Seattle's 'Bit of the Ould Sod'
SEATTLE - A marble headstone at Seattle's Calvary Cemetery stands over the graves of Terence O'Brien from Co. Tipperary and his wife Maria O'Brien from Co. Clare. Maria's grave is a "Bit of the Ould Sod" that was shipped from Ireland in 1863.
We met recently when she drove up to Vancouver to support The Celtic Connection fundraiser golf tournament.
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THE O'BRIEN headstone as Seattle's Calvary Cemertery. |
In 1862, Terence and Maria O'Brien and their young family sailed for over four months around Cape Horn to the Pacific Northwest.
Maria was nursing a child and fell ill on board from scurvy and malnutrition. When she took seriously ill, she extracted a promise from Terence that on her death she would be buried "on Irish soil." Maria died on November 17, 1862, aged 33, shortly before the ship reached Vancouver, British Columbia.
When the ship docked, Terence set about keeping his promise to his wife. However, rather than sending her remains back to Ireland to be buried, he had a load of Irish soil shipped from Ireland and he buried his wife in a grave filled with the Irish soil at the Hudson's Bay Company's burial ground in Esquimalt, near Victoria.
In 1868, Terence moved his family to the White River Valley area south of Seattle where he started farming. The area's name was later officially changed to O'Brien, so named for Terence and his brother Morgan O'Brien.
When Terence died on April 11, 1888, his son Terence Jr. buried his father in Holy Cross Cemetery on Seattle's Capitol Hill (located where Seattle Prep Jesuit High School is today). Terence Jr. also arranged to have his mother's remains, including her grave's Irish soil, moved from Victoria to Seattle, and he re-buried his mother in the Irish soil next to his father in Holy Cross Cemetery. He also paid $1,400 to have a 10-foot tall marble headstone erected.
In the 1890s, city authorities decided that Holy Cross Cemetery had been located on a geologically unsuitable site and the Diocese of Seattle started the process of moving all the buried remains from Holy Cross to Seattle's Calvary Cemetery.
However, Terence O'Brien Jr. didn't want to have his parents' remains moved again and he refused to cooperate. He even camped out with his rifle at Holy Cross Cemetery in order to make sure that nobody would touch his parents' graves.
Seattle Bishop Edward O'Dea, whose parents were also Irish immigrants, came down to Holy Cross Cemetery to talk to O'Brien, and finally convinced him to permit the transfer of his parents' bodies to Calvary Cemetery on condition that all the Irish soil and the $1,400 monument were also transferred with them.
In November 1898, the bodies of Terence, Sr., and his wife Maria, along with their small part of Ireland and the headstone, were finally moved to Lot 379 of the St. Joseph Section of Calvary Cemetery where they remain today, Seattle's genuine "Bit of the Ould Sod."
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