rivers, where they established the town of Cork, which, however, after a precarious existence of only six years, was entirely destroyed by the Indians.  For nearly a century the place was familiarly known to the residents of the locality as “Ireland.”  The records of York, Lincoln, and Cumberland counties contain references to large numbers of Irish people who settled in those localities during the early years of the eighteenth century.  The Town Books of Georgetown, Kirtery, and Kennebunkport, of the period 1740 to 1775, are especially rich in Irish names, and in the Saco Valley numerous settlements were made by Irish immigrants, not a few of whom are referred to by local historians as “men of wealth and social standing.”  In the marriage and other records of Limerick, Me., as published by the Maine Historical and Genealogical Recorder, in the marriage registers of the First Congregational Church of Scarborough, and in other similarly unquestionable records, I find a surprisingly large number of Irish names at various periods during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  In fact, there is not one town in the Province that did not have its quota of Irish people, who came either direct from Ireland or migrated from other sections of New England.

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The records of New Hampshire and Rhode Island are also a fruitful source of information on this subject, and the Provincial papers indicate an almost unbroken tide of Irish immigration to this section, beginning as early as the year 1640.  One of the most noted of Exeter’s pioneer settlers was an Irishman named Darby Field, who came to that place in 1631 and who has been credited by Governor Winthrop as “the first European who witnessed the White Mountains.”  He is also recorded as “an Irish soldier for discovery,” and I find his name in the annals of Exeter as one of the grantees of an Indian deed dated April 3, 1638, as well as several other Irish names down to the year 1664.  In examining the town registers, gazeteers, and genealogies, as well as the local histories of New Hampshire, in which are embodied copies of the original entries made by the Town Clerks, I find numerous references to the Irish pioneers, and in many instances they are written down, among others, as “the first settlers.”  Some are mentioned as selectmen, town clerks, representatives, or colonial soldiers, and it is indeed remarkable that there is not one of these authorities that I have examined, out of more than two hundred, that does not contain Irish names.  From these Irish pioneers sprang many men who attained prominence in New Hampshire, in the legislature, the professions, the military, the arts and crafts, and in all departments of civil life, down to the present time.  In the marriage registers of Portsmouth, Boscawen, New Boston, Antrim, Londonderry, and other New Hampshire towns, are recorded, in some cases as early as 1716, names of Irish persons, with the places of their nativity, indicating that they came from all parts of Ireland.  At Hampton, I find Humphrey Sullivan teaching school in 1714, while the name of John Sullivan from Limerick, schoolmaster at Dover and at Berwick, Me., for upwards of fifty years, is one of the most honored in early New Hampshire history.