Tablewares and Ten-Footers: The Materiality of Irish Immigrant Life in Nineteenth-Century Lowell, Massachusetts

The Irish immigrant experience in 19th-century North America is often framed in terms of processes of oppression and racialization. However, archaeological and documentary evidence from the industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts, complicates this narrative, because Lowell’s Irish population transcended the initial trauma of immigration and the challenge of anti-Irish prejudice by leveraging the powers of the Catholic Church and of community-building mechanisms, such as residential clustering and voluntary associations, to become a major political force in the city. Consideration of domestic architecture and analysis of ceramic assemblages from excavations near St. Patrick’s Church, in the Irish enclave known as the “Acre,” in 2010–2012 provide insight into the material choices Lowell’s Irish community made—choices that suggest the Lowell experience differed from that of other urban American centers of the Irish diaspora.