a derogatory slur for the girls who immigrated from Ireland in the 1800s, working as domestics.1 After honoring the 14 with my best attempt at prayer, I sorrowfully explored the rest of the cemetery. The headstones under the trees were a blend of anonymous pointy rocks and carved gray markers from the late 1800s. One stood out, the only sand-colored stone, and, from the dates, seemed to be the last burial here. It read, “The Irish Colleens / In Memory of Robert W. Boughter, 1896-1983.”
I peered through the windows of the chapel, longing to enter it, and I was shocked to find that when I gripped the front door knob, it turned. Why wasn’t this sacred space locked? While I trusted myself to enter gently, any vandal could absolutely desecrate and destroy it.
Yes, I had been right—this one-room chapel was tended to with love. There were no cobwebs, no dust, sand or grit, all the statues and silk bouquets were arranged on tables with doilies. Contrasting with the gravity of the nearby shamrock marker, the light-filled space held a softness, a peace that made it truly beautiful within.
The peace in the nineteenth-century chapel was palpable.
Open 24/7 to anyone who stops by.
I read everything on the walls. The prayers, the information that a parish one town over cared for this holy and historical structure, and a calligraphed poem on browned parchment by Robert W. Boughter, whose headstone I’d just seen:
“The Little Church in the Valley”
In the lovely Catskill Mountains
And high upon a hill,
There stands a little church and yard
And I hope it always will!
For in that quiet church yard
Lies a story, now quite old
For it tells of Irish Colleens
And their story should be told.
They came from far old Ireland
And with them brought their skills
They worked as expert weavers
In the local cotton mills.
But the bitter winters took their toll
And long before their time
They died penniless and friendless
In that land of mountain pine.
Within that little church-yard
Stands granite great and tall
To plainly mark the resting place
Of those who had it all.
And nearby those who had no wealth
And for which they must atone
For their lack of worldly treasure
With a chip of native stone.
But when they stand there proudly
Up high before the throne,
I am sure they will be welcomed
And no longer be alone.
I think that in that church-yard
A marker should be placed
To honor those courageous girls
In their final resting place.
We have statues by the millions
And they need not atone.
I think we can do better
Than a chip of native stone.
What was this place? Who was this poet, interred alongside the girls a century after them? In what town had the tragedy occurred, and why didn’t any lines of this verse include any details of a fire? What were the actual first names of these daughters and sisters, I wondered. I am no historian, just a religious writer obsessed with stories. I actually said out loud to myself, alone in this well-tended chapel, “I cannot wait to get home and Google this catastrophe.”
And when I did, I was instantly led to a superb—riveting, actually—article written by the local Greene County Historian Jonathan Palmer, published by the Vedder Research Library. He begins with the description of the road and the chapel and grounds, precisely as I had just deeply, and meaningfully, experienced them. But then he calls the shamrock gravestone a “humbling spectacle” that would have been “particularly poetic and stirring . . . were it not for some inconvenient details . . . the tragedy of the fourteen Irish Colleens never happened.”2 His use of the word “inconvenient” is not snarky; rather, I got the sense he was treading carefully as the first person to publicly debunk this myth. Using suspenseful, exhaustive records and facts, including the pivotal connection of the poem in the chapel from the 1950s, he lays out the historical inaccuracies of this “tale.” Palmer unearths an exquisite, persuasive, and sadly dispiriting argument. Most convincing is his use of United States and New York State Census data from 1865, 1870, 1875, and 1880. These document the surprisingly small number—2%—of Irish immigrants living in the area, and how, in 1880, not a single responder even claimed Ireland as their birthplace. So from where did all these doomed Irish girls spring? It seems there was a breathtaking leap from Robert Boughton’s poem crafted decades ago, into the grotesque fiction recorded on the gravestone that appeared there in the 1990s.
Determined to find out more about the imaginary girls, I called Helen Bizanos, the archivist at the Vedder Research Library. She was cheerful, receptive, and unable to answer my most pressing question: “Who put that stone there?” She has no record. There is no record. But how does an object of that density just appear on the angled slope of a mountain? Surely some sort of machine, with laborers, had to be involved in the installation. As I write this, my working theory, with only a century-old, devastating New York Times article for flimsy evidence, is that one of Robert Boughton’s descendants may have latched onto the facts of a true story. In particular, maybe it was the number 14 that led to the lie on the grave, in an enlarging of Boughton’s literary legacy. Palmer wrote of how the 1800s fire “was never recorded, reported, or recollected” and that this missing news is deeply suspect, as it would have been “the second greatest disaster behind the Twilight Inn fire.”3 I researched the real tragedy that occurred in 1926, twenty-five miles southeast of St. Joseph’s Chapel. The story is terrible not because of a hard life being female and foreign and penniless, but because of a fire escape made of wood. The New York Times headline reads:
18 BELIEVED DEAD IN TWILIGHT INN FIRE
Fourteen Bodies Now Recovered From the Ruin; But Only One is Identified.
12 Victims Were Women.4
I wrote “duped” in my notebook and underlined it twice. Faithful pilgrim that I am, devoted Franciscan, I had collapsed in a cemetery with my head bowed for a lie. There were no tangled bones of Irish girls who needed me to remember their lives and to love them. I was a dolt. I was, it bears repeating, duped. Perhaps to a person less immersed in faith, this false narrative might seem at best intriguing, a limp sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. But at its worst, the fake grave provides a stark weight tipping the scales into justified cynicism. And for those of us who adhere to a belief, we, too, might feel heavy-hearted realizing that we’ve squandered something fundamentally precious to us: prayers. The tiny stones and scribbled notes left behind on the base are tokens of prayers and wishes that evaporated, useless and wasted, into the clear mountain air. It’s likely that many visitors, like me, were further spellbound by the grim narrative because part of the inscription is taken from “On Eagle’s Wings,” a song that’s a staple at Christian funerals. But there was no need for any of us to envision them “held in the palm of his hand”—it was empty.
A year later, I think about all the travelers who might be spontaneously stopping by the chapel, stunned by the false atrocity. While I still have the cropped photo of the interior of the chapel on my wall, finding a diaphanous beauty in it, I continue ruminating on that carved fabrication, resolved to find out where the gravesite marker came from. I can tell you right now, even if the lie of the 14 Irish Colleens becomes further exposed, that massive stone is going nowhere. Because once something is dropped down deep into the imagination, where can it possibly go?
The poet Robert W. Boughter would have been an impressionable 17-year-old when this song (and others like it) was written in 1913; did it spark something in his imagination that later steered his poem, I wonder? (Jack Course and Earl Kelty, “My Irish Colleen,” 1913. Vocal Popular Sheet Music Collection. Score 2670, Public Domain.)
- For further reading, see Maragret Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930 (Syracuse University Press, 2009) and Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
- Jonathan Palmer, “The Irish Colleens of St. Joseph’s Chapel,” The Vedder Research Library (November 2, 2022), https://vedderresearchlibrary.org/gc-historians-blog/2022/11/1/the-irish-colleens-of-saint-josephs-chapel.
- Palmer, “The Irish Colleens of St. Joseph’s Chapel.”
- “18 Believed Dead in Twilight Inn Fire,” New York Times, July 16, 1926.
