The McWenie family belonged to the great tide of Irish men and women who crossed the Atlantic in the middle of the nineteenth century and settled among the mill villages of central New York. Their story runs from Ireland to the industrial heart of the Mohawk Valley, out to the frontier streets of New Mexico Territory, and back again to the place where it had begun — carried forward, in each generation, by men of enterprise and by the wives who bound their households together.
The Earliest Generations
The earliest known member of this line was Michael McWenie, born around 1800 in Ireland. He had three sons with his wife Elizabeth Jones. All of his sons were born in Ireland before the family's crossing: Edward, born in May 1838, who made his home in the Albany area and died there in April 1902; Thomas, born about 1836, who took a different path westward, settling in Brownsville, Texas, where he died in October 1882; and Joseph McWenie, born in Ireland on 24 May 1822.
Joseph came of age in a country soon to be shaped by hardship and emigration — a land of small farms and close parishes, where family and faith held communities together against uncertain harvests and limited prospects. Nothing survives to describe his precise home place, but as a young man he would have witnessed the pressures that pushed hundreds of thousands of Irish families toward the ports and the promise of America.
When and by what route Joseph crossed the ocean is not recorded, but by the middle of the 1850s he had established himself firmly in Oneida County, New York, in the small manufacturing hamlet of Coleman's Mills in the town of Whitestown, near where the Oriskany Creek and the Mohawk River had made the region a magnet for mills and workshops. Such places drew Irish immigrant families with the offer of steady labor and the presence of a growing community of fellow Catholics and countrymen.
Joseph remained tied to this corner of Oneida County across the decades. He appears at Coleman's Mills in the state census of 1855, again in 1875, and by 1880 in the nearby village of Whitesboro. This rootedness in a single locale — rather than the restless westward movement that carried many immigrants across the continent — suggests a man who found in Whitestown the work, the neighbors, and the parish life that made a settled existence possible. During the war he served in the Union Army in 1864, in the conflict's final, desperate year, when the fighting had touched nearly every household in the county.
Joseph's household grew large over the years. The record names two wives — a Mary, whose maiden name is not preserved, and Mary Tobin, whom he married in 1874. The order and circumstances of these unions are not fully clear, but the pattern was a familiar one in an age when illness and childbirth frequently left husbands widowed and remarrying to keep a household together. His children — James, Maggie, William, Mary, Elizabeth, Agnus, Joseph, Frank, and Elizabeth Lillian — carried the McWenie name into the next generation of Oneida County life.
By 1880 Joseph was living in Whitesboro, still within the small compass of the Whitestown region that had been his American home for a quarter century and more. He died on 15 August 1884 at Coleman's Mills — the very place where he first appears in the records — a fitting close for a man whose life was rooted so firmly in one community. He was sixty-two years old. The place of his burial is not recorded, though it is likely he was laid to rest among the Irish Catholic families of the Whitestown area whose lives had run parallel to his own.
The Mill Country of Oneida County
The world in which Joseph raised his family was one thoroughly reshaped by water power and human ambition. By the time the McWenie family had taken root there, the Mohawk River and its tributaries had made the region irresistible to manufacturers. Mills clustered at every promising falls and rapids, their brick facades rising from the valley floor and their smokestacks becoming the defining silhouette of the county's skyline. Coleman's Mills embodied this pattern: a small industrial settlement built around a mill complex, drawing workers and their families into a close-knit, if sometimes transient, community. Nearby New York Mills was a village literally built by and around mills, where the manufacturer's interests and the workers' fortunes were visibly intertwined.
Utica, the county seat and largest city, had by the 1870s and 1880s evolved into a sprawling industrial metropolis of perhaps thirty to forty thousand souls — crowded, grimy, and humming with enterprise. The textile industry dominated, and the city produced not only cloth but the machinery that made cloth elsewhere. Breweries, foundries, and small manufacturing concerns lined the streets. The city drew workers from across the Atlantic — Irish, German, and Italian immigrants arriving in waves — into dense and often poor neighborhoods knit together by churches, fraternal lodges, taverns, and mutual aid societies. These were fundamentally working places: ethnic, sometimes harsh, but offering opportunity and proximity to employment. Men rose early, walked to the mill or factory, labored through a set schedule, and returned to crowded boarding houses or small cottages in the evening. It was a world in which a young man of ambition could learn a craft and rise through it — and this was the world that shaped Joseph's most enterprising son.
James McWenie and the Cigar Trade
The blue haze of tobacco smoke and the smell of curing leaf followed James McWenie through much of his working life. Born about 1852 at Whitesboro, the son of Joseph and Mary McWenie, he grew up in the Catholic community of the Utica area, worshipping at St. Paul's Church in Whitesboro — the same church from which he would one day be buried. Little survives of his boyhood, but he grew up in a bustling corner of the Mohawk Valley where the Erie Canal and the railroads had made small cities into centers of manufacture and trade.
By 1872 James had entered the cigar trade in Utica, and his name became linked with the firm of F. M. Kendrick & Co. at No. 4 Bleecker Street. The firm confined itself entirely to the manufacture of cigars, producing brands across every grade from the lowest to the highest. It had begun that same year with only eight employees, but grew swiftly; by 1878 it employed some sixty hands and expected annual cigar sales approaching two million. The company also carried on a substantial jobbing trade in chewing and smoking tobacco, employing three traveling agents and marketing its goods largely within the State of New York, with stock purchased in New York City and Connecticut.
James did not remain a partner in another man's firm. Striking out on his own, he opened his own establishment as a manufacturer of and dealer in tobacco and cigars at 30 Fayette Street, in the Opera House Building in Utica. Trading on his experience as late of F. M. Kendrick & Co., he set his own name over the door — McWenie Cigars — and worked as an independent maker through much of the 1870s and 1880s, living in Utica across a long run of years.
In the later 1880s James did something bolder than most tradesmen of his standing. He carried his craft west to New Mexico Territory, where he lived in 1888 and 1889. There he is credited with establishing the first cigar factory in Las Vegas, New Mexico, building it into a business of statewide reach; his establishment stood on the site that would later hold the town's Masonic building. The move west was in keeping with the era — the railroads had opened the territory to eastern men with capital and skill. Yet the West did not hold him. He grew tired of the venture and returned to New York State, settling by 1897 and 1899 in Little Falls, in Herkimer County, closing the long arc that had carried him from the Mohawk Valley to the southwestern territories and home again.
James married Mary Moore, a daughter of the same mill country in which he had grown up. Mary was born in 1855 in New York, the daughter of John and Ann Moore, and lived through the whole of her recorded childhood and youth at Coleman's Mills, counted there as a newborn in the census of 1855 and again in 1860, 1865, and 1870. This steady presence across four successive enumerations speaks to a stable household — one that stayed put while much of the country was in motion. By 1880 she had moved from Coleman's Mills to Utica, following the familiar arc of young people of her generation who sought work in the towns.
James and Mary had at least one son, Edward John McWenie Sr. After Edward's birth Mary disappears from the record entirely; her death date, place, and burial are all unknown. It is possible, though it cannot be confirmed, that she died in childbirth — a fate common enough among women of her time. What we know comes indirectly: after James's death their son Edward was sent to live in New Mexico with Mary's sister, Etta Reed, rather than with any household of his mother's, which suggests that Mary was no longer living to raise him. But the record simply falls silent, and honesty requires acknowledging that we do not know.
James's later years were shadowed by consumption — the wasting tuberculosis that claimed so many in his generation. He suffered from it for some time, though he was confined to his bed only during the last two weeks of his life. He died on 9 June 1900, at the home of his brother William on South Ann Street in Little Falls, at the age of forty-eight. Obituaries in the Utica press noted that he possessed many friends both in Little Falls and at his old home in Whitesboro. His body was carried back to Whitesboro, where the funeral was held from the family residence and from St. Paul's Church, with interment following at St. Agnes's Cemetery in Utica.
Joseph and Mary's Wider Family
Joseph's family was substantial, and his brothers and sisters spread across several states. His second son, William "Willie" McWenie, was born in New York in August 1857 and spent much of his life in the Little Falls and Oneida areas, dying in New York in October 1901 at the age of forty-four.
Among the daughters was Maggie, born about 1855 in Utica, who followed the family's restless westward impulse and made her home in New Mexico, becoming known as Mrs. Maggie Holland. She established herself as a woman of some means and community standing, running a fifteen-room summer resort hotel at the junction of Blue Canyon and Red Canyon in the Mineral Hill District — a scenic location high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains near Las Vegas. Though the hotel eventually burned, Maggie's influence on the family's western branch proved lasting: it was she who set the course of the next generation.
Other daughters and sons remained closer to home. Mary, born in 1862 in Oneida, became the wife of a business associate and bore children of her own. Elizabeth — called Lizzie or Bessie — was born about 1867 and died in Utica in February 1895 at the age of twenty-seven. Agnus, born in December 1874, married Wilfred E. Atherly in 1894 and made her home in the Utica area until her death in June 1939. Joseph, born in June 1879, built a life in Binghamton, where he married Alice Mary Jackson on New Year's Day 1907; he died there in April 1934. Frank, born in November 1881 at Coleman's Mills, spent much of his adult life in Rochester, married Catherine M. Lawler in June 1913, and eventually settled back in the Utica area, where he died in November 1958 at the age of seventy-six. Elizabeth Lillian, born in April 1884 in New York, married George Levering Jones in February 1945.
Edward John McWenie Sr
Edward John McWenie, born in August 1881 in Utica, was the son most transformed by the family's western enterprise. When Edward was five years old, in 1886, his father traveled west on business and stopped to visit his sister Maggie at her mountain resort. Maggie persuaded James to send for his sister-in-law Etta — Mrs. W. T. Reed — and for young Edward. The boy came west permanently after his father's death, though not before returning briefly to attend first and second grades in Whitesboro, New York.
Edward arrived in Las Vegas at a formative age and made it his own, attending the public schools of East Las Vegas and going on to the New Mexico Normal University, where he graduated in 1901 as a member of the first full graduating class. The full arc of his life in the West — his career, his civic standing in Las Vegas, and his marriage to Muriel Beveridge Hill — belongs to a later chapter, where the McWenie line joins with the Hills. Here it is enough to mark him as the son of James McWenie and Mary Moore, and as the bridge by which the family's story passed from the mill country of the Mohawk Valley to the frontier town where his father had once built the first cigar factory.