"Between the Creeks" Page: 198
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Some blarney about potatoes, Irishmen 3-17-91
Each year on St. Patrick's Day, I feel a little Irish, and a little Irish I am. Before
the time of St. Patrick, there was a chieftan named McManus with a clan of kin known by
his name. In 1773, 13 centuries after St. Patrick brought Christianity to these pagan
ancestors, my only known Irish ancestor, Lawrence McManus, came to the colony of
North Carolina.
Eight generations have diluted my Irish blood, but one day a year can't we all be
as Irish as the Irish potato?
The Irish adopted the potato, a native of South America, as a food staple in the
1500s, some 200 years before it was widely accepted in other parts of Europe. The
dependence of Ireland on the potato was so great, that when the potato blight attacked the
crop in 1845-46, many thousand Irish people died of starvation.
The potato famine caused over a million Irish to emigrate to America. This new
group swelled eastern chities and over-flowed over the country. Emigration continued
during the last half of the 1800s; shiploads came regularly to Galveston and New
Orleans.
During this time, some Irish families moved into North Texas to be neighbors of
others with obviously Irish names, whose ancestors had come to this country, perhaps a
century before, during colonial days. There was less predjudice toward these newcomers
here, than in other places. They are remembered as being very Irish, whatever that
means.
One thing the new Irish had in common with others in this community was their
dependence on potatoes as a diet staple. Language geographers indicate an ethnic link
with potatoes. It has been determined by the speech of native North Texans, and research
of individual families shows that it is so, that we share a history of migration from the
back country of Virginia and the Carolinas that took a northern route into Texas. East
Texans' speech indicates a more southern route to Texas.
Our speech is sometimes called Hill Southern, while theirs is Plantation Southern.
The dividing line, according to some experts, is drawn from the Appalachian Mountains
westward at approximately where hash browns replace grits on the breakfast menu. This
potato eater first encountered grits in an Alabama restaurant.
My family may have been far removed from Lawance McManus and his wife
Cattrel, but we would have found it hard to survive without potatoes at least twice a day.
Instead of meat, we had fried potatoes. On Sundays we might have meat, usually fried
chicken or fried steak, or even more rarely pot roast, served with mashed potatoes and
gravy.
Perhaps no other food except rice or pasta can have the variety a potato has by
varying its preparation. I can detect a subtle difference in taste between fried potatoes
that are cut in strips in the French style and those cut in round disks that are sometimes
called cottage fries. Potatoes fried with onions can be soft and mushy; others, crisp with
the onions slightly burnt, are quite different. What I am trying to say is that I nerer got
tired of having potatoes at every meal.
Not only were poratoes the main food of my father's family, there were his
business. Grandpa raised potatoes as a cash crop on a hillside farm in Tennessee.198
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Spreadsheet index of personal and family names found in the compiled transcriptions of newspaper articles written by Gwen Pettit about the local history of Allen, Texas.
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Pettit, Gwen. "Between the Creeks", book, July 2006; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth752794/m1/203/?q=Lamar+University: accessed June 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .