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IRISH TRavelers of Aiken County.
By Dan and Conor Casey
We are freeborn sons of the Travelling People Got no fixed abode, with no man we are dormered. Country lanes and byways were always our ways We never fancied being harboured.
"The Travelling People," song by Ewan MacColl
By the mid 1960s more than three hundred Irish Traveler families had settled on a fifty-acre parcel of land that they called Murphy Village. They named the site for Father Joseph Murphy, a parish priest and advocate who started the settlement for Travelers and guided it for twenty years before his transfer in 1968. What makes Murphy Village unique is that it's a continent away from Dublin and Galway -- it's located across from an S & S Truck Stop on a stretch of U.S. 25, four miles north of the Clearwater Road on the Aiken-Edgefield county line in South Carolina.
The ancestors of these Murphy Travelers emigrated to the U.S. from all over Ireland during "the hard times." Ancient Irish society accepted the mobility of certain social classes--poets, metalworkers, mendicants; the economic and political evictions that followed from the 17th through the 19th centuries insured Travelers a heritage of mobility. The evidence is that some may have shipped out to the States in the late-18th century but that traffic peaked in the 1845-60 period, during the Famine and post-Famine years. They arrived in Northern port cities and after the American Civil War made their way into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Some ventured as far west as Arkansas, Texas, and California.
The Murphy Village Travelers are Carrolls, Costellos, Gormans, McGuires, Macks (McNamaras), McNallys, Mulhollands, O'Haras, Rileys, and Sherlocks. The Sherlocks trace their roots to the Sherlocks of Kilorglin, County Kerry, home of the celebrated Puck Fair.
The ten surnames haven't changed much, and because they're shared among so many families--there are literally dozens of Eddie Carrolls, John Sherlocks, and Pat O'Haras--the villagers, like their Irish counterparts, have concocted an array of by-names or nicknames to distinguish one family from another. "Bunk," "Sudel," "Slick," "Cisco," "T.O.," "High Pockets," "Jabber," "Sweeney," "the Sheriff," "Big Shot," "Little Shot," "Rock," "Tommy Taylor," and "Tommy Daily" are current in Murphy.
Practiced storytellers, the Murphy Travelers offer intriguing...
