Bernard O'Hara (1820-1877)

The blight that struck the Irish potato crop during the winter of 1845-46 brought ruin to tens of thousands of tenant farmers and rural laborers like Bernard O'Hara and reduced almost all of Ireland to poverty. Dependent on the potato not only as the staple of the Irish peoples diet but as a means of barter and paying rent, the Irish peasant was forever at the mercy of his crop and nothing could have prepared him for the calamity of the great potato famine. When the blight struck, it brought total destruction to the primitive agrarian economy of the island. At the time, despite the abolition of the vicious penal laws, very few Irish farmers such as Bernard O'Hara owned their land or held title to their cottages and cabins, and when the crop failed they had no means whatever of satisfying their remorseless landlords or the hated "Gombeen man," the first money lenders of Ireland. Rents and obligations soon fell into arrears, and before long, there were wholesale evictions throughout Ireland. Thousands of families were thrown on the limited resources of local jurisdictions or roamed the countryside in desperate search of food. For many of these wretched people who were now homeless and without any means of substance, in dread of the hunger which claimed the lives of a million of their countrymen, the choice was painfully clear: quit Ireland and leave or perish. Of necessity, therefore, hundreds of thousands including Bernard O'Hara and later his wife, Anna, chose to leave. Bernard O'Hara first arrived in New York City, New York in April of 1847. A year later, in 1848, Anna O'Hara left Ireland and arrived in America's largest city. Now in a foreign land the O'Hara's struggled to make ends meet as Bernard worked as a junk man in lower Manhattan. With the birth of their first child, the O'Hara's left New York City and relocated to Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York. Later the family traveled west to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After the death of his wife in the spring of 1861, Bernard O'Hara remarried and moved to Evanston, Illinois. After a short period of time there the family settled in Danby, Ionia County, Michigan where Bernard worked as a farmer. This then is the narrative of the life and epic struggle of Bernard O'Hara.