NELLY HOLLAND COMES TO FIVE POINTS
IF FIVE POINTS was so famously wretched, why did so many immigrants settle there? Ellen Holland’s tale provides one answer: it was far better than staying home. “Nelly” had been born and raised in southwestern Ireland in the County Kerry parish of Kenmare. There she grew up surrounded by jagged mountain peaks and lush green hills that sloped dramatically to the wide, majestic Kenmare River. Nelly and her family lived on the estate of the third marquis of Lansdowne—an English nobleman whose property was home to thirteen thousand of the most impoverished residents of nineteenth-century Ireland. Visitors to the huge estate commonly chose adjectives such as “wretched,” “miserable,” “filthy,” “half naked,” and “half fed” to describe the poor farmers and laborers who comprised the vast majority of its population.
Observers invoked such descriptions of Nelly’s birthplace even before a mysterious potato blight began to wreak havoc with the staple of her diet in 1845. By late 1846, Kenmare residents began to succumb to starvation and malnutrition-related diseases that spread in the blight’s wake. In early 1847, the death toll multiplied. An Englishman who visited Kenmare village wrote that “the sounds of woe and wailing resounded in the streets throughout the night.” The following morning, nine of those sufferers lay dead. “The poor people came in from the rural districts [of the Lansdowne estate] in such numbers, in the hopes of getting some relief, that it was utterly impossible to meet their most urgent exigencies, and therefore they came in literally to die.” Tens of thousands fled Ireland in 1847, hoping to start new and more prosperous lives in England or America. But almost none of the Lansdowne tenants could afford to leave Kerry. Few had emigrated from this isolated estate in the pre-famine years, so Kenmare residents were not receiving the remittances from abroad that enabled many famine victims to leave Ireland.1
When the fungus subsided in 1848, British officials in charge of famine relief declared the emergency at an end. But such decrees meant nothing to Holland and others suffering in Kenmare. Most of Lansdowne’s tenants were by that point too weak to work or plant and too destitute to buy seed potatoes. And what few tubers they did cultivate in 1849 were again ravaged by the dreaded fungus. Kenmare once more became the center of suffering in the region, with people “dying by the dozens in the streets.” Those on the brink of death crowded into the village workhouse, where, in return for giving up all of their worldly possessions, the starving received just barely enough food to keep them alive. By April 1849, the institution held 1,800 souls “in a house built for 500—without shoes, without clothes, in filth, rags and misery,” wrote Kenmare’s Roman Catholic archdeacon, John O’Sullivan. “The women squatted on the ground, on the bare cold clay floor and [were] so imprisoned for months . . . without as much as a stool to sit on.” One of these poor souls was Ellen Holland. She and her three sons, thirteen-year-old James, nine-year-old Thomas, and four-year-old George, were almost certainly among the institution’s inmates. Her husband Richard was probably one of the many men who remained outside the workhouse hoping to find work. Or he may have been one of the hundreds authorities turned away for want of space.2
Securing one of the coveted spaces in the Kenmare workhouse did not ensure survival. Hundreds died there during the famine from diseases such as dysentery and cholera that spread rapidly in the crowded, unsanitary conditions. The food supply was so meager that some inmates died of starvation just hours after being released from the facility. Nelly Holland probably remained at the workhouse throughout 1849 and 1850, wondering how her life might ever return to normal, or if she and her sons would also fall victim to the seemingly unending cycle of disease and death.3
Nelly must have been elated when Lansdowne’s estate agent announced in December 1850 that the marquis would finance the emigration to America of all his workhouse tenants who wished to go. Holland and her sons were among the first to take advantage of the program. Yet transAtlantic voyages were challenging even for hearty souls, and Lansdowne’s tenants were emaciated and totally ill-equipped for the crossing. Sailors were horrified when they first encountered the Lansdowne emigrants, reporting that in the half decade since the onset of the famine they had never laid eyes on such wretched beings. The emigrants continued to suffer as they made their way across the Atlantic. The rags they wore provided woefully inadequate protection from the elements aboard a North Atlantic sailing ship in the dead of winter. Nelly Holland’s vessel, the Montezuma, had to detour around an iceberg and huge swaths of “field ice” during its voyage, giving some indication of the frigid conditions she and her shipmates endured. And although Lansdowne’s agent had paid for the emigrants’ tickets, he did not supply his charges with the foodstuffs that the typical Irish immigrant brought aboard a trans-Atlantic vessel. Holland was forced to subsist on the “ship’s allowance,” just one pound of flour or meal and thirteen ounces of water each day, during her thirty-nine days at sea.4
By the time Nelly arrived in New York in mid-March, hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women, and children fleeing the famine had arrived in the United States through this bustling port. Yet even jaded New Yorkers considered the condition of the Lansdowne immigrants shocking. A New York Tribune reporter found many of the Montezuma’s passengers dazed, disoriented, homeless, and starving in the streets near the waterfront days after their arrival. The Herald also singled out the Lansdowne immigrants for comment, characterizing their treatment as “inhuman.” With three children in tow and no husband (he came on a later vessel), Nelly must have found those first weeks in New York extraordinarily difficult.5
Like most of the Lansdowne immigrants, Nelly and her family eventually settled in Five Points. Unable to afford anything else, the Hollands rented an apartment at 39 Orange Street, where they were surrounded by drunks, notorious saloons and brothels, and other Lansdowne immigrants. The Hollands’ two-and-a-half-story frame building was set within one of the most notoriously squalid blocks of tenements in the world. A journalist visiting the building less than two years before the Hollands’ arrival in New York had found 106 hogs residing on the premises.6
Despite these hardships, Ellen Holland and her family set to work rebuilding their lives. After years of unemployment, they must have been eager and delighted to take even the lowly jobs available to them. Ellen became a washerwoman. Richard found work as a menial day laborer. Their son James, fifteen years old when he arrived in New York in 1851, probably began doing day labor as well. But a laborer’s life was a hard one, full of long hours and backbreaking work in all kinds of weather. Such strenuous exertion could take its toll on even the heartiest constitutions, especially those weakened by years of famine. Ellen Holland discovered this all too well. By July 1855, Richard and James were both dead. Still living in squalor at 39 Orange, Nelly now had to pay the rent and support two children on the few dollars a week she could scrape together by taking in laundry. But Nelly Holland was not a quitter. As bad as life in Five Points was, Kenmare had been far worse. Holland would live at least to age fifty-two. Not only would she survive in America—she would eventually thrive.7