Joe Wayne sits at his bar in the Hibernian House. PHOTOS BY JACQUELINE DORMER
This story originally appeared in two parts in the Pottsville Republican-Herald. The first part appeared on March 17, the second part on March 18.
GIRARDVILLE - Some time in the 1930s, an old miner’s widow was asked if she remembered June 21, 1877.
“Indade I do, sir,” she said in an Irish brogue. “Will I ever forget it! A sad day it was in the hard coalfields, sir.”
On June 21, 1877, forever to be known as “The Day of the Rope,” six Irishmen were hanged at the Schuylkill County Jail in Pottsville, and four were hanged at the Carbon County Jail in Jim Thorpe (then known as Mauch Chunk). These ten men were accused of being Molly Maguires, members of a secret society of Irish-American coal miners who believed that violent rebellion was the only way to overthrow their cruel and greedy bosses. John “Black Jack” Kehoe, who newspapers called “King of the Mollies,” was spared the Day of the Rope. He was hanged for the 1862 murder of mine foreman Frank W. Langdon one week before Christmas 1878, leaving behind his wife, five daughters and his bar, the Hibernian House in Girardville.
“When the hour of the hangings arrived for them poor Irish lads,” the miner’s widow remembered, “the world suddenly became dark and we had to burn our lamps. It’s Black Thursday it was, sir.”
Joe Wayne, Kehoe’s great-grandson and fourth-generation owner of the Hibernian House, remembers March 13, 2020 as “a black day in history.” That day, he bought plenty of food and liquor to restock his bar in time for the annual Girardville St. Patrick’s Day Parade, of which Wayne is founder and chairman. All of his preparation was for naught when COVID-19 forced the Hibernian House to close and the parade to be cancelled. Although Wayne assures me that he and his friends did not let the beer go to waste, it was a crushing blow.
Joe Wayne demonstrates the cell door and shackles that held his great-grandfather.
“We were always taught that everyone had to entertain,” he said about growing up around the bar. As a child, his weekends were filled with singing, music and jokes at the Hibernian House. Despite its Irish roots, all were welcome, and Wayne continues that welcoming tradition with the bands and crowds that choke the streets of Girardville every St. Patrick’s Day.
“It’s so crowded in here every parade day that if you died then you couldn’t fall over,” Wayne said. The bar has a collection of neon beer signs broken by lovers who pushed each other up against them.
Even though the parade has been postponed for the second year in a row, there are still shamrocks on Girardville’s doors and windows. Behind the Hibernian House’s Killarney-green doors is a wood-paneled diamond in the rough. Wayne has the Irish gift of gab and a flair for mile-a-minute folk wisdom. He is prone to using his own colorful expressions (he calls using the Hibernian House’s bathroom “shedding a tear for the Queen.”) He tends bar just like his great-grandfather did, and stores his beer on the same 150-year-old wooden bar. Wayne says the exquisitely-carved bar has been in the family “since Adam and Eve were runnin’ around.”
Above the bar are the names of the 20 men who were executed for crimes connected to the Molly Maguires.
“Let’s face it,” Wayne said. “20 men went to the gallows. Not one of them apprehended in the commission of a crime. 20 men danced on the end of a rope.”
Wayne denies that there was a group of people who called themselves the Molly Maguires, and says that their existence “was put on by the coal companies” to discredit their movement. “He wasn’t King of the Mollies no more than myself,” Wayne said.
The Molly Maguires were an offshoot of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a longstanding Irish-American organization (“Hibernia” is an ancient name for Ireland). Wayne is the President of the AoH John Kehoe Division #1.
A portrait of Jack Kehoe in the Hibernian House. The candles pictured here were used at Kehoe's funeral mass.
Although Wayne claims that “there was no such organization,” the Hibernian House honors the men who were called Molly Maguires. Portraits of Kehoe are flanked by the ornate candles used at his funeral mass. What was once the door to his cell now leads to the women’s room. Portraits of Wayne’s ancestors, and the major players in the Molly Maguire drama, hang on the walls. A large mural shows the 20 hanged men standing at the bar with Wayne and his friends. There’s Gene Salay of Doylestown. Salay was a prisoner of war in Korea (“They tortured him something fierce.”) There’s also Wayne’s lifelong friend John M. Elliott, the attorney who helped clear Kehoe’s name by securing a posthumous pardon from Governor Milton J. Shapp in 1979.
“There were a lot of discriminatory remarks being made about my great-grandfather,” Wayne said.
His uncle, Jack Kehoe’s grandson, was taunted for being “the grandson of a murderer.”
“That didn’t sit well with me and that didn’t sit well with the family,” Wayne said.
Starting when he was in college, Wayne researched his great-grandfather, but as he tried to clear his family name, some of his relatives referred to an old Irish saying: “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Don’t stir up the stuff,” he remembered them saying. “I wasn’t the most popular guy in the family because of it. But I was gonna see it through.”
Even when his mother was a little girl, she was tainted with the stigma of being descended from a Molly. The popular image of the Molly Maguires was one of violent outlaws - there were wild rumors of them throwing people on hot stoves, and cutting off the ears of those who crossed them. People joked that the survivors of the Molly Maguires looked like bighorn sheep, because they had to use ear trumpets to hear out of their surviving ears.
After years of lobbying, Shapp pardoned Kehoe over 100 years after he was hanged. The framed pardon hangs in the Hibernian House.
“I was elated,” Wayne said. “I had an open house here and it lasted for three days. We had every TV station in the area. We had one heck of a party here”
Wayne points out that his own likeness in the mural is thinner than he is, and missing his bald spot. That, he says, is what you pay painters for.
A close-up of the mural showing Joe Wayne, his friends and the Molly Maguires.
John Kehoe was born in 1837 in County Wicklow, Ireland. He was among the thousands of Irish who fled the potato famine for America, and found work in the coal towns of Schuylkill County. He tried his hand as a miner, but found the most success when he opened a bar, the Hibernian House. The place became a popular hangout for Irish miners. It wasn’t just these men who crossed the Atlantic. They brought with them a spirit of resistance against discrimination. In the 1840s, Irish peasants rose up in the face of economic hardship and mistreatment from the English elite. They would sometimes dress in women’s clothing, imitating a woman named Molly Maguire who may or may not have existed. The followers of this “Mistress Molly Maguire” delivered a form of vigilante violence that they called “midnight legislation,” targeting local authorities and rent collectors.
“When the Irish first came here,” Wayne said, “they weren’t saints.”
When these sons and daughters of Molly Maguire came to the Coal Region, the widows of mining accidents became the new “Mistress Mollies.” People like Kehoe wanted to fight for them. In time, Irish immigrants had built a Democratic political machine in Schuylkill County.
“Contrary to the papers that made them sound like ignorant Irish and so forth,” Wayne said, “they were school directors, they were tax collectors, they served on councils. They were very active in the community.”
At the heart of it was Kehoe. An educated man, he explained to the miners how they were being exploited. In those days, Schuylkill County was a Wild West of dangerous mines, unscrupulous owners and discontented workers. It was the kind of place where revolution was bound to break out sooner or later, it just needed a spark. That spark was the Civil War, which the Irish Democrats saw as “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.” In June 1862, Frank Langdon, a mine foreman accused of ripping off miners when it came time to pay them, gave a speech in preparation for the Fourth of July. Kehoe was in the audience that day, and allegedly stepped on the American flag, spit on it and said “I’ll do worse than that before this night’s over.” Shortly after Langdon finished his speech, an angry mob beat him to death. Witnesses claimed to have heard Kehoe say “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you!” Kehoe was hanged on this evidence. Every ethnic group had its own interpretation of what happened, shared in each of their saloons. Meanwhile, miners were becoming angrier and angrier about their poor wages and even poorer working conditions. They wanted to band together and fight for their rights - and the Ancient Order of Hibernians was the way to do it.
In the ensuing century and a half, the Hibernian House has survived the execution of its founder, two World Wars and now two global pandemics. Kehoe has become a folk hero, a martyr in the fight for workers and immigrants. Wayne is now living history, getting interviewed by local schoolchildren and serving green-clad tourists. They quote “The Quiet Man” in mock accents and ask him what he thought of the 1970 movie “The Molly Maguires,” where Sean Connery played his great-grandfather with a Scottish accent (much to Wayne’s chagrin).
“The music by Henry Mancini was excellent,” he said, “I wrote words for that. The photography by James Wong Howe was good. Other than that, the movie sucked.”
Among the visitors Saturday afternoon was Ed McDevitt, a member of the Philadelphia AoH.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” he told Wayne as they shook hands.
“No dirty Irish jokes!” Said Don Moynihan. “I’m easily insulted.”
“Ain’t that a wonderful sound?” Wayne said as he poured a drink. “Like a fart from a baby.”
Countless people have told Wayne that they too are related to Kehoe. He tries to explain that they can’t be, but they don’t listen. It has to be true, they say, because their fathers told them so.
“Finally you have to shake their hands and say ‘Not too many people admit their line of bastardy,’” Wayne said.
Kehoe’s spirit still haunts Schuylkill County, sometimes literally. After he was hanged, his body was kept on ice in the Tamaqua Railroad Station. Local paranormal investigators have since investigated the Station for ghostly activity.
“They put these recording machines all over and said ‘You hear that? It sounds like Jack Kehoe’s saying “Can you help me?”’” Wayne said. “Yeah, and I’m an astronaut. They give a dog’s rear end heartburn with the stories they come up with.”
In 1863, mob violence against the draft was raging in Schuylkill County. That year’s Enrollment Act allowed wealthy men to avoid the draft by paying a $300 fee. One of the men who paid the fee was Franklin Benjamin Gowen, a prominent lawyer in Schuylkill County and a man whose actions in history secured him a place in the Hibernian House portrait gallery. A brash, flamboyant and well-spoken son of an Irish immigrant, Gowen was a failed mine operator before being elected District Attorney of Schuylkill County. His father James witnessed schools, homes and churches burn during anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia. James was a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. His son would see the society as a mortal enemy.
In the ensuing years, a nonviolent group called the Workers Benevolent Association formed. The WBA was a threat to Gowen, who had risen through the ranks to become CEO of the Reading Railroad and was gobbling up Schuylkill’s coalfields. He kept wages low and suppressed strikes with the help of his private police force, known as the Coalies. It was then that the killings popularly associated with the Molly Maguires began. Gowen declared that “a noxious weed of foreign birth” was in the mines. The WBA dissolved due to ethnic conflict between the Welsh and Irish miners. In 1875, a letter supposedly from a Molly Maguire was published in the Shenandoah Herald.
“I am against shooting as much as ye are,” the letter read, “but the Union is broke up and we have got nothing to defend ourselves with but our revolvers and if we don’t use them we shall have to work for 50 cents a day.”
Meanwhile, Gowen had a secret plan of his own. In 1873, he hired a private detective named James McParlan, a slim 29-year-old Irishman with red hair and a redder face, to infiltrate the Molly Maguires. For his mission, McParlan reinvented himself as James McKenna. He claimed he was a Colorado miner looking for his fortune in Schuylkill County. “McKenna” sang, danced, drank and fought with the miners, slowly earning their trust. He would brag about violent adventures he never had. In 1874, McParland was sworn into the Ancient Order of Hibernians under their motto: “Friendship, Unity and true Christian Charity.”
The summer of 1875 was one of great bloodshed. McParlan claimed Kehoe ordered the murders of “Bully Bill” Thomas and mine superintendent John P. Jones. After the brutal slayings of Charles McAllister, his mother-in-law and pregnant wife by vigilantes in the Wiggans mine patch, McParlan wrote a letter of resignation.
“As for the O’Donnells,” he wrote, “I am satisfied that they got their just deservings. Now to wake up this morning and find that I am the murderer of Mrs. McAllister. What had a woman to do in this case? Did the Molly Maguires in their worst time shoot down women?” He was told by his superiors that it was “fighting fire with fire.”
The church, the labor unions and the general public were appalled when they read about the Mollies’ crimes.
“They are scum and a disgrace to us Irishmen and American citizens,” said Father Daniel O’Connor of Mahanoy City.
The trials and subsequent executions of the Molly Maguires began in 1876. They were hanged on the investigation of Coalies and private detectives, the arrests of private policemen, the prosecution of Gowen and other coal region lawyers, and McParlan’s testimony. The juries had no Irish-Americans; they were predominantly German-Americans who spoke little English. Even now, Wayne is disgusted at the miscarriage of justice. When asked whether McParlan and Gowen have any descendents, he said “I hope not.”
Both tabloids and fiction magazines salivated over the trials. Gowen and his allies made fire-and-brimstone sermons about how the Mollies were Irish savages that must be eliminated. Gowen saw all labor activists as no better than lawless murderers. No trial was more sensational than the trial of the “King of the Mollies.” The defense brought in witnesses to vouch for Kehoe’s character, but it didn’t work.
“As to his conduct,” that has always been good,” one said, “but as far as the reputation goes, I never did hear much good.”
Among the many allegations of Mollie political corruption was that they used their influence to deliver the Irish vote to Pennsylvania Governor John Hartranft, and were expecting pardons in return.
“If we don’t get justice,” Kehoe allegedly said to the county jailer, “I don’t think the old man at Harrisburg will go back on us.”
The pardon never came. Kehoe was sentenced to seven years in prison for the attempted murder of “Bully Bill” Thomas. It took 20 minutes for the jury to decide the verdict. Gowen wasn’t satisfied. He believed that the Molly scourge would never be eradicated unless Kehoe hanged. He was tried for Langdon’s murder and sentenced to death in what historian Kevin Kenny called “unquestionably the most dubious of all the verdicts handed down to the Molly Maguires.” No witnesses claimed to have seen Kehoe in the mob that day.
Looking back, Wayne sees the Mollies as the forerunners of today’s labor unions.
“The names have changed, but the corporate structures and so forth aren’t too different today as far as unions are concerned,” he said. “Look what’s going on down in Georgia today and Alabama with Amazon.”
Since Kehoe’s hanging, the ethnic tensions have abated. Wayne grew up on a street with people of English, Welsh, Italian, Russian and Lithuanian descent.
“It was a melting pot,” he said. “Back in those days they took advantage. We were all immigrants. But there was nobody more prejudiced than the Irish were. When the Irish finally got a foothold in the mines, the owners didn’t like the idea of having to pay more money out so they started bringing the Eastern Europeans over. And what did the Irish do? They started calling them names, mocking their food and their customs and so forth. And nobody was harder-working than the Lithuanians, Polish, Ukranians.”
Jack Kehoe is not the only loss in Wayne’s family - just the most famous. His wife died in 2016, and his brother ultimately died of injuries sustained in Vietnam. Elliott, the lawyer who got Kehoe pardoned, died the day before I came to the Hibernian House.
“Anyone who comes and tells you time heals all wounds don’t know what they’re talking about,” Wayne said. “That’s the sad part of getting older, believe me. You don’t realize, when somebody dies and you’re at their funeral, there’s some of you going in that hole.”
As he grows older, Wayne sees Girardville’s old traditions fading away too.
“All of the organizations are gone,” he said. American Legions, “VFWs, the Catholic War Vets, the AoH, the Elks, all the memberships are going down. The younger generation won’t be involved in anything… They don’t read about [history].”
And yet, he still has the folks who gathered from across Pennsylvania to be here this Saturday afternoon and listen to him talk about his great-grandfather and the Mollie Maguires. They listen as he talks about his younger days (“I don’t know if you ever picked coal a lot. Coal is sharp.”) and his memories of the Hibernian House.
“They expect me to live forever,” Wayne said. “I hope I do, but that’s not gonna be the case. I figure 125 would be long enough.”
“Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” McDevitt said. “God Bless America!”
The grave of Jack Kehoe in Tamaqua.
John Kehoe was buried in Old Saint Jerome’s Catholic Cemetery in Tamaqua, on a hill of yellow grass overlooking the town. The cemetery is old and worn now - its gates are as rusty as Kehoe’s jail cell. The graves are cracked and broken. Many of them are so eroded that the names are no longer visible. Some are knocked over and shattered in the wind, like the leaves that scatter in front of them. Low on the side of the hill, behind a fallen tree, is Kehoe’s grave, the best-preserved of them all. The words at the bottom are faint, but they read “WHILST IN THIS SILENT GRAVE I SLEEP/MY SOUL TO GOD I GIVE TO KEEP.” There is an American flag at the foot of his tombstone.