CAPE GETS ITS IRISH UP IN DONNYBROOK

Never a people to be overlooked, the Irish have a way of making their presence known.

Even in predominantly German Cape Girardeau, the Irish were able to make their mark, leaving as their legacy the Donnybrook neighborhood, a small Irish enclave on North Main Street near the old shoe factory.

The Irish didn't stick around Donnybrook for long. The earliest references to Irish in the neighborhood date from end of the 19th century, and the latest to about 1910.

"Then it just vanished," said Judith Crow, a Cape Girardeau journalist and historian.

Details about the neighborhood's early history are scarce, Crow said.

"I've looked for 40 years and there's occasional mention of it," she said. "It was a little strip in there that was occupied mainly by Irish people, but I've never been able to verify the boundaries."

As the name might suggest, Donnybrook could be a wide open kind of place under the Irish regime.

"Cape Girardeau: Biography of A City," by Felix Eugene Snider and Earl August Collins, refers to "the rough and tumble fun of Donnybrook" with its local carnivals and festivals featuring shooting contests, wrestling, weightlifting, races and jumping contests.

Later, an Irishman named Mike Miggins became known as the mayor of Donnybrook.

A plumber-pipe fitter by trade, Miggins reportedly got roaring drunk every Saturday night and came home swinging at everyone and everything in sight.

Sober, he was apparently a model citizen. The 1906 City Directory lists Miggins as being a street commissioner who lived at 8 N. Main St.

The Irish may have descended on Cape Girardeau to find jobs in the city's foundries and factories, then moved on, following the railroad and the river to new jobs.

Howard Tooke, a former mayor of Cape Girardeau, grew up in Donnybrook in the 1920s and '30s, after the Irish had moved on.

"My family moved to Donnybrook when I was four years old, which would have been 1922," said Tooke, who is now 78.

Tooke's uncle, C.L. Williams, owned and operated the North End Market at the corner of Spanish and Mason.

"It went broke in the Depression," Tooke said, and his uncle, who was then 70, signed on to work at the shoe factory "and worked there for 10 or 15 years."

Donnybrook was mostly blue collar and largely populated by workers from the shoe factory, Tooke said.

The shoe factory didn't pay the highest wages in town, he said, but it was steady work.

"The shoe factory ran all through the Depression. It never shut down," he said.

Donnybrook was home to "some pretty tough kids," Tooke said, but overall it was "a decent, hard-working neighborhood. Everybody was poor, so nobody was poor."

Millions of Irish, escaping famine and oppression at home, came in waves to the United States during the 1800s and through the beginning of this century.

It wasn't easy being Irish -- or Catholic -- in the new country.

Job-seekers found signs up proclaiming "No Irish Need Apply," and the popular press of the day portrayed the Irish as "almost ape-like," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Regional History Center at Southeast Missouri State University.

Locally, St. Vincent's Seminary was a big draw for the Irish-born, said Dr. Michael Roark, a health and leisure professor at the university.

"The Irish were involved in the development of that institution," Roark said. "The Catholic church in Cape had a big help from that source."

There was "no major settlement" of Irish in the region, although the Scotch-Irish moved into the region "in the very beginning of the settlement" at Cape Girardeau, Roark said.

"Culturally, they were more Scottish than Irish," he added.

The Irish tended not to hang around rural areas too long, Roark said.

"The Irish were often more mobile than any other ethnic group," he said. "That particularly had to do with the kinds of jobs they had. They often did construction work, most famously the railroad."