Danaher, Kevin

Prominent Irish folklorist, military historian, and teacher who often published under the Irish version of his name, Caoimhín Ó Danachair. A native of Athea, he helped preserve the letters of Sgt. Maurice H. Wolfe. Danaher was born in 1913, the son of a school teacher, In 1934 he began collecting the oral traditions of Athea for the Irish Folklore Commission. He was mentored by the Swedish ethnologist Äke Campbell. While serving in the military during the 1940s, he wrote a master’s thesis on Irish house types. Afterward, he resumed work with the Irish Folk Commission, taught in Sweden, devised the Bunratty Folk Park, and served as president of the Military History Society of Ireland and editor of its journal, The Irish Sword. In the summer 1957 issue, he summarized the military career and letters of Maurice H. Wolfe. According to Timothy Woulfe, of Athea, those letters had been loaned out and not returned. Danaher retrieved them and arranged for them to be photocopied and deposited in the National Archives of Ireland. Danaher died in 2002.

See Tom Aherne, “The man who help [sic] preserve our folk history,” Limerick Leader (2018); Kevin Danaher, In Ireland Long Ago (1962); Caoimhín Ó Danachair, “A Soldier’s Letters Home, 1863–1874,” The Irish Sword (1957).

Delmar

A city in Bloomfield Township, Clinton County, Iowa, established in 1871. Two railroads—Davenport & St. Paul and Midland—completed grade and tracks into town and ran their first cars on the same day, December 1, 1870. According to a history of Clinton County published in 1879, “Tradition records that the place was named upon this occasion by the Midland conductor, taking the first letters of the names of six ladies on the train and combining them to make the word Delmar.” Raymond Wolfe farmed in the vicinity of the city, the population of which is now only several hundred.

See The History of Clinton County, Iowa, Containing a History of the County, Its Cities, Towns, &c. (1879).

Desmond Rebellions

Two rebellions (1569–1573 and 1579–1583) led by the Catholic Anglo-Norman aristocracy in the southern province of Munster, which includes the counties of Limerick and Kerry, against the administration of Queen Elizabeth I. Two family groups, descended from the Norman invaders of 1169, dominated southern Ireland and often were at odds with one another: the Butlers of Ormonde and the FitzMaurices and FitzGeralds of Desmond, also known as the Geraldines. Feeling his authority and feudal privileges challenged by both the Ormonde family (led by a cousin of the queen) and the English authorities, James FitzMaurice rebelled in 1569. English forces ruthlessly put down the uprising, using terror tactics and, in West Limerick, burning the town of Kilmallock (where Fr. Patrick Woulfe later served as a curate). Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, and resentment over the sometimes extreme English violence led FitzMaurice, who briefly lived in exile in Europe, to lead an invasion force in 1579. He was killed shortly after landing off the southern coast of Co. Kerry and the FitzMaurices were again defeated. The queen dispossessed many Catholics of their land and planted British Protestants on the newly opened estates. The Woulfe family of West Limerick, also of Anglo-Norman lineage, supported the Geraldines, Records indicate that in 1573 Pátragín (“Little Patrick”) Wolf and Edmund Wolfe, likely brothers and from the townland of Williamstown, near Rathkeale, received pardons from the English for their roles in the first rebellion. Patrick also owned lands around nearby Wolfesburgess (named for the family), and is listed as killed on July 12, 1580, during the second rebellion. Another Woulfe, this one called Gerald, also farmed near Rathkeale, in Enniscoush, and was killed during this time. Family legend tells of two of his sons who fled west, possibly to the area around Athea. Meanwhile, Fr. David Wolfe, the Jesuit from Limerick city who had been imprisoned and tortured by the English, was friends with the upstart FitzMaurice. Wolfe wrote a Description of Ireland and carried it with him to Spain in order to convince King Philip II to join the invasion force.

See John Canon Begley, The Diocese of Limerick in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1927); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (2001); S. J. Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 (2007); Colm Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (rev. ed., 2005); Paul MacCotter, “The ‘Original’ Limerick Woulfes,” woulfefamily.com.

Dromada

One of twenty-five townlands in the civil parish of Rathronan. From the Irish Drom Fhada, meaning long ridge and often spelled, especially in old sources, Dromadda. Late in the eighteenth century, Maurice J. “Young Maurice” Woulfe left Cratloe and farmed in Dromada, becoming known as Maurice of Dromada.

Dromalught

One of twenty-seven townlands in the civil parish of Galey in northern Co. Kerry. Also known as Dromolought. From the Irish Doire Iomlachta, meaning oakwood of the passage. Richard J. Woulfe, a son of James M. “The Barrister” Woulfe, farmed there, and members of the family remained for at least a century. The house below, with a collapsed thatch roof, photographed in 2019, is in Dromalught on land once owned by the Woulfes.

Easter Rising

An armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland waged, unsuccessfully, in Dublin during Easter week in April 1916. The revolt was organized by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret group whose origins were in the Fenians of the mid-nineteenth century. They were joined by the Irish Volunteers, led by Patrick Pearse and including Con Colbert; Cumann na mBan, a women’s auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers; and the labor-focused Irish Citizen Army, led by James Connolly. In the days leading up to the revolt, these groups together became the Army of the Irish Republic, with Pearse as commandant-general. On April 24, they seized buildings in Dublin, including the General Post Office, and declared an Irish republic, Poblacht na hÉireann. But over the next five days were crushed by British forces, which were superior in number and firepower. At first the Irish public, weary and wary both of political violence, did not widely support the Easter Rising, even jeering some groups when they surrendered. However, when the British executed sixteen men, including Colbert, public opinion began to change and set the stage for the Anglo-Irish War three years later.

See Maurice Walsh, Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World (2015).

Glen, The

The home and estate of the Woulfe family in Cratloe West, near the village of Athea, in Co. Limerick. The house was built by Edmond R. “Old Ned” Woulfe in 1815, and his son, Richard E. “Dicky Ned” Woulfe, hosted a hedge school there from the 1850s to 1900. The original house no longer stands.

Goold Family

The Goold family served as landlords for much of the land around Athea where the Woulfes farmed. In 1817, an aristocratic Protestant named Thomas Goold (d. 1846) purchased the eleven-thousand-acre estate on which the village is located from the notorious William “Kitty” Courtenay, ninth earl of Devon. Sergeant Goold, as he was known, was a Dublin lawyer, an accomplished orator—“Goold of the silver tongue,” some folks said—and a friend and supporter of Daniel O’Connell. According to Edmond Woulfe White, Goold and his first son, Wyndham (d. 1854), a member of Parliament, acted as true and fair landlords. When tenants appealed to the Sergeant that they could no longer afford rents, he appointed an arbitrator and made sure that the farmers found representation. In this way the rents were fixed by mutual consent and hardly budged for the rest of the century. In 1854, the estate passed to Wyndham Goold’s brother, the Very Reverend Frederic-Falkener Goold, archdeacon of Raphoe (near Derry). While he maintained the family tradition of fair rents, the Archdeacon built a mansion in Athea (now gone) and a Protestant church, invited some Protestant families onto the estate to farm, and meddled in the business of the local Catholic church. He was not well loved. In 1906, the estate was owned by the Archdeacon’s grandson, Hamilton Frederick Stuart Goold Verschoyle, who sold it to his tenants. These included James P. “Paddy” Woulfe, Richard J. “Brown Dick” Woulfe, and Richard E. “Dicky Ned” Woulfe, among other family members. A monument to the Goold family—and Thomas F. Goold, the recently deceased, twenty-four-year-old son of the archdeacon—was erected near the village “by a sorrowing and grateful tenantry” in 1863. An interesting fact is that the Reverend Goold’s sister, Caroline-Susan Goold Booth, was the grandmother of the famed Irish revolutionary Countess Markievicz, who was born Constance Georgine Gore-Booth.

See Edmond Woulfe White, “Veraschoyle Goold Estate, West Limerick,” letter to the editor, Kerry People (Tralee), September 29, 1906 [transcription].

Great Famine

A period from 1845 to 1852 when staple potato crops were destroyed by a fungus, causing widespread disease, death, and emigration. Ireland’s population from 1841 to 1851, taking into account expected natural increases, actually decreased by about 2.5 million people, or about 30 percent. In North Kerry, where the Woulfes who emigrated lived, the losses were comparable. In the townland of Kingsland, just south of Athea, the population fell from 41 to 1. The rural townland of Listowel, surrounding the city of the same name, lost 318 of its 332 residents. The year 1847, when John R. Wolfe and his cousin Maurice emigrated with their families, is generally considered to have been the height of the Great Famine (in Irish, an Gorta Mór). In April of that year, the Kerry Examiner reported on a quick-spreading fever, overcrowded hospitals, and the poor seeking shelter in abandoned homes or by the side of the road. Many died there. “If the Almighty God does not interfere,” the editor wrote, “our unhappy country will be a grave, its people dead, and no priest left to intone a nation’s requiem.” The Woulfe family were better off than most, however. To be considered a “large farmer,” one needed only 15 acres of land or more, which allowed for the keeping of animals and cultivation of grain crops. According to Griffith’s Valuation, compiled in 1853, John R. Wolfe’s oldest brother, James R. Woulfe, leased more than 607 acres in Dromalught, much of which he sublet to nine others. They had the means, in other words, to leave, and those who did not suffer in the same way as the poor.

See “Listowel—Alarming Progress of Fever,” The Kerry Evening Post (Tralee), reprinted from The Kerry Examiner, April 14, 1847; Bryan MacMahon, The Great Famine in Tralee and North Kerry (2017); Ciarán Ó Marchadha, The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony, 1845–1852 (2011); John D. Pierse, Teampall Bán: Aspects of the Famine in North Kerry 1845–1852; Colm Tóibín and Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish Famine: A Documentary (2001).

Grogan, Joan

A bean feasa, or wise woman, who was the subject of legendary stories in West Limerick and North Kerry. Although said to be from Athea, Joan Grogan is often portrayed as itinerant, traveling across the region and communing with fairies and the dead. In these stories, people facing an illness or crisis call on Grogan for help; other times she just appears, providing assistance through magic and an expert knowledge of herbs and natural healing. Stories describe her working herself into a “fit” or trance as she performs her cures. On occasion she refuses to help or otherwise punishes people for their moral failings. Her character is but one example of Irish folklore’s “wise woman” archetype that is marked by an insistence on the storyteller’s part that Grogan was real and, sometimes, known personally by the storyteller. (There is no historical evidence of Grogan’s actual existence.) In 1956, Jane C. “Dollie” Woulfe wrote a letter about family history that contained a Joan Grogan story referencing Dollie’s grandfather, Richard E. “Dicky Ned” Woulfe, whose farm was called The Glen: “There was Joan Grogan of Athea who, one night at the Glen, called on the dead of previous generations naming each individually as they came in—one after another, out of the dark in response to her call until my grandfather, then a young man, was driven into a fire-place corner by the press of the weird, if friendly visitors.”

See Letter from Dollie Woulfe to Sr. Mary Caelan (Helen) Woulfe, August 1956; Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, “Reading the Bean Feasa,” Folklore (April 2005); Stories about Joan Grogan, from the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin.

Harnett, James Daniel

Auctioneer and journalist in Abbeyfeale who published as J. D. H. and often wrote about the Woulfe family. Upon his death in 1951, the Cork Examiner called him “the last of the older generation of Irish journalists” who reported on tenant rights in West Limerick, and “a man of fine literary taste and possessing a flair for historic work.” James Daniel Harnett was born in 1871 to Daniel B. Harnett, of Abbeyfeale, and Helen Woulfe, of Athea. He was the seventh of fourteen children. Harnett’s mother was the granddaughter of Maurice J. “Young Maurice” Woulfe, who himself had married a Harnett, Honora “Norrie” Harnett, of Abbeyfeale. Helen Woulfe Harnett’s uncle was James Harnett Wolfe, who went to America and disappeared, possibly murdered, about 1836. In 1939, J. D. Harnett published an article about the discovery of an old letter home from Wolfe’s two brothers who had gone looking for him in America. In the piece, he introduces the family in grand terms, citing the martyred Fr. James Wolfe and the Cromwellian Conquest. In 1935, J. D. Harnett wrote about a hedge school operated at The Glen when it was the Cratloe home of Richard E. “Dicky Ned” Woulfe. He also contributed to writing about Abbeyfeale during the Anglo-Irish War, including about Maurice J. Woulfe’s defense of the families of two men murdered by a Black and Tan in 1920.

See J. D. H., “Last of the Limerick Hedge Schools,” Limerick Leader, April 27, 1935; J. D. H., “Remarkable Career of a West Limerick Emigrant,” The Kerry News, March 4, 1940; J. D. H., “Written Over a Century Ago; Interesting Letter from West Limerick Exile,” Limerick Leader, May 13, 1939; Limerick’s Fighting Story, 1916–21: Told by the Men Who Made It, introduction by Ruán O’Donnell (1948; 2009); “Mr. J. D. Harnett,” Cork Examiner, January 8, 1951.

Hedge Schools

Informal schools, hosted by a family, sometimes in secret. Under the penal laws of eighteenth-century Ireland, only Anglicans were allowed to attend schools, prompting Catholics and Presbyterians to find alternatives. However, in 1800 the government established National Schools across Ireland that were open to Catholics. Hedge schools slowly declined after that. “The term ‘hedge' school,’ which developed from the customary practice of holding classes near a hedge, is really a misnomer,” Tony Lyons has written. “It is also an anachronistic term. A more correct name would be ‘pay school’ because the teachers were paid by the parents of the children they taught.” In 1826, there were 317 such schools in Co. Limerick, 301 of which were Catholic. Maurice R. Woulfe, born at The Glen in 1778, attended a hedge school in Athea from 1791 to 1797, and the curriculum heavily stressed mathematics. (Limerick hedge schools were known for their math, Co. Kerry schools their Latin.) In the 1850s a hedge school opened in the Glen, home to Richard E. “Dicky Ned” Woulfe. (Maurice R. Woulfe was Dicky Ned’s uncle.) Called the Academy in the Glen, the school was taught by Michael Sheehan and lasted until 1900. A later writeup by J. D. Harnett calls it the “Last of the Limerick Hedge Schools.”

See J. D. H., “Last of the Limerick Hedge Schools,” Limerick Leader, April 27, 1935; Tony Lyons, ”The Hedge Schools of County Limerick,” North Munster Antiquarian Journal (2006).

LaSalle County

One of 102 counties in Illinois and located southwest of Chicago, in the northern part of the state. Established January 15, 1831, LaSalle County was named for the early French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who explored the area in 1682. In 1847, two first cousins, John R. Wolfe and Maurice Wolfe, left Co. Kerry for the United States, settling first in LaSalle County, before moving west a few years later to Clinton County, Iowa. In subsequent years, nearly all of the Co. Kerry Wolfes came first to LaSalle County. Some stayed—farming or living in the county seat of Ottawa or the city of Streator—while others spread across the country, from the Dakota Territory to Montana, Idaho, California, and Texas.

See History of LaSalle County, Illinois, in two volumes (1886).

Listowel

A market town on the River Feale in northern Co. Kerry best known for its horse racing and literary festival. From the Irish, Lios Tuathail, meaning Tuathal’s ringfort. Pronounced LISS-tole. The town’s name is associated with the earl of Listowel, a hereditary title held by William Hare (the third earl) when he evicted Thomas Woulfe from his land in 1885. Late in the nineteenth century, Patrick Woulfe ran a draper’s shop on Main Street with his wife Sarah. Sadly, they died in 1885 and 1888, respectively, at the ages of forty-four and thirty-four, leaving behind three young children.

See Vincent Carmody, Listowel: Snapshots of an Irish. Market Town, 1850–1950 (2012).

Lost Nation

A city in Sharon Township, Clinton County, Iowa, established in 1872 and incorporated in 1904. It was a station on the Sabula, Ackley & Dakota Railroad and home to many in the Wolfe family related to John R. Wolfe and Maurice Wolfe, two first cousins who immigrated from Co. Kerry in 1847. In Wolfe’s History of Clinton County, Judge P. B. Wolfe offers a few different legends for how the town was named, including “the story that a German named Balm was looking for some relatives here in the times when the prairie was unbroken and covered with grass high as a horse, and when asked where he was going, said that he was looking for the ‘lost nation.’” Its current population is about four hundred.

Maurice, Why Is Everyone Named

See Naming Conventions.

Moore, George

Irish novelist, playwright, poet, and critic. With W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, he helped found the National Theatre of Ireland (now the Abbey Theatre) and engaged in an affair with and wrote a story about Honoria E. Woulfe. George Moore was born in 1852 at Moore Hall in Co. Mayo to a wealthy, landowning Catholic family. His father was a member of Parliament, and George lived in London as a young man before studying art in Paris and self-publishing a book of poems. By the 1880s he began publishing realist novels that often contained scenes that at the time were considered to be sexually explicit. At the turn of the century he returned to Ireland and befriended Yeats and Lady Gregory. His untamed writing, often confessional and fiction in name only helped precipitate fallings out both literary and personal. Moore converted to Protestantism and had a long-lasting relationship with Maud, Lady Cunard, who was married. He died in London in 1933. Some time after his return to Ireland, he began a relationship with Honor Euphrasia Woulfe, an unmarried bohemian from Waco, Texas. He eventually published a cheeky, self-deprecating story—one that flirted with memoir and, indeed, was later republished in 1921 as part of his Memoirs of a Dead Life—in which he depicted a Woulfe-like character as coming to Dublin in hopes of convincing Moore to father her child.

See Adrian Frazier, George Moore, 1852–1933 (2000); Adrian Frazier, “On His Honor: George Moore and Some Women,” English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 (1992); Michele McCall, “Honor Woulfe and George Moore: ‘Not a Woman that a Man Forgets,’” English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 (2013); George Moore, “Euphorion in Texas” (1920); Honor E. Woulfe, “George Moore and the Amenities”, English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 (1992).

San Rafael

The seat of Marin County, California, and located on the northwestern shore of the San Francisco Bay. Named after the Mission San Rafael Arcángel founded by Spanish missionaries in 1817. The city was incorporated in 1874, and the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad arrived five years later, linking to the national rail network in 1888. The Dominican University of California was founded there in 1890. In 1872, John C. Wolfe, who had moved west from Iowa during the Gold Rush, established a pharmacy on Fourth Street in San Rafael. He and his wife. built a house on D Street, a portion of which was later renamed for the businessman. In 1964, John P. Wolfe, a native of Clinton, Iowa, and a Navy captain who had received a commendation for his actions at Pearl Harbor, retired to San Rafael with his wife and six children.

Spanish Civil War

A civil war fought from 1936 to 1939 between the government of the left-aligned Second Spanish Republic and the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco. Leftist groups from around the world expressed support, or formed “international brigades” to fight, for the Republic, while fascist Italy and Nazi Germany backed the autocratic Franco. Notable for its particularly ferocious fighting, atrocities—such as the bombing of Guernica in 1937 that inspired the Picasso painting—and political purges, the war ended on April 1, 1939, when Franco’s forces victoriously entered the Spanish capital of Madrid. The historian John Newsinger has noted “that while in most European countries public opinion was seriously divided over the Spanish Civil War, with often strong support for the Republic, in Ireland it was overwhelmingly for Franco.” Given a popular voice by the short-lived mass movement the Irish Christian Front, the clergy tended toward strict traditionalism, authoritarianism, and an anti-Semitism that found a target in Soviet Communism (itself virulently anti-Semitic). The Irish Brigade, a group organized by Eoin O’Duffy, recently the fascist leader of the Blueshirt movement, was the only “significant force of genuine volunteers” in the world to fight for Franco’s Nationalists. They arrived completely unprepared and performed poorly. About two hundred Irishmen volunteered to fight for the Republic, most of them affiliated with the labor movement and radicalized by Catholic Church–inspired anti-Left violence in 1930s Ireland. Jim Woulfe, of Athea, left Ireland for Canada and the United States at the end of the Irish Civil War, and became a labor organizer and Communist. He volunteered from Canada and was killed at the Battle of Belchite in 1937.

See Maurice Manning, The Blueshirts (1970); Ferghal McGarry, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War (1999); Barry McLoughlin, Fighting for Republican Spain, 1936–38: Frank Ryan and the Volunteers from Limerick in the International Brigades (2014); John Newsinger, “Blackshirts, Blueshirts, and the Spanish Civil War,” The Historical Journal (2001).

Streator

Streator is a city in LaSalle and Vermilion counties, located on the Vermilion River, southwest of Chicago in northern Illinois. It was chartered as a village in 1868 and eventually named for the Ohio industrialist Worthy S. Streator, who financed the region’s first coal mine. (The community earlier had been called Hard Scrabble and then Unionville.) Incorporation came in 1882. Mining dominated the city’s early economic life and was home to supporting businesses such as foundries, machine shops, and boilerworks. When John R. Wolfe and Maurice Wolfe immigrated in 1847, they came first to LaSalle County, and although they moved on to Clinton County, Iowa, the Wolfe family from Kerry had established a beachhead in the county. Many lived and farmed around Streator. John W. Maher, the son of Margaret Wolfe Maher, was born and attended high school there before practicing law (and taking a bullet in the back) in Dakota. Honor Woulfe, who had an affair with the Irish writer George Moore, also was born there.

See History of LaSalle County, Illinois, in two volumes (1886).

Surname

The family surname is most often found in one of three different forms: Wolfe, Woulfe, and de Bhulbh. The Co. Limerick and Co. Kerry branches of the family most often write their names with a “u,” and once in the United States, the immigrant generation most often removed the “u.” But on neither side of the Atlantic has there been perfect consistency. The first recorded Woulfe in West Limerick actually appears as William le Lou in 1298, but within a decade this same man had begun to identify himself as Wolf. The Jesuit Fr. David Wolfe, of the Limerick city branch, who lived in the sixteenth century, was most often found in the records as Wolf, although historians mostly remember him now as Wolfe. He is said to have given us the first recorded instance of someone using the Irish-language version of the name: de Bhulbh. And de Bhulbh is what appears in Fr. Patrick Woulfe’s definitive list of English names in Ireland and their Irish-language equivalents. Historians have suggested that the name references the animal, perhaps because some family member resembled a wolf in either appearance or spirit. Whatever the case, men and women born in Ireland as Woulfes may have died in Iowa or Illinois as Wolfes. And in Ireland, while you may have signed your name Woulfe, church records may identify you as Wolf, Wolfe, Woolf, Woolfe, or some other variation.

See Paul MacCotter, “The ‘Original’ Limerick Woulfes,” woulfefamily.com; Patrick Woulfe (Pádraig de Bhulbh), Sloinnte Gaedheal is Gall: Irish Names and Surnames (1922).

Templeathea

Templeathea East and Templeathea West are two of twenty-five townlands in the civil parish of Rathronan, and located just northeast of the village of Athea. From the Irish Teampall Áth an tSléibhe, meaning stone church at the ford of the mountain. The church there was established in 1201 by Augustinian friars and known as Donergismachmore, also Eaglais Móintín, or church of the little bog. According to oral history from Richard E. “Dicky Ned” Woulfe (put in writing by Jane C. “Dollie” Woulfe), “It was a long oblong building, now in ruins. No mortar was used in the building. It is supposed to have been built with small flags from Derren quarries, and according to tradition they were brought on horseback from there, a flagged pathway being first laid.” The church was burned in 1580, during the second of the Desmond Rebellions. Legend has it that the monks wrapped the church plate in cowhide and buried it. According to oral history in the National Folklore Collection, attempts to find the plate were unsuccessful: “One treasure-hunter was disturbed in his work by a black bull. Another saw his own house on fire and ran home to quench it only to find it was an illusion.” The church was burned again in 1649, at the start of the Cromwellian Conquest. Now all that remains is a graveyard that serves as a traditional resting place for, among others, the Woulfe family. Maurice J. “Old Maurice” Woulfe lived in Templeathea with his wife and six daughters before moving to Cratloe about 1760. Dicky Ned Woulfe told the folklorist Kevin Danaher of an exorcism that took place in the graveyard.

See John Begley, The Diocese of Limerick: Ancient and Medieval (1906); Caoimhín Ó Danachair (Kevin Danaher), “An Exorcism,” Sinsear: The Folklore Journal (1982). “Teampall Áth t-Sléibhe,” National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin; Richard E. Woulfe and Jane C. Woulfe, Templeathea booklet, with an introduction by Richard W. Wolfe, undated.

Toronto

A town in Liberty Township, Clinton County, Iowa, on the Wapsipinicon River. It was home to a sawmill as early as 1844, then a gristmill in 1846, a store in 1850, and in 1853 a mill-powered carding machine, which prepared wool for spinning. The town was platted in 1853 and incorporated in 1909. The Wolfe family arrived to Liberty Township and neighboring Sharon Township in the early to mid-1850s, and by 1879 Toronto served as the township’s post office and as a station on the Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. The largest landowners at the time were John R. Wolfe and his son (or cousin) Maurice Wolfe. The Catholic church was established in 1860 and John Wolfe is buried in its graveyard.

See P. B. Wolfe, editor, Wolfe’s History of Clinton County, vol. 1 (1911); The History of Clinton County, Iowa, Containing a History of the County, Its Cities, Towns, &c. (1879).