Stories
Stories and source material—letters, essays, newspaper reports, police reports,
short fiction, even recipes—from the Wolfe family archives.
Dollie Woulfe
Jane “Dollie'“ Woulfe (1879–1964) was a farm manager, painter, amateur archaeologist, family historian, and writer.
Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe (1940–2012), of Davenport, Iowa, was a teacher, political organizer, family historian, and essayist.
John C. Wolfe
John C. Wolfe (ca. 1840–1902) was born in County Kerry and became a druggist in San Rafel, California, known for his medicines.
Sr. Íde & the
Black and Tans.
Sr. Íde Woulfe (1915–2015) was born Honora Woulfe in Abbeyfeale, County Limerick. Her father, Richard B. Woulfe, was a pharmacist and IRA man and her maternal uncle was Con Colbert, executed after the Easter Rising. During the War of Independence, Black and Tans burned the pharmacy after an IRA ambush of a police patrol. In the transcribed audio recordings below, Sr. Íde recalls that time from her early childhood. Oral history by Irish Life and Lore, 2015.
“Brother James Wolfe died in the state of Mississippi.”
In a remarkable letter home, dated December 26, 1836, John Harnett Wolfe (1807–1856) tells family of how he and his brother Richard traveled all the way to Missouri in search of yet another brother, James, They eventually learned he was dead, possibly by foul play.
The General Wolfe
Connection.
Did the Limerick Woulfes just make it up because he was famous?
Fr. David Wolfe (1528–1579)
He was thrown in the Tower of Dublin and tortured. After managing to escape, he committed himself to fighting Queen Elizabeth. Fr. Wolfe’s “Description of Ireland” was intended as military intelligence for King Philip II of Spain, whom the Jesuit priest hoped to coax into invading Ireland. The rebellion failed—and Wolfe disappeared from history.
Stories of Lost Nation.
My dad, Tom Wolfe, grew up on a farm near Lost Nation, Iowa. It’s where the Wolfe family came after leaving Ireland and it’s where many still are today. I never quite fit in (that’s me below, in Lost Nation, appropriately with a black sheep), and that may be why I’ve written so much about family, about my father, and about the land we’re connected to as Wolfes—because I’ve struggled with that connection myself.
“The Northwestern Exchange” (2021), an essay about murder in the hills of Dakota
“The Book of Athea” (2019), a long essay on the Irish and American Wolfes
“The Case of the Hungry Stranger” (2013), an essay about my father’s death
“Stories from the Lost Nation” (2009), driving the backroads of Clinton County
“Lost in Clinton County” (1997), on wondering which direction is home
Name dropping.
Fr. Patrick Woulfe began working on his study of names and naming in Ireland early in his career. The first part was published in 1906 and then expanded and republished in 1922 and 1923. It’s a seminal work that was widely used in Irish schools during the twentieth century.
Wolfe’s History.
Patrick B. Wolfe was born to immigrant parents and spent a long career in as a lawyer, member of the Iowa state Senate, and district court judge. He was only a few votes shy of winning a seat on the state supreme court. “It is a unique fact,” he once wrote about himself, “that Judge Wolfe has resigned from every public office he has held.” In 1911, he published, in two volumes, a history of Clinton County, Iowa, where his father landed in 1852.
Wolfe’s History of Clinton County, volume 1 (1911)
Wolfe’s History of Clinton County, volume 2 (1911)
Shots in the night.
In the early morning hours of July 15, 1934, someone fired a shotgun from outside the Abbeyfeale home of Maurice J. Woulfe, solicitor, and into the upstairs bedroom where he slept with his wife. The Irish Independent reported on the incident the next day but offered no hint as to the circumstances or of any suspects or even of a possible motive. For more information, we must turn to An Chartlann Náisiúnta, or the National Archives of Ireland, which has preserved a twenty-nine-page file on the investigation. You can read the whole thing here. The police linked the incident to a lawsuit in which Woulfe was involved, although investigators found it also had political undertones. At the time, the competing parties Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, formed around the two sides in the Civil War, were prepared for the possibility of violence. Fine Gael had a fascist League of Youth group, popularly known as the Blueshirts, while Fianna Fáil filled its ranks with disaffected veterans of the Irish Republican Army. This formed the backdrop of the shooting in Abbeyfeale, and in the end no charges were ever brought.
Four shots fired.
“At 2.10 A.M. on the 15-7-’34 four shots were fired through the bed-room window of the residence of Maurice J. Wolfe Solicitor, Knickasna, Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick. At the time of the occurance Mr. Wolfe and his wife were in bed in the room into which the shots were fired. They were not injured and it was not until morning that Mr. Wolfe realised that it was shots that were fired through the window.”
The motive.
Gardaí quickly settled on a motive. Maurice Woulfe was representing parties who were sureties in a debt negotiation, and the debtor was applying pressure for them not to sign off on the default of his business. Because Woulfe was president of the local Fine Gael club and the attackers Fianna Fáil, the gardaí noted that there was “a political tinge” to the attack.
Weapons everywhere.
During subsequent searches of the suspects’ homes, gardaí found a service rifle in a drain and witnessed from afar it being hid there. They also found leather straps under a table the presumed were designed to conceal a shotgun. No one was hurt but weapons were everywhere.
Politics everywhere, too.
Further investigation showed that the rifle found in the storm drain was linked to a shooting in April outside an Abbeyefeale dance hall where Fine Gael party members had been celebrating. Maurice Woulfe had signed his name to a public letter denouncing the violence and the lack of a police investigation.
A confidential informant.
A confidential informant told Gardaí that the original suspects were, in fact, the ones who had fired the shots into Woulfe’s bedroom window, aided by a pump sinker who had previously worked in Woulfe’s home and, “therefore, would know Mr Woulf’s bedroom, and would be in a position to point it out to the other members of the gang.”
All quiet again in Abbeyfeale.
“The Sergeant also received reliable information that the dump of arms concealed on Abbeyfeale Hill was removed on the night of the 17/7/34—the day after the Gardaí made extensive searches for this dump—to an unknown destination.” As a result, the “rather frequent” gunfire from the hill into town ceased, and Abbeyfeale went quiet again.
“Whenever occasion arose for any severe punishment the preparatory cry of the victim would ring loud and long enough in the school to bring Mrs. Woulfe hastening over the intervening yard from her kitchen, some yards off, scattering the farmyard fowl in her eagerness to make her appeal for mercy timely and effective.”
“We crossed the Rockies twice.”
Maurice Woulfe left West Limerick for America in 1863 and joined the army
to fight Indians in the West. His colorful, often cantankerous letters home
have become a staple in academic literature about the Irish in America.
(Transcriptions by Kerby Miller.)
Chapter 1 of Richard W. Wolfe’s biography
“The boy used the brain back of his eyes and sought the meaning of things.”
Dick Does Propaganda.
Richard W. Wolfe, or Dick to his friends and allies, was one of Chicago’s great propagandists in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Before he was Mayor Big Bill Thompson’s “Great Communicator,” he used his pen on behalf of the cause of Irish republicanism. “God intended that men and races should be free,” Wolfe wrote, “and whoever robs them of that right invokes for their own destruction the anger of God and man.”
Commissioner Wolfe
& The Hoodlums.
It could be Capone-era film noir: two hoodlums with foreign accents enter a Chicago warehouse, demand some files, and end up shooting the security guard. Was the murder connected to an investigation of city hall? Were the hoodlums connected to the mob? The Chicago Tribune reports.
A Case of Extreme Impertinence.
After his cousin Brown Dick died in a Limerick hospital, Dr. Timothy Woulfe made arrangements to ship his body back to Abbeyfeale by train. What happened next in the train station is unclear, but it led to perhaps one of the most ridiculously petty slander trials in Irish history.
Inside the Archdeacon’s Outhouses.
In a letter to the editor, published in September 1906, the lawyer Edmond Woulfe White tells of how the tenants in Athea, including a number of Woulfes, bought their land from the Goold family. He also tells a few stories, including about the notorious Archdeacon Goold.
Bound.
An Allegory.
“Boats were gliding down a stream; a stream
at times calm and beautiful, and again rough and unfair.”
Heist in Baltinglass.
In January 1924, a bank manager named Maurice Woulfe found himself on the business end of an armed robbery. There was a tall man and a short man, and when it was all over Woulfe had been gut shot and a Guard lay dying on the sidewalk.
A very Victorian kind of romance.
“She had paid me the compliment of thinking of me as a possible father for her son …”
Murder in the Hills of Dakota.
In 1882, a ranch hand saw a fire on the prairie. When he went to help, he discovered the body of Daniel Wolfe.