Every family that ends up scattered across a continent begins somewhere small, and for the McWards that somewhere was County Donegal, in the far northwest of Ireland. From a single household of tenant farmers in the townlands around Convoy, this family sent its children out across the Atlantic and beyond — to New Zealand, to Philadelphia, and above all to the Illinois prairie, where the branches this book follows put down their deepest roots. This chapter traces the earliest generations we can name, from the hard ground of Donegal to the farms and villages of Christian County, and pauses on a family story that gives the book its title: a young Irishwoman who, before her married life had well begun, is remembered as having made clothes for the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.
A Hard and Beautiful Corner of Ireland
Donegal occupies the far northwest of the island, a county of jagged Atlantic coastline, wind-scoured headlands, and mountains that rise abruptly out of boggy uplands. It is one of the most rugged and remote of the Irish counties, hemmed in by the sea on the north and west and, after the later partition of Ireland, all but severed from the country to which it belonged politically by the border that curled around it. The landscape is beautiful in the way that hard places often are: the Bluestack Mountains, the sea loughs biting deep into the land, glens of small stone-walled fields, and vast stretches of blanket bog. But beauty of this kind rarely translated into ease of living. The soil across much of the county was thin, acidic, and stony, and the growing season short. Farming here was a matter of coaxing crops from reluctant ground.
The population that worked this land was overwhelmingly rural, scattered across townlands and small clustered settlements rather than gathered into towns. Communities were tight, poor, and deeply rooted, bound together by kinship, church, and the shared labor of survival. Donegal was also distinctive in its religious geography. While much of the west of Ireland was almost entirely Catholic, Donegal — like the rest of Ulster — held a substantial Protestant population, particularly the descendants of Scottish Presbyterian settlers who had come during the seventeenth-century plantations. Families of Scots-Presbyterian stock, farming folk with names carried across the North Channel generations earlier, formed a recognizable community within the county, and the McWards moved within this Ulster-Scots world. That heritage mattered: the same Presbyterian faith and the same well-worn routes back and forth to Scotland shaped where such families went when they left Ireland.
The economy that supported them ran on subsistence agriculture and cottage industry, with almost no margin for error. Most families held small plots, often as tenants rather than owners, and paid rent to landlords whose estates dominated the countryside. The potato was the foundation of daily life — cheap to grow, nutritious, and productive enough on poor ground to feed a family from a small patch. Oats, some barley, a cow or a few pigs, and the peat cut from the bog for fuel rounded out the household economy. Many families supplemented farm income with the spinning and weaving of linen, a trade woven into the fabric of Ulster life, and in Donegal especially with the knitting of wool and, in coastal districts, with fishing and the gathering of seaweed for fertilizer.
It was a way of life balanced on a knife's edge, and in these very years that balance collapsed. The Great Famine, which struck when the potato crop failed catastrophically beginning in 1845, fell upon a county already living close to the bone. Donegal suffered hunger, disease, and death, and — like the whole of Ireland — it suffered depopulation on a scale that reshaped the country permanently. Between the famine years and the decades that followed, Ireland's population fell by millions through death and emigration, and Donegal poured out its young people in a steady exodus toward Scotland, England, and above all across the Atlantic to North America. Emigration, which had always been part of Ulster life, became a near-universal expectation for the young. To grow up in Donegal in the 1840s and 1850s was to grow up knowing that adulthood would very likely be lived somewhere else, and that the ship out was not a catastrophe but a plan. The great sorting of families this created — some staying, some going to Scotland, some crossing to America — was the defining experience of the era, and the McWard brothers' own dispersal, one remaining in Ireland while others made their way to Pennsylvania and to Illinois, was an utterly typical version of it.
Richard McWard and Eliza Wilson
The earliest members of the family who can be named with certainty lived out this world in full. Richard McWard was born around 1810 in Ireland, the son of Robert McWard, and he lived his whole life within a few miles of where he was born. His world was the Laggan district — the fertile, largely Protestant eastern reaches of Donegal, distinct in character from the poorer, Irish-speaking country to the west. He came into the world in the years following the Act of Union, when Ireland's rural population was expanding rapidly and the pressures on land were mounting, and he grew up amid the routines of a small holding: the cutting of turf, the tending of crops, the seasonal rhythms that governed life in the countryside.
Richard married Eliza Wilson, and together they raised a large family — five brothers and three sisters in all. Their children included Mary Ann, born about 1835; Robert, born on New Year's Day 1837; Catherine, born about 1839; William, born about 1843; David, born in 1846; and sons John and another Richard, along with a daughter whose name has not survived. A household of this size was both a comfort and a burden in mid-nineteenth-century Donegal: many hands to work the land, but many mouths to feed on holdings that were rarely generous.
Richard's life was anchored in the parish of Convoy, in the barony of Raphoe. By 1850 he was living in Convoy itself, a market and mill village whose economy was tied to agriculture and the linen trade; by 1858 his home was in the townland of Prieststown, also spelled Priesttown, on the outskirts of the same village. His years spanned the catastrophe of the Great Famine, and that he remained on the land through those years — still recorded in Convoy in 1850 and settled at Prieststown by 1858 — suggests a family that weathered the crisis and held on to its place when so many others were scattered by death and emigration. His son David, in fact, was born in 1846, in the very depths of the hunger.
Richard McWard died around 1868 in Ireland, in his late fifties, having spent his whole life in the county of his birth. The place of his burial is not recorded, though he most likely rests in the parish ground near Convoy where his family had made their home. What became of Eliza after his death is beyond the reach of the record. But the size of his family speaks to a line that carried the McWard name forward — and outward, far from the Donegal hills.
The Scattering of a Generation
Richard and Eliza's children scattered across the world in the manner their county had taught them to expect. One son, John, remained in Ireland and was still living there decades later. Two daughters, Catherine and another whose name has not survived, settled as married women in New Zealand. A third, Mary Ann, born in 1835, made her way to Philadelphia, where she died; of her and Catherine, born in 1839, little more than the names remain in the family's memory. Three of the sons, Robert, William, and David, crossed to America and left the fullest record of their lives. Their choices divided the family neatly between the eastern city and the western prairie.
Robert McWard and the Coat for Lincoln
Robert McWard, born on New Year's Day 1837, was among the first of Richard's children to cross the Atlantic. He grew up in a region where farming was hard and prospects for a young man were narrow, and in the late 1850s he joined the outward tide, arriving in America and settling at Springfield, Illinois, around 1859.
On the Fourth of July, 1863, at Springfield, Robert married Margaret McIntosh, born in Ireland on October 31, 1842, the daughter of John McIntosh. The couple began married life in the vicinity of Springfield and Chatham — in the "Horse Creek" area near Pawnee — where they remained for roughly a decade. In 1873 they moved to Christian County, settling first in Ricks Township, six miles southeast of Morrisonville, where Robert owned and improved a farm. About 1881 he purchased the home place four miles east of Morrisonville, a tract of 160 acres, and there he spent the remainder of his working life.
It is here with Margaret that the book's title takes root. Robert and Margaret's granddaughter, Marguerite McWard Achenbach, long remembered hearing her grandmother tell of making clothes for President Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 — a recollection that helps fix the years of the family's arrival in Springfield, Lincoln's own city. The precise particulars are lost to us. We do not know exactly who the garments were made for, nor who wore them on that day. What the family carried down through the generations was simply this: that a coat was made for Lincoln. Who wore it, the record does not say.
By the account of those who knew him, Robert was industrious and frugal, upright in his dealings, and a good neighbor, sympathetic in times of sickness and need. Through steady labor on the land he attained the modest prosperity his neighbors would remember as a "competency of worldly goods." Faith was woven through his life on the prairie; he was a member in good standing of the Presbyterian church at Morrisonville, the congregation that would ultimately conduct his funeral.
Four children were born to Robert and Margaret, though the family knew early sorrow. William H., born in February 1868 at Springfield, died the following January of lung fever, not yet a year old. Fannie, born in March 1871, lived only about two months and was buried at Antioch Cemetery southeast of Morrisonville. Two children thus died in childhood — a common grief in that era, but no lighter for its frequency. The two surviving sons, Robert John, born in 1866, and Richard D., born in 1870, lived long lives and carried the family forward in Christian County.
Failing health finally compelled Robert to give up farming. Less than a year before his death he left the land and moved into the village of Palmer, where, on the afternoon of October 29, 1908, he died at the age of seventy-one, the cause given as paralysis. His funeral was held at the Presbyterian church at Palmer, the Reverend E. P. Rankin of Morrisonville officiating, and was largely attended. His remains were carried to Springfield and laid to rest in Oak Ridge Cemetery, beside the son who had died in infancy.
Margaret McIntosh's Long Widowhood
Margaret survived her husband by more than twenty years. She had come out of Ireland as a young woman in the years before the Civil War, one of countless emigrants who crossed the Atlantic in the 1850s in search of a steadier life than their homeland could offer, and by the latter part of that decade she had made her way to central Illinois. For much of her married life her world was the farm near Morrisonville — seasons measured by planting and harvest, a household that supplied much of its own needs, and a community bound together by church, kin, and shared labor. Altogether she lived in the vicinity of Morrisonville for some fifty-five years, a span that anchored her firmly in Christian County and made her, as one account put it plainly, well known throughout the county.
In 1908, the same year her husband died, Margaret moved into the village of Palmer, settling into a large two-story house on Main Street beside the post office. There she made her home for the last twenty-one years of her life, near enough to her sons and grandchildren to remain part of the family's daily orbit, and she belonged to the community's religious life through the Advent Christian church in Palmer. By the end of her life she counted twelve grandchildren and three great-grandchildren among her survivors.
Margaret McWard died at her home in Palmer on the evening of January 27, 1929, at the age of eighty-six years, two months, and twenty-six days, the cause recorded simply as the infirmities of advanced age. Her funeral was held two days later at the Advent church in Palmer, with the Reverend W. O. Talbott of the Morrisonville Presbyterian church officiating, and she was buried beside Robert in Oak Ridge Cemetery at Springfield — the same city where, some seventy years earlier, her married life had begun. Her surviving sons, Robert John and Richard D. McWard, would carry the family's story into the American chapters that follow — Robert John into the implement and hardware business at Taylorville and Richard D. onto the home place east of Morrisonville.
David McWard, the Penniless Lad
The youngest of the emigrating brothers arrived a penniless lad of nineteen, stepping off a ship into a country where he knew almost no one but the brother who had gone before him. David McWard was born on August 20, 1846, in Donegal — in the depths of the Famine — a son of Richard McWard and Eliza Wilson.
David crossed to the United States in 1865 to join his brother Robert in Sangamon County, coming with little more than his hands and his willingness to use them. He met and married Ellen Holmes an immigrant from Scotland. The marriage took place on December 4, 1867. His early years in Illinois were a record of restless improvement. He hired out among the farmers by the month, then took a rented place in Cotton Hill Township for two years, moved on to the White Oak district of Montgomery County for a year, and made his first purchase — an eighty-acre tract in King Township. He sold it and leased wild prairie land in Ricks Township, breaking and improving it over the five years he lived there. His decisive move came when he bought 120 acres in Johnson Township. To this he added steadily until he held some 395 acres, and there, at last, he stayed. He and Ellen worked the place in close partnership — she is credited plainly with the co-operation that helped him "get a start" — and it was on this farm, home for some forty years, that eight of their children were born.
The daily life of the household was bound to the seasons and the soil, and not without its hazards. In August 1899 a violent storm — described as a "water spout" — swept the country southeast of Palmer and struck David's farm hard, leaving water two feet deep in his cornfield and blowing a large tree onto his house. Such storms were the ordinary risks of a farming life, capable of flattening in an afternoon the labor of a whole season. Yet across the decades the direction of his fortunes ran steadily upward.
David and Ellen raised eleven children, of whom ten survived their father. Robert A., who had begun to make a name for himself as a schoolteacher in the county, died at nineteen. The others scattered across the prairie states as they married and established themselves: Sarah Ann, wife of J. A. Shetlar; Jane Elizabeth, wife of H. L. Hammer; Mary Ellen, wife of J. C. Calloway; Letitia Lucile, wife of F. O. Nicodemus; Margaret Louise, wife of W. G. Brandon; Lou Emma, wife of Walter Grundy; and the sons Robert J., William Holmes, and David Jr. His daughter Maude remained at home. At his death he counted twenty-three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
By 1908 the newspapers described David as "a wealthy and prominent farmer of Johnson township." That winter he arranged to buy the John Dacy property on West Franklin Street in Taylorville as a home for his retirement, moving into town in 1909, leaving the old home place to his son William, and quitting active farming after four unbroken decades on the land. A Presbyterian and a Democrat, and for forty-two years a member of the Odd Fellows, he had become one of the largest landowners in Christian County, holding more than 1,200 acres in Illinois and 237½ acres in Kansas.
His last years were shadowed by a long illness. In 1918 he had his teeth extracted, and shortly afterward developed a cancer that steadily worsened. Though attended by skilled specialists brought from Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities, the disease could not be checked. He died at his home at 205 West Franklin Street on the afternoon of April 15, 1920, after suffering more than two years. Funeral services were held the following Sunday in the Presbyterian church of Taylorville, with Dr. John Rugh delivering the sermon, and he was buried on April 18 in Oak Hill Cemetery. His will left the entire estate — valued at some two hundred thousand dollars — to Ellen, his widow of more than half a century, and named her executrix. Owing to her advanced age and the magnitude of the property, she relinquished the administration to their children David and Mary Ellen Calloway, and in the summer of 1921 the great body of land he had accumulated was sold at a master in chancery sale held, fittingly, on the old homestead near Palmer — the very ground he had bought as 120 acres and built into the center of a family's life.
William McWard, Who Chose the City
The third emigrant brother made a different choice, and his story runs shorter and darker. William McWard was born in Ireland about 1843, one of the sons of Richard McWard and Eliza Wilson, and in age he stood squarely between Robert and David. His early ties were to County Donegal. It was there, at Stranorlar in 1861, that he first married Mary Roulston. Four years later, in 1865, he married Rebecca McWard, again in Donegal. The record does not explain what became of the first marriage, though the sequence suggests Mary may have died young, as so many wives of that era did.
On October 30, 1866, William arrived at Philadelphia. Unlike his brothers, who made their lives on the Illinois prairie, William chose the city — a decision that set his branch of the family apart. Philadelphia in the years after the Civil War was a booming industrial port, its wards thick with Irish immigrants who found work in its mills, yards, and streets. He can be traced there across the following two decades, and by the time of his death he was living at 2418 Sepviva Street in the Thirty-first Ward, in the working-class neighborhoods of the city's northeast. That he died beneath his own wagon points strongly to a life of hauling or carting — the kind of daily labor that filled Philadelphia's streets and that put a working man in constant, and sometimes fatal, contact with heavy horse-drawn traffic.
William lingered several days after being run over before he died on Friday, March 23, 1888, at the age of forty-five. His funeral was held four days later, on the 27th, at two o'clock, from the Sepviva Street house, and he was buried in Philadelphia on the 29th. The city papers noted him twice — a spare death notice in The Philadelphia Times and a mention in the Inquirer's list of coroner's inquests, which supplied the grim particulars of his end.
Twenty years on, his brother Robert remembered him in his own 1908 obituary as the brother who "died in Philadelphia about 20 years ago." In the same breath Robert spoke of a sister who had died in that same city only two months before, and of John, still living in Ireland — a family, by then, spread thin across an ocean, its members remembered as much by absence as by presence.