Page 14 - Always Virginia

2 Virginia Day Fritscher

The immigrant from a small island nation occupied by the
British braved becoming a pioneer of a large continent discovering
itself. He endured the California Trail that opened a rugged route
to wagon trains during the 1840s, heading to San Francisco whose
population of 200 in 1846 had boomed to 36,000 by his arrival in
1850. Striking it rich enough as a prospector, he returned east sailing
out of San Francisco and around Cape Horn to New Orleans. It
was a voyage of four to five months, but he was not about to repeat
the cross-country hardship of a wagon train. He had little choice.
At that time, stagecoach travel, one-way, at 24-hours a day for 28
days, would not begin until 1861, and transcontinental railroads
until 1869. In the early 1850s when the population of a thousand
English settlers in Calhoun County boomed to 3200 with the ar-
rival of German and Irish immigrants, his success allowed him to
buy several large tracts of land near Hamburg in Irish Hollow with
strategic access to transportation on the Mississippi which became
an even more vital highway during the Civil War. In Calhoun
County in 1850, farmland in Hamburg cost around five dollars an
acre increasing to ten dollars in 1860, to nineteen in 1870 when he
married, and to twenty-seven when he died in 1888.
He settled in as a farmer and orchardist who put down his
roots and sold his produce north to Peoria, locally to Jacksonville,
and down river to St. Louis where thousands out of a population
of 160,000 were dying in a cholera pandemic that lasted from 1852
to 1860 at the same time St. Louis, populated by Catholic Irish
and German immigrants, was divided on the issues of slavery and
abolition, but remained in the Union. He had arrived seasoned
by the mass death of the Famine and the politics of the Famine
Rebellion against British landowners that took place near his home
in Tipperary in 1848 when revolution swept Europe. During the
Famine from 1845-1849, a million Irish were starved to death, and
another million Irish, including him, left the island. His mother’s
family, the Catholic Tyrrells of Westmeath, had been fighting