The Black Donnellys

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A look at one of Canada's more infamous families, The Black Donnellys. The entire clan was killed one night in 1880, what led up to their massacre is made up of legend and probable fiction........a good read nonetheless.

Setting the Scene


"You're welcome, Mick, to foreign lands,
Where'er the Celt may roam,
Your caubeen, pipe and blackthorn
Shall find a cozy home."

-- Rev. James Keegan, You're Welcome, Mick McQuaid

What became known, as "the Donnelly Massacre" was the culmination of a 30-odd years feud between one Irish immigrant family and their Irish immigrant neighbors. It reeks of obsessive pride and prejudice. It is a landmark example of an ancient and bitter religious opposition in one country spreading thousands of miles across an ocean to affect human lives in another.

According to an article that appeared in the Toronto Globe the day immediately following the tragedy, "The Donnelly family, to a marked degree, bore quarrelsome characteristics – when they were not fighting among their neighbors, they constantly fought among themselves." It is a description that supports that of Johannah Donnelly, matron of the sparring Gaelic clan that appears in Thomas P. Kelley's Vengeance of the Black Donnellys. In the book, Kelley quotes Johannah as saying, "From the time they could toddle, I taught my seven sons to be foin fist-and-club fighters. Sure, an' 'tis I who taught them how to gouge, bite off an ear and crack in a head with a club; showed them the best way to send a fast punch to the chin."

A local axiom at the time taught, "The farther one lives down Roman Line Road, the tougher one is. And the Donnellys live at the end of the road."

But, many of the citizens with whom they quarrelled in and around Lucan, Ontario, were neither timid nor lily white. Equally headstrong, equally superstitious, equally prejudiced, yes, and equally Irish, they also clubbed and gouged and bit and cracked and kicked. Unfortunately for the Donnellys, they were a mite tougher and unrelenting and, therefore, in being so, disposed their own hides to the harder lesson forthcoming.

The Donnellys were Ireland born. Considering the climate of the Emerald Isle in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century – and the fact that nearly all of Lucan's citizens were immigrants from the same county in Ireland -- the fate of the Donnellys, in retrospect, seemed pre-destined. The "ould sod" they left behind had been torn by a religious animosity that existed since that Protestant Protector, William of Orange, himself, crossed into Roman Catholic Ireland in the late 1100’s. After four decades of religious civil war, the situation worsened when, in 1697, Oliver Cromwell's re-design of Ireland land rights left English Protestants the major landlords and the Catholics mere serfs in their own beloved Erin.

"This awful state of affairs was at its worst in (County) Tipperary, where James and Johannah Donnelly came from," reads The Official Donnelly Home Page, which is dedicated to the family's colorful, albeit bloody, saga. "The Roman Catholics' poverty became...abject."

Continued Here