preface

In its initial stages, Fenian Graves will include many images of headstones at the four adjacent Calvary cemeteries in Queens, New York (adjacent to Brooklyn) that were begun on a small scale but now cover 365 acres encompassing more than 3,000,000 burials. The initial  "Old Calvary"  has been called The Irish Valhalla, where thousands of civil war veterans lie, many of them members of the Fenian Brotherhood, while other graves include Catalpa escapees, an Irish-born Connaught Rangers deserter following the Sepoy Rebellion in India, a Confederate Army private who led the last Fenian battle in 1867 at Ballyhurst, Tipperary. In Section 4 of Old Calvary lie so many war veterans it's called Military Hill, its burials including General Corcoran, Colonel Huston, as well as two commanders of the Irish Brigade, and one Daniel Murphy whose massive plot is surrounded with low marble walls deeply inscribed, "To Outlast the British Monarchy."  

Fenian Graves will also extend its reach to include the magnificent heroic-size sculpture of Major General Thomas Francis Meagher mounted on his charger before the State Capitol of Montana at Helena where he was Territorial Secretary before statehood. Contrary to wide belief, Meagher -- who organized and led the Irish Brigade for over a year -- became a Fenian (during the civil war), though it was also widely believed that his effectiveness as a revolutionary in the United States would be more telling without any affiliation.

While many prominent Fenians were known to have served in the Union Army, what surprises historians is that fair numbers of Confederate soldiers and their officers were also members of the Brotherhood.  Indeed the names of several Confederate personnel appear on the Military Roster of the Fenian Brotherhood (simply called "I.R.A." on several pages of the MRFB ledger that contains the military profiles of about 400 officers and men, from General Corcoran to scores of officers and several hundreds of other ranks). Not a few Fenians on both sides died in the conflict. In fact the last general to die in the war, Brigadier General Thomas A. Smyth from Cork and Delaware was commander of  Meagher's Irish Brigade for a time, and became the successor of General Michael Corcoran as military commander of the Fenian Brotherhood's military wing. Corcoran himself also died in the war, in 1864. Alas, Smyth, a native of Fermoy, Cork, would himself expire on the very day that Lee's army, including about 1,000 Irish, would surrender at Appomattox, April 9, 1865.

Finally, while our initial album of photos will be limited to the Fenian-IRB-Clan na Gael period, we will soon begin to add the men and women of the Wolfe Tone family, William MacNeven, the Sampsons and the Binns of the 1798-1803 years. Later, while continuing to publish photographs of others of the Fenian years through the 1920s, we'll initiate a series encompassing the men and women from the  more recent campaigns -- those activists who kept the flame alive in America from the 1930s to 2000. 

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