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tkingfisher · 1 year

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I have a question I just thought of. I remember reading that the potato is something that you can discuss at length. I'm curious about the Irish potato famine (as it's called by many people) of 1845 - 52. The potato blight killed a whole load of potatoes, and blight warnings are still a thing today. But... honestly, why? Was just one variety of potato grown? If not, wouldn't different varieties have resisted? The only thing I'm even remotely familiar with is Panama Disease, which is killing off Cavendish bananas because they're all genetically identical - was that the case for the potatoes being grown at the time?

Oh boy. Okay, this is a huge complicated topic and I can only do the Cliff Notes version and even that is absurdly long, but here we go.

The cause of the Irish Potato Famine were, in order:

A) the British

B) the British but moreso

C) still the British but also capitalism

and

D) monoculture

I am not nearly so equipped to talk about A-C as many, many other people, so let’s talk about D.

Now, the humble potato is frankly one of the most glorious products of agricultural science ever created, for which we must thank the indigenous people of Peru, who produced some goddamn geniuses at potato breeding (and also figured out how to freeze-dry potatoes centuries before Idahoan.) The Incas had literally thousands of potato varieties, every size, shape, color, growing condition, right down to sacred potatoes only for consumption by the royal family. They did seriously epic shit with a weird little tuber, a feat perhaps only surpassed by the geniuses who made corn out of teosinte.

Quite a long time later—by which I mean about ten thousand years after the potato was domesticated—the Irish were growing a potato variety called the Lumper. It was a big, coarse, ugly-ass potato which apparently didn’t even taste that great. Irish farmers had other potatoes that they liked a lot better! But the Lumper had three things going for it—it gave huge yields, tolerated nutrient-poor soil, and it didn’t mind wet feet.

(Wet feet is the gardening term for plants with their roots in waterlogged soil. Most potatoes do not actually like wet feet and will rot. But the Lumper was fine with it, which meant that basically you could grow the things in poor soggy soil, which large swaths of Ireland had in generous supply.)

Because of a whole lot of really abusive shit by various landowners, a lot of Irish people ended up dependent on the Lumper for their diet, and I mean dependent. You can live for a really long time on cow’s milk and potatoes if you have to, and a potato that would produce massive yields in crappy wet soil was a godsend. So you had vast areas that were planted with just the Lumper. (There are some reports that other, better-tasting potato varieties were grown for the landlords, but while the workers dug them, they were not allowed to eat them. I can’t speak to the truth of this or not, but it’s definitely worth looking up a full history of the socioeconomics of the famine, if you ever happen to be feeling too good about the world and want to be crushed.)

Unfortunately, the Lumper has one other significant trait—it is extremely vulnerable to potato blight, a disease caused by Phytophtora infestans, which is a weird little thing called an oomycete. It’s more like a fungus than it is anything else, but it’s actually in a separate kingdom called Chromista. (Currently, anyway. Taxonomy is where idealistic young scientists go to become old before their time.) Nevertheless, for our purposes, let’s just call it a fungus. (Also, Chromista is a great name for an alicorn in My Little Pony.)

P. infestans loooooves members of the Solanum clan, which include tomatoes and potatoes. This love is not returned. In a tomato, it’s usually called late blight, in a potato, it’s potato blight, no matter what you call it, it’s bad news. It likes damp, cool conditions, and of course Ireland is basically one big damp cool condition, so once the blight got established, it was in heaven.

Blight on a potato takes about five days from start to finish. This sucker is FAST. One day there’s a blotch on a leaf, next day there’s some whitish stuff under a leaf, then the tubers are suddenly turning black and mushy and stink to high heaven. You may even think you got a good tuber and put it in storage and then you open the door to the root cellar and the whole bin has rotted practically overnight.

The spores can spread by wind, and once it landed on a potato plant, all it needed was like two days above fifty degrees with high humidity, and it was off and running. And it gets in the soil. But worst of all, it lives in the tubers themselves.

Potato cultivars, for those who don’t know, are almost always a clone of the parent. All Yukon Golds are basically the same Yukon Gold. You pop a tuber off a plant, you pop it in the ground, it grows another plant just like the first one, asexual reproduction at its finest.*

Now, potatoes can and do set seed, but there’s some variation even in a seed with two parents of the same variety. Two Yukon Golds might give you Yukon Goldish. Mix up multiple varieties and you don’t always know what you’re gonna get.** (I have grown potatoes from mixed seed and thus made my own cultivars, it’s fun, but the results are wildly variable. Some don’t set tubers at all, some contain high levels of solanine.***)

If you want specific, uniform varieties that all perform the same way, you probably use the tubers. More importantly, tubers start growing right away once you wake them up, whereas potato seedlings can be finicky and often won’t do anything impressive the first year.

To make matters more confusing, the little tuber clones are referred to as seed potatoes.

Anyway, back to the blight. Everybody was growing from little tuber clones, which could be infected with the blight. This means that if your seed potatoes are infected with blight, even if they look fine, if you plant them, your whole crop is infected. The minute you get a cool wet day, the oomcyte wakes up and goes to town. And if you leave an infected potato in the ground, it infects everybody else—and if you’ve ever dug potatoes, you know that you always, always miss one.

Well. The blight came, it hit the Lumper, and it spread like wildfire. The Lumper grew in the wet conditions the blight loved, and was also really susceptible to it, so it was a match made in hell. There were potato varieties even then that were more resistant to the blight, but they were tiny islands and a sea of blight was washing over them daily, so they eventually succumbed. Even if you planted a different potato, if it was in soil that had previously held the Lumper, it was likely doomed.

This is the problem with monocultures. You plant all one variety and it’s susceptible to some particular bug, when that bug hits, you have no fall back position. And potatoes, being more or less clones, are even more vulnerable than most seed-grown crops, and this bug is particularly nasty and the spring of ‘45 was exactly the right weather and the British government was being particularly evil and ultimately a million people starved to death because of a perfect storm.

The Lumper still exists. Somebody turned up some heirloom seeds back in 2008 and grew them out, and what they got is probably pretty close to the original. Being seed grown, it doesn’t carry the blight. It’s an ugly, watery, kinda waxy potato that even its champions think tastes sorta okay, I guess. Cultivariable, one of the few sources I can find, says that in addition to not being resistant to blight, it’s not resistant to anything else either, and there’s not much point in trying to grow it unless you have long dry summers and no local blight.

And that is the saga of the Lumper, the blight, and why I personally always plant at least four varieties of potato.

* There’s some subtleties here, but for layman’s purposes, we’ll go with this.

** It’s actually way complicated, but this is already hella long.

*** Same stuff that makes green potatoes toxic. Super bitter, so you know right away it’s inedible and spit it out. We still refer to taste-tasting the new crop from seed as “the Potato Suicide Pact” but it’s not actually dangerous.

#gardening #potatoes #potato famine #long #agriculture

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millingroundireland · 6 months

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The story of Ireland's other famines

This cartoon, appearing April 18, 1846, was drawn by John Leech. It depicts the Irish peasantry as children and Sir Robert Peel as the old woman who lived in a shoe, with so many children, she didn’t know what to do. Under the title is written, “She gave them some Broth without any Bread, Then whipp’d them all Round, and sent them to Bed.” She is thrashing them with the recently enacted Coercion Bill.

Building off what was written about in yesterday's post, I noted that "considering the famines in 1830-1834, 1836, and 1839," this may have been a factor in Margaret Bibby, John Mills, and may I add Thomas Mills, in coming over the U.S. when they did. I also noted that "famine was nothing new to Ireland, mentioning the famines in 1740–41, 1756–7, 1800, 1807, 1821–2, 1830–34, 1836, and 1839, but providing no further detail. This post aims to provide that detail.

The Irish Potato Famine of 1845 to 1852, at most, connects to a deeper history of Ireland. [1] Due to a harsh military policy begun in 1579, in 1582 and 1583 there was a Munster which killed people by the tens of thousands. This was not an isolated incident, as another occurred in Ulster from 1602 to 1603. Many years later, in 1651 and 1652, an even harsher famine "swept away whole counties" as Colonel Richard Lawrence reported in 1653, killing possibly 200,000 people! This was again, a result of war, with this famine killing up to 20-25% of the population, sometimes called "Cromwell's Famine." In the 1720s, famines again wrecked the continent of Ireland. In 1726, a famine led to the "first large scale Irish migration to Newfoundland." In 1727, famine again struck, with devastation continuing until 1730, leading to widespread devastation, with thousands killed, with the potato, some say, making little difference, as harvest failures in oats went on. Later on, in the 18th century, was an even more severe famine, lasting from late 1739 into 1740 and 1741, which some say was caused by a cold winter and a frost. It killed hundreds of thousands of people, which some say was worse than the famed Irish Potato famine, leading 1741 to be called the "Year of Slaughter" (Bliain an Áirin Irish) as it was accompanied by dysentery and fever! This would foreshadow later famines as the population was becoming even more dependent on potatoes.

This post was originally published on WordPress in July 2018.

As the 18th century went on, there would be further famines. [2] Some recorded famines in 1756-1757 in County Kildare of Ireland, or in 1766 when there was food rioting. However, it is undeniably clear that there were famines later on in the 18th century, as the years between 1782 and 1784, 1795-1796, 1799-1801, there were hardships, but they were short-lived and localised. As one undergraduate honors thesis on Irish famine by a student of the College of William and Mary pointed out:

What we remember as the Great Famine was by no means the first Irish experience with endemic hunger: “crop failures had occurred periodically in Ireland in 1740, 1766, 1782-4, 1795-6, 1800-1, 1816-17 and 1822” (Kinealy 32). Hunger was so common in Ireland that when “Bishop Doyle was asked, in 1832, what was the condition of the population in the west of Ireland, he replied ‘that which it has always been – they are famishing as usual’” (Van de Kamp 2). The Great Famine, however, was unprecedented in both its scope and duration.

David Wootton writes that in the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith declared that "in a free market economy famines will never occur" and famines that happen are "the result of misconceived government interventions to prevent famine," claiming that "grain harvests never completely fail" but that "famines occur when governments artificially lower prices and thus cause supplies to run out." This actually relates directly to Ireland, as his policies led to issues in years to come:

Smith was quite right to think that England, where there was a relatively free market in grain, had not seen anything resembling a famine in his lifetime. But he completely failed to consider Ireland, where severe famines happened frequently. Worst of all was the famine of 1740-42, which killed 10% of the population, or 300,000 people. Smith had every reason to be familiar with Irish famine, for Jonathan Swift was one of his favourite authors and he had surely read Swift’s Modest Proposal...suggesting that the Irish poor should breed children as livestock, to be consumed by the wealthy. Swift’s solution to the problem of starvation in Ireland was (in appearance) a perfect example of free market economics in practice...Why did the Irish starve? For reasons that would have been familiar to Sen: because neither the government nor landlords intervened effectively to prevent the famine taking hold. In England, on the other hand, there were elaborate interventions, not only to feed the feeble and the unemployed, but also to subsidise bread for the poor and to distribute it free..Smith was also fundamentally wrong: the working poor could not afford to feed themselves in bad years, and were dependent on charity to survive. Why was Smith unwilling to acknowledge the role of charity in preventing famine? I am afraid the answer has to be that his commitment to free market arguments was so dogmatic that he was unwilling to look with an impartial eye at the evidence. Smith was wrong, and his mistake had extremely serious consequences as it influenced policy towards famine through the nineteenth century.

This brings us to how Lyman A. Baker describes Ireland in the 18th century. She writes that it was a place wrought by religious division as "the overwhelming majority of the population was Roman Catholic, but the immigrant Protestant minorities had united with the English to force through Parliament a series of discriminatory inheritance laws which effectively broke up large Catholic estates and put them at the mercy of rapidly consolidating Protestant landowners," leading Catholics to loose their land rights. She adds that the Irish Parliament was impotent, with anger at English efforts to destroy the Irish economy for the benefit of those in England.

In the 18th century, famine spread across Ireland once more. [3] In 1807, there was famine, concentrated in Galaway, Ireland. From 1816 to 1817, there was famine across Ireland, first started by a late growing season and excessive rain which killed the tens of thousands, accompanied by a typhus epidemic. Famine struck again in 1821 to 1822, due to the failure of the potato crop, with fever and other diseases following, with the same happening in 1825. This led many to immigrate out of Ireland, some to the U.S. and others to Canada, while population of Ireland would continue to rise until 1845. For our purposes, it is worth noting that famine appeared in Ireland again, beginning in 1830, ending in 1834, spurting up again in 1836 and 1839, continuing a trend of "sporadic potato crop failures." There were food riots in Limerick in 1830, a cholera epidemic beginning in 1832, with increased immigration to the U.S. in 1833 due to the failure of the potato crop, with later failures from 1835-1837 in the counties of Mayo and Galaway most harshly. As one website pt it, "by the early 19th century everyone ate potatoes, from rich to poor, and no meal was complete without them. For some this was almost all they ever ate." Then in 1839 there was "hurricane winds...after a period of unusual weather and which saw heavy snow falling across Ireland," with the wind extinguishing "cabin lanterns, rush lights and candles," with the destruction of housing leaving many homeless,and many losing their life savings as the roof of their cabins blew away!

It is worth remembering what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his father on July 16, 1835 about the condition of the Irish people, just like what a Hungarian would write two years later:

You cannot imagine what a complexity of miseries five centuries of oppression, civil disorder, and religious hostility have piled on this poor people. It is a ghastly labyrinth, in which it will be difficult to find one's way, and of which we shall only catch a glimpse of the entrance. [4]

This relates to an account by an individual in County Mayo, talking about the limited diet of many Irish before the Potato Famine began in 1845, saying "most families owned a cow and a calf only and those near the mountain owned a few sheep each," adding that they lived on potatoes, having "oatmeal cakes and butter and milk" from time to time, with corn sold to pay taxes and rent. They also note that flax was sown, with which they made their linens, wool provided heavier clothing, bed clothes were used as clothing, with men wearing "short knee breeches, long tailed coats, high hats, white linen shirts, long stockings and nailed boots" while women wore a "cloak with a white lined head cloth." Adding to this, a good number of Irish were Catholic, including those in County Tipperary, likely including the Mills and Bibby families, although that cannot be fully confirmed.

Even with all these famines throughout Ireland's history, the one beginning in 1845, the Potato Famine, is different. As a well-known social theorist wrote in the 1860s, earlier in Ireland there had been "repeated cases of partial famine" but "now famine was general."

All of this relates to the stories of the Mills, and interrelated Bibby families, because such famines and disruptions, especially in the 1830s, may have been one of the push factors which led them to leave Ireland and arrive in Warren County, New York. It might also be possible that the Mills and Bibby families knew each other before coming together in the U.S., which is the reason they ended up in the same county. This isn't saying that John Mills and Margaret Bibby knew each other well before their marriage, but rather that there could have been some familiar connections. They may still be descendants in Ireland, perhaps including Simon Mills, whom died in March 2017 and had previously lived in County Tipperary.

Until next time!

Notes

[1] All sources in this paragraph from this footnote if not otherwise noted. Don Lehane, "History of Kinsalebeg: The Great Famine," 2014; "The Siege of Galway 1651 – 1652," yourirish.com, accessed May 12, 2018; John Dorney, "War and Famine in Ireland, 1580-1700," The Irish Story, Jan 3, 2012; Maggie Land Blanck, "The Great Famine - 1845-1849," Jul 2016; Jim Lee, "Cromwell's Victory and Irish Famine," May 2017; Tim Lambert, "A TIMELINE OF IRISH HISTORY," localhistories.org, accessed May 12, 2018; "Newfoundland History – 18th Century part 1," Dec 9, 2015; "Irish Famines, Charlestown in Co. Mayo," Mayo Ireland Ltd, Excerpts from “Ireland 1845-1850: The Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it ‘Perfect'” by Christopher Fogarty; "Potatoes in Ireland in the 1700s," suttonelms.org.uk, accessed May 12, 2018; "Scots-Irish," accessed May 12, 2018; L. A. Clarkson, "A Non-Famine History of Ireland?," History Ireland, Issue 2 (Summer 2002), Vol. 10; Elroy Christenson, "Elroy's History of Ireland of 17th and 18th centuries," Jan 26, 2016; SilentOwl, "1739-40 Arctic Ireland. Our little ice age and The Forgotten Famine," Mar 22, 2011; "History of 18th Century Ireland," yourirish.com, accessed May 12, 2018; "The Great Frost Or Forgotten Famine Of 1740," Thurles Information, Dec 31, 2010; "1741 The Year of the Slaughter," yourirish.com, accessed May 12, 2018; Brendan McWilliams, "The Great Frost and forgotten famine," Irish Times, Feb 19, 2001; "Bliain an Áir (Year of Slaughter) – Irish Famine of 1740-1741," Stair na hÉireann, Nov 2, 2017; Paul Homewood, "The Irish Famine Of 1741," Not A Lot of People Know That, Mar 12, 2013; AJ, "Are You Irish?," HubPages, Sept 25, 2016; "The Irish Famines of ’40s," Musings from the Chiefio, Mar 16, 2012; "Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa," Maher Matters, Jan 13, 2014; Sarah Zielinski, "A New “Drought Atlas” Tracks Europe’s Extreme Weather Through History," Smithsonian, Nov 6, 2015; "People," Cecil Township Historical Society, accessed May 12, 2018; "New drought atlas maps 2,000 years of climate in Europe," phys.org, Nov 6, 2015; "What were the social and economic effects of the Famine?," History Zone, Apr 4, 2018;"The Irish Famine of 1739," from An Illustrated History of Ireland by Margaret Anne Cusack. There are also reports that there were famines in Ireland in 670, 698, 772, 773, 965, 1065, 1098, 1116, 1271, 1316-1317, and 1497. Some claimed that there were famines in 1646, 1690, but no evidence was found to prove these claims.

[2] James Durney, "THE EFFECTS OF THE GREAT FAMINE IN KILDARE 1845-50," Oct 2007; James Kelly, "Food rioting, an overlooked Irish tradition," Irish Times, Nov 27, 2017; L. A. Clarkson, "A Non-Famine History of Ireland?," History Ireland, Issue 2 (Summer 2002), Vol. 10; John Herson, "Escaping poverty and oppression in the pre-Famine Roscommon," Divergent Paths, Aug 26, 2015.

[3] Tim Lambert, "A TIMELINE OF IRISH HISTORY," localhistories.org, accessed May 12, 2018; L. A. Clarkson, "A Non-Famine History of Ireland?," History Ireland, Issue 2 (Summer 2002), Vol. 10; "Timeline of Ireland," Tipperary Genealogy, 2011; Marjie Bloy, "Famine and emigration hit Ireland: 1817," A Web of English History, Jan 12, 2016; Patrick Webb, "Emergency Relief during Europe's Famine of 1817 Anticipated Crisis-Response Mechanisms of Today," The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 132, Issue 7, 1 July 2002, Pages 2092S–2095S; Patrick O'Brien, "Top ten worst times to have lived in Ireland," Irish Central, Jun 27, 2016; Lawrence M. Geary, "William Carleton: famine, disease and Irish society," History Ireland, Issue 5 (September/October 2013), Vol. 21; "Ireland 1800’s – Outbreaks and Epidemics," The Swain Page, Sept 26, 2015; Hugh Fenning, "Typhus Epidemic in Ireland, 1817-1819: Priests, Ministers, Doctors," Collectanea Hibernica, No. 41 (1999), pp. 117-152; Chuck H., "Weather, Famine, Disease, Migration and Monsters: 1816-1819," The Historic Interpreter, May 11, 2015; "What were the social and economic effects of the Famine?," History Zone, Apr 4, 2018; "The Irish Famine of 1739," from An Illustrated History of Ireland by Margaret Anne Cusack; Summary of James S. Donnelly, Jr's book, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-1824; Noise Cleary, "The Irish Famine," O'Brien – Ireland to Van Diemen's Land, accessed May 12, 2018; "Irish Poverty Relief Loan records available online," The National Archives (UK), Jan 23, 2015; Rebecca Preston, "Was there a Political Dimension to the Irish Rockite Movement of 1821 to 1824?," accessed May 12, 2018; "Irish Famine Years- McGinnis and Donahue’s….. What Might They Have Endured," Heritage and More, Mar 8, 2013; James Durney, "THE EFFECTS OF THE GREAT FAMINE IN KILDARE 1845-50," Oct 2007; Cormac O Grada, "The population of Ireland 1700-1900 : a survey," 1979; John Greham, "The Irish Potato Famine," Your Family Tree, May 2005; Michael Byrne, "The families and streets of Birr in 1821," offalyhistoryblog, Jun 23, 2017; "Scots-Irish," accessed May 12, 2018; Noise Cleary, "Emigration," irish-roots.ie, accessed May 12, 2018; Robert McNamara, "The Great Irish Famine: Turning Point for Ireland and America," Thought.Co, Mar 6, 2017; "Food in Ireland 1600 – 1835," dochara, accessed May 12, 2018;Niall O’Ciosain, "Poverty Before the Famine, County Clare 1835," Clare County Library, accessed May 12, 2018; "The Irish Potato Famine," The History Place, 2000; Wicklow Genealogy Tours, "About Emigration and the Famine," 2017; "Life Before the Famine," accessed May 12, 2018; Richard McMahon, "Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland," Dublin Review of Books, 2016; Thomas Cahill, "Why Famine came to Ireland," Irish Central, May 10, 2010; "Timeline of the Irish Famine," irishhistorian.com, accessed May 12, 2018; W.L. Lowe, "The Irish Constabulary in the Great Famine," Issue 4 (Winter 1997), Vol. 5; Niall Whelehan, "Labour and agrarian violence in the Irish midlands, 1850-1870," accessed May 12, 2018; Robert McNamara, "Ireland's Big Wind," Thought.Co, Oct 16, 2017; Oana Frawley, "Photography and the Visual Legacy of Famine," accessed May 12, 2018. Also see James S. Donnelly's book, Landlord and tenant in nineteenth-century Ireland, Beatrice Coogan's book, The Big Wind: A Novel of Great Famine, Michael D. Nie's The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882, Samuel Clark's Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, and Ian N. Gregory, Niall A. Cunningham, C. D. Lloyd, Ian G. Shuttleworth, and Paul S. Ell's Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland.

[4] Emmit Larkin, "Introduction" within Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey in Ireland, July-August, 1835 (USA: Catholic University Press, 1990), p 3. Other parts of the quote are within John F Quinn's Father Mathew's Crusade, Peter Quinn's Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America, and Kevin Kenny's The American Irish: A History.

#potato famine #irish history #irish heritage #irish genealogy #wordpress #19th century #genealogy #ancestry #famines

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