Merna, McLean County One-Place Study

I am conducting a series of “one-place studies” in a larger study of Irish immigrants settling in the rural upper-Midwestern states. These studies will examine one-place in context of the county in which they are located. One of these studies has been published in “New Hibernia Review”. It is titled “’A Cargo of Irish Girls:’ Assisted immigration of Domestic Servants into the Midwest 1850-1860″. It compares the experience of these women in Bloomington Illinois and Janesville Wisconsin.

Forthcoming in the same journal, in April 2024, is “The Greening of the Prairie: Irish settlement and farming on the Illinois Prairie”. This uses the village of Merna Illinois as an exemplar community. I am currently working on the issue of how these famine immigrants were able to become farm-owners by studying canal and railroad laborers in LaSalle and Grundy County Illinois. By 1870 over 700 Irish farm families were found in LaSalle County.