Irish kings, gangs, and witches ☘️
The story of the Kerry Patch, a notorious 19th century Irish neighborhood in St. Louis
In this special St. Patrick’s Day edition of Unseen St. Louis, I explore the history of the Kerry Patch, a neighborhood in north St. Louis that for about 60 years was a tight community of recent Irish immigrants fleeing An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Famine.
Since the French fur traders Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau founded St. Louis in 1764, the city has attracted people from all over the world, choosing to make their home here in large part due to the economic opportunities that came from trade, manufacturing, and the railroad. And from almost the city’s beginnings, that included the Irish.
In 1796 Irishman John Mullanphy came to the US looking for better opportunities than what the Irish Penal Laws afforded Catholics. After meeting fur trader Charles Gratiot, Mullanphy moved to St. Louis in 1804, at a time when fewer than 1000 people lived in the city. He made his fortune trading cotton and turned that money into real estate. With some of his wealth, he pieced together a large plot of land in what is today Carr Square, just north of downtown, obtaining much of it through foreclosures and back taxes. Starting a trend of forward-thinking philanthropy in the family, he also built hospitals and orphanages starting in 1828 with the stipulation that they treat “all such indigent sick free persons without regard to color, country or religion.”
This neighborhood was initially settled by German and Irish immigrants around 1830. Most of the homes in the area were brick row houses built closely together, with tiny gardens that were home to chickens, goats, and cows. As more people moved to the city, the area became a popular choice for breweries, brickyards, lumber mills, and other growing nearby industries, as well as homes for the workers, and “all such indigent sick free persons without regard to color, country or religion.” was happy to lease his land to these new pursuits.
The Kerry Patch sprung up out of necessity
A flood of new Irish immigrants hailing largely from County Kerry came to St. Louis in the 1840s and 1850s and settled on the land Mullanphy had acquired and bequeathed to his children at his death in 1833. These new residents had escaped An Gorta Mor, the terrible blight that destroyed multiple potato harvests and caused thousands to flee to America. As a result, these new residents had little means to pay rent. Instead, they squatted on common fields in the neighborhood, owned by building small ramshackle homes from scrap lumber.
As described in the 1878 book A Tour of St. Louis, the homes of these new immigrants were “mere shanties, erected by poor people on land not their own, upon which they have constructed their dwellings without the leave or license of the owner of the soil.”
Despite their poverty—or perhaps because of it—the Mullanphys did what they could for the refugees. This attitude was likely thanks both to the tradition passed down by their father as well as the intervention of Mullanphy’s son Bryan, who was mayor of St. Louis in 1847-48 and well-known for his willingness to give great sums to assist the poor.
And quickly this area of St. Louis, which Father O’Reardon of St. Patrick’s Church called the ‘Kerry Patch’, had become a tight-knit community.
Although the Mullanphys—particularly John Mullanphy’s son Bryan, who was an Alderman, Circut Court Judge, and the city’s 10th mayor—welcomed these new immigrants, not everyone in the city shared the same attitude. For much of the 19th century, American Protestants looked down on Irish Catholics, treating them with significant discrimination and hostility. As happens with other immigrants and refugees to this day, tensions increased as thousands of destitute farmers fled the Great Hunger and came to America.
This was the era of “No Irish Need Apply” signs in shop windows and factories and the rise of the Know-Nothing Party, a group overtly anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. Making assimilation even more difficult, most of the people coming from Kerry, in the far southwest corner of Ireland, also spoke Irish Gaelic rather than English. So the people of the Kerry Patch knew they couldn’t rely on outsiders to help them and, therefore, banded together. Out of a sense of shared culture and history, they made the neighborhood a home away from home.
The kings and witches of the Kerry Patch
With such an auspicious start, it’s unsurprising that the neighborhood had its fair share of interesting characters.
One of the earliest settlers to the Kerry Patch was grocery owner Denis Sheehan, who had moved to the neighborhood in 1847. When the Civil War broke out, Sheahan, a Democrat like everyone in the neighborhood, took the wrong side in the conflict and was arrested and held in jail for a few weeks. Shortly after his release, the men in the neighborhood saw him as a hero and elected him King of the Kerry Patch. As described by the Post-Dispatch in 1896,
“With stern justice and kindly love he ruled over his people just like any monarch, and dying left a kingdom remarkable for its character.”
As king, Sheehan ruled over the neighborhood, settling disputes, attending weddings, assisting the needy, and serving as a representative for the community as a whole. He and his successors also organized St. Patrick’s Day parades and Fourth of July fireworks. After his death, his son Jack was the heir presumptive but considered too young and inexperienced, so a man named James Cullinane served as regent—some referred to him as King Cullinane. Loyalty to Jack Sheehan was strong, however, and eventually, Cullinane stepped down so Jack could become king.
The Kings of the Kerry Patch made for a good, wholesome story, but little of the reporting about the Patch cast its residents in such a positive light.
In particular, I was drawn to the profile of one woman, dubbed the ‘Little Nun of the Kerry Patch.’ In 1882 a Post-Dispatch reporter went into the Patch find out how the Irish could live in such poverty.
The woman the reporter chose to interview—whose name was never given—was a short, slight woman of about 50, with grey-brown hair and blue eyes. She had moved to St. Louis from Toronto twenty years before when her husband and two of her three children had died. No one knew much about her, including whether or not she had a job, as she didn’t leave her home other than to attend an early Mass. Because she tended to wear all black and “refuses to visit with the neighbors and seems to be absorbed in minding her own business,” she was the topic of much gossip, and some of the local boys regularly harassed her by throwing bricks on her roof.
One night, an adjacent home caught on fire, and the woman wasn’t going to let her little house go up in flames. As the reporter described,
“She managed to climb up on her cabin with a bucket of water and a broom, and executed a species of witches’ dance in the full blaze of the fire, apparently defying it to reach over to her property.”
One could argue that the reporter demonstrated his anti-Irish bias when he cast the woman as a witch in her struggle to save her home.
‘All the deviltry done in the city’
Like the Little Nun above, many residents of Kerry Patch were poor. Because few people in the city would hire the Irish, residents were forced to take jobs no one else wanted, such as brickmaking, mining, cleaning, and other unskilled labor. While they worked hard and contributed to much of the city’s industrial growth (and to a large percentage of the police), to outsiders, the Irish, especially those in the Patch, were nothing but dirty, violent drunkards—the ‘shanty Irish’ (in contrast to the preferred ‘lace curtain Irish,’ such as the Mullanphys).
And by most contemporary, if biased, accounts, it does seem that the Patch was a rough and tumble place to live. An 1885 guidebook with the entirely trustworthy title The Dark and Mysterious Places of St. Louis described it as follows:
“The principal productions of the "Patch" are goats, police cases, street brawls, broken heads, and unwashed kids. Its chief industries are second-hand clothes shops, junk stores, low saloons, whiskey dives and beer morgues.”
To be sure, the residents made and enforced their own laws, which is always a double-edged sword. Roving street gangs and hoodlums made sure outsiders left the Patch alone, but they would also be used to enforce the rule of the “king.” One can imagine how tough things might have been for those who didn’t see eye to eye with the leadership.
In 1949, well after the demise of the neighborhood, Post-Dispatch columnist Frank P. O’Hare reminisced about growing up in the Kerry Patch. He called it a “crazy-quilt of neighborhoods,” and painted it as
a melange of kindly and brutal, prim and riotous; pious and profane; where drunken husbands beat their slattern wives, and patient mothers wore their finger to the bone scrubbing, sewing, patching, knitting, cooking, breast-nursing.
Hardly hostile to the place he grew up, O’Hare still described the various street gangs that he had to avoid as a ten-year-old running a paper route, but the gangs were a serious concern. In the Kerry Patch, as he and others recalled, there were saloons with dog and cock fighting and lots of drinking. And from other sources, apparently rock-throwing street fights were commonplace, many ending with a number of black eyes and broken bones.
Some criminals got their start in the Patch and then turned their sights to larger prey. One group that began as the Ashley Street Gang morphed into the notorious crime syndicate Egan’s Rats, led by Kerry Patch residents Tom Egan and Missouri State Senator Thomas Kinney. The gang engaged in voter intimidation, bootlegging, train robbery, and murder from about 1890 until the 1920s when one of their members turned on them, and the leaders were sent to prison.
Given the number of small businesses like bakeries, druggists, grocers, and so forth, as well as churches and religious institutions (including a large convent), it’s unfair to paint the whole area as violent. After describing the Patch in disparaging terms, the 1885 guidebook quoted above also pointed out that within the neighborhood lived
“hundreds of respectable people who are compelled by unfortunate circumstances to reside within this limit, and there are many fine residences and large and elegant business establishments.”
Just like anywhere, most of the residents were just trying to get by at a time when the city was growing rapidly, and who faced challenges in this half-century that included a cholera epidemic in 1848-49, the Great Fire of 1849 that burned much of downtown, the Civil War, and the F4 tornado that ripped through St. Louis in 1896.
As Grocer Danny Lyons complained in 1881, “To read the papers one would think that all the deviltry done in the city was done in the Patch.”
The slow demise of the Kerry Patch
Many of the people living in the Kerry Patch lived on land owned by the Mullaphy clan, with long leases that outlived the owners. As the Post-Dispatch explained, “the leases… were a wet blanket, that prevented any improvement.” With the advent of the 20th century, many of the leases expired. The landowners evicted the squatters who had occupied the land for over a half-century, which the paper suggested would lead to “new buildings, better streets, better pavements and less dirt.”
The expiration of the leases must have been a terrible blow to the residents, many of whom had lived most of their lives in the Patch.
At the same time, the neighborhood was shaken up as a wave of new immigrants from Poland began to move into the area in the 1880s, with St. Stanislaus Kostka Church built in 1891. Once again displaying anti-Irish sentiments, the Post-Dispatch hailed the first resident pastor Urban Stanowski as “the genius of the reformation of ‘Kerry Patch.’” The Irish shanties were a thing of the past because, according to the paper, Stanowski’s ideas “bore fruit in clean, busy lives and substantial brick homes.”
With the dissolution of the Kerry Patch, some people chose to remain in their homes, while others sought new residences across the city, particularly to the south and west. It’s not hard to imagine that some of the former Kerry Patch residents took jobs in the Cheltenham brickworks or working on the Missouri-Pacific railroad and relocated to the Irish neighborhood known as Dogtown.
The Kerry Patch today
Although St. Louis boasts many 19th-century structures across the city, very few of the structures associated with the Kerry Patch exist today.
To get a sense of what remains, I tried to map the Kerry Patch onto today’s topography, plotting known addresses on a Google map (with the caveat that this is a rough estimation as some of the streets were rerouted or renamed). Although boundaries were fluid, the majority of the neighborhood would have been between Mullanphy to the north, Carr to the south, and 14th to Jefferson. This means the Kerry Patch, loosely defined, stretched across most of the modern Carr Square neighborhood, including the entire former site of Pruitt-Igoe, some of the new NGA development, Murphy Park, and Preservation Square.
And as I discovered, almost all of the houses and shops that existed during the Kerry Patch heyday were torn down over the past 50-70 years.
Most of the western half of the Kerry Patch land, including King James Cullinane’s two-story brick house, was cleared in the 1950s for the public housing project Pruitt-Igoe.
The Lafayette Brewery’s malt house on Cass was demolished in 1837 by the Hyde Park Brewery, which had bought the property, like for the “warrens of excellent beer caves below the demolition site,” as St. Louis Magazine described. Today, the brewery’s location boasts all-new housing.
There once were multiple churches in this Catholic stronghold. The earliest, St. Patrick’s Church at 6th and Biddle, was torn down in the 1970s. St. Lawrence O’Toole at 14th and O’Fallon was demolished in 1948. St. Leo was torn down in 1978, though its cornerstone remains in an otherwise vacant lot on Mullanphy. The Archdiocese of St. Louis closed St. Bridget of Erin in 2003, and it was torn down in 2016 in order to build La Salle Middle School.
The Clemens Mansion, one of the finest homes in the area, is gone, too. It was built in 1859 for James Clemens Jr. and his wife, Eliza Mullanphy (a daughter of John Mullanphy). Clemens was also a cousin of Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain). The house was at 1849 Cass and is visible on the Compton and Dry map at the top of this article—locate the large structure in the top left corner, the Convent of the Visitation—the mansion is the next building on the street, surrounded by trees.
In recent years, the house had been abandoned, and it deteriorated badly. In 2017, a catastrophic fire destabilized what was left, and it was completely demolished in 2018. Check out this video made by a couple of guys who explored the mansion not long before it burned down.
In contrast to all of the buildings lost in the past century, two from the Kerry Patch legacy are hanging on—barely. When John Mullanphy’s son Bryan died in 1851, he left one-third of his estate to the City of St. Louis in a trust called the Mullanphy Emigrant Relief Fund, “to be and constitute a fund to furnish a relief to all poor emigrants and travelers coming to St. Louis on their way, bona fide, to settle in the West.”
Out of that fund, two buildings were constructed to help immigrants and the poor.
The first building was the Mullanphy Emigrant Home, built in 1867 (above). Located at 14th and Mullanphy/Florissant, as you can see, it still stands for now… barely.
As noted in the Post-Dispatch, it is in poor condition, and some of the walls have collapsed. It’s considered a landmark, and local preservation groups want to save it, but its fate doesn’t seem very promising. [Update: the building burned down in Sept. 2023.]
Bryan Mullanphy’s bequest sponsored a second philanthropic project, the Mullanphy Apartments at 2118 Mullanphy. It was designed by St. Louis architect George D. Barnett in 1909 and built just after the Kerry Patch heyday.
Intended to show that apartments could be built for working-class residents with features that had been reserved for the wealthy, the Mullanphy Tenement Home must have been quite the knockout when it first opened. Its apartments featured balconies, double-hung windows with screens and Holland shades, steam heat, slate sinks, communal clothes dryers, and maple floors, though as a contemporary survey noted, the building was considered fireproof, so no fire escapes were provided. Today, the interior isn’t in great shape, as it sits vacant and is rapidly deteriorating. If you have some resources, though, you could buy it for $595,000 and turn it into something cool.
A final lesson
Some argue that pointing out the areas of decay within the city only reinforces negative images people have of St. Louis. That is not my intent. Instead, with this article, I hope to evoke the memories of thousands of people who, having nowhere to go, chose St. Louis as their home. Many of their descendants still live here and take pride in their Irish heritage, as anyone in the city can attest each March 17th.
But even so, it is worth noting that as of spring 2022, there is almost nothing left of the Kerry Patch or physical reminders of the vibrant community that once resided there.
Back in 2016, in reference to the Clemens mansion, local preservationists Carlie Trosclair and Michael Allen issued a statement saying:
"History is not a commodity. No individual owns cultural heritage. We have a civic responsibility to uphold and care for the historical lineage of our city."
I believe that it’s important to remember and revisit our city's history even after the buildings where people lived, worked, and worshipped are long gone, because it was the people, not the properties, that made St. Louis what it is today.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this article, be sure to subscribe to Unseen St. Louis so you will receive notice of my future explorations of St. Louis history. And to experience a little luck of the Irish, I do hope you’ll share this article and leave a comment before you go! ☘️
Ethnic neighborhoods add much to a city's character, even if prejudice and racism threaten their very existence. The rise and fall of the Kerry Patch recalls, for me, the similar rise and fall of such neighborhoods in Canada, such as "Rooster Town" (in my home town of Winnipeg), "Cabbagetown" (in Toronto) and "Africville" (Halifax), all of which were ultimately wiped off the map when the cities surrounding them expanded their urban sprawl.
Great read, well done! What do you make of both Collins & Ashley Streets (re: Egan's Rats origins) being well east of any known boundary description of the Patch? Is it possible that the Kerry Patch origin story was owed to the gang's turf claim even though Kinney & the Egan brothers didn't physically live there?