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Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis pp 133–146Cite as

“A Brother Orangeman the World Over”: Migration and the Geography of the Orange Order in the United States

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Part of the book series: Historical Geography and Geosciences ((HIGEGE))

Abstract

Historical geographers’ explorations of migrant networks have focused have focused on ethnic and religious organization and clustering in the host country as well the influence of the sense of place in the migrant’s country of origin. This case study focuses on the Orange Order, a Protestant organization established in County Armagh in 1795, and its diasporic resettlement patterns from the Irish Province of Ulster to North America. Settlement patterns were typically anchored by Orange Lodges established as nodes on trans-national migration networks which stretch from Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, North America, Australia, New Zealand and West Africa. As much work has been conducted on Orange Order Settlement in Canada, this case study specifically examines and maps early twentieth-century settlement patterns in the United States, particularly locations in New England and the Mid-West. This case study sources data from the The International Bureau of ‘Orange’ Information, a body established in 1903 to gather information on its diasporic communities. Historical geographical information systems (GIS) methods were employed in this case study to parse, map and explore demographics of Orange Order migrants’ origins and destinations. Such methods have also been applied to explore how migrant identity is often tied to the sense of place carried from a migrant’s native country such as Scotland and Nigeria. This study contributes to the literature and mapping of the Orange Order diaspora in north-east and mid-west regions of the United States.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, “Transferred Loyalties: Orangeism in the United States and Ontario,” American Review of Canadian Studies 14, no. 2 (August 1, 1984): 193–211.

  2. 2.

    Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).

  3. 3.

    Georg Christ, “Mapping Change: A Collaborative GIS-Based Cue Card System for the Humanities,” in Scientific Computing and Cultural Heritage, ed. Hans Georg Bock, Willi Jäger, and Michael J. Winckler, Contributions in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 109–17; Nicholas Karanikolas, “Understanding Place: GIS and Mapping across the Curriculum,” Cartographic Perspectives, no. 63 (2009): 71–73.

  4. 4.

    Janette Lee, “Redistributing the Population: GIS Adds Value to Historical Demography,” History and Computing 8, no. 2 (1996): 90–104; I. N. Gregory and R. G. Healey, “Historical GIS: Structuring, Mapping and Analysing Geographies of the Past,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 5 (2007): 638–53; Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier, eds., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008); Eric Gidal and Michael Gavin, “Introduction: Spatial Humanities and Scottish Studies,” Studies in Scottish Literature 42, no. 2 (2016): 143–150; Jordan Branch, “Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in International Relations,” International Organization 70, no. 4 (2016): 845–69; Diana Stuart Sinton, “Roles for GIS within Higher Education,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 33, no. sup1 (2009): 7–16; Charles Travis, Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2015).

  5. 5.

    Ian N Gregory and Paul S Ell, Historical GIS Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012); Gregory and Healey, “Historical GIS”; Alistair Geddes and Ian N Gregory, Toward Spatial Humanities Historical GIS and Spatial History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

  6. 6.

    Knowles, Placing History.

  7. 7.

    Julius Komolafe, “Nigerian Migration to Ireland: Movements, Motivations and Experiences,” Irish Geography 41, no. 2 (2008): 225–41; Gidal and Gavin, “Introduction: Spatial Humanities and Scottish Studies”; Samuel M. Otterstrom and Brian E. Bunker, “Genealogical Geography and the Generational Migration of Europeans to America,” in The Routledge Companion to Spatial History, ed. Ian Gregory, Don DeBats, Don Lafreniere (New York: Routledge, 2018).

  8. 8.

    Loyal Orange Association of the World, Imperial Grand Orange Council, Report of Proceedings of the Triennial Session of the Imperial Grand Orange Council of the Loyal Orange Association of the World (Glasgow, Scotland: Published at the Office of Imperial Grand Secretary, 1906), 12, 16, 37.

  9. 9.

    Imperial Grand Orange Council, Report (1906), 16.

  10. 10.

    Donald M. MacRaild has used the term in “The Orange Atlantic,” in The Irish in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 307–26, and “Wherever Orange Is Worn: Orangeism and Irish Migration in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 28/29 (2002): 98–117.

  11. 11.

    Donald M. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting: The Orange Order and Irish Migrants in Northern England, C. 1850–1920 (Liverpool University Press, 2005), 77; Purple Star Loyal Orange Lodge no. 40, Meeting minutes, Nov. 12, 1899, June 12, 1900, Aug. 25, 1900, Collection D0462 M98-14, box 4, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Hereafter cited as, Purple Star minutes).

  12. 12.

    For England, see MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting, 4.

  13. 13.

    Loyal Orange Institution of the United States of America, Records, 1883–1974, Collection MSS 103, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Hereafter cited as, LOI USA).

  14. 14.

    Membership applications, Lily of the Valley Loyal Orange Lodge No. 167, folders 2, 4–9, 12–18, MSS 103, HSP.

  15. 15.

    Andrew Elmer Ford, History of the Origin of the Town of Clinton, Massachusetts, 1653–1865 (Clinton, MA: W. J. Coulter, Courant Office, 1896), 222–225.

  16. 16.

    Charles Tilly, “Transplanted Networks,” in Immigration Reconsidered, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 84.

  17. 17.

    “US Naturalization Records, 1840–1957,” digital images at Ancestry.com; Purple Star meeting minutes.

  18. 18.

    Ibid.

  19. 19.

    Ibid.

  20. 20.

    Ibid; “1911 Ireland Census,” digital images at Ancestry.com; “Massachusetts, Marriage Records, 1840–1915,” digital images at Ancestry.com; “Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787–2004,” digital images at Ancestry.com; “US Federal Census Collection, 1790–1940,” digital images at Ancestry.com.

  21. 21.

    James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1962), 159; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 40.

  22. 22.

    Walter T. K. Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

  23. 23.

    Randy William Widdis, With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), xx, 3, 6, 9, 12, 62.

  24. 24.

    Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 45, 51.

  25. 25.

    Graeme Wynn, “New England’s Outpost in the Nineteenth Century,” in Stephen Hornsby, Victor Konrad, and James Herlan, eds., The Northeastern Borderlands: Four Centuries of Interaction (Orono and Fredericton: Canadian-American Center, University of Maine and Acadiensis Press, 1989), 64–90; Patricia A. Thornton, “The Problem of Out-Migration from Atlantic Canada, 1871–1921: A New Look,” Acadiensis 15, no. 1 (October 10, 1985): 3–34.

  26. 26.

    Alan Brooks, “The Exodus: Migration from the Maritime Provinces to Boston During the Second Half of the 19th Century.” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Brunswick, 1978), 72–75.

  27. 27.

    Frederick A. Bushee, Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston (New York: American Economic Association, 1903), cited in Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel, 25–26.

  28. 28.

    Betsy Beattie, “‘Going Up to Lynn’: Single, Maritime-Born Women in Lynn, Massachusetts, 1879–1930,” Acadiensis 22, no. 1 (1992): 68.

  29. 29.

    Bostonia Loyal Orange Lodge no. 505, Meeting minutes, 1924–1929, Collection D0462 1993-102, box 1. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Hereafter cited as Bostonia meeting minutes).

  30. 30.

    Wynn, “New England’s Outpost.”.

  31. 31.

    “US Federal Census Collection, 1790–1940,” digital images at Ancestry.com; Bostonia meeting minutes.

  32. 32.

    For recent scholarship on the Great Lakes borderlands region, see Janet Dorothy Larkin, Overcoming Niagara: Canals, Commerce, and Tourism in the Niagara-Great Lakes Borderland Region, 1792–1837 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018); Holly M. Karibo, Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), and Karl S. Hele, ed. Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008).

  33. 33.

    Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel, 10, 27, 31–32, 106, 109.

  34. 34.

    D. MacDougall, The American Year Book-Directory of Scottish Societies & British Associations in the United States, Canada & British Possessions (New York: Caledonian Publishing Company, 1914); “US Federal Census Collection, 1790–1940,” digital images at Ancestry.com; “Canadian Census Collection, 1851–1916,” digital images at Ancestry.com.

  35. 35.

    Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 33, 39, 41.

  36. 36.

    “US Federal Census Collection, 1790–1940,” digital images at Ancestry.com.

  37. 37.

    Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 548.

  38. 38.

    Lesger, Lucassen, and Schrover have argued for the importance of non-network migrants who follow labor demands. While many travel for work because they have specific information based on their network connections, some migrate with only general knowledge of the likelihood of opportunities in a particular location. Cle Lesger, Leo Lucassen, and Marlou Schrover, “Is There Life Outside the Migrant Network? German Immigrants in XIXth Century Netherlands and the Need for a More Balanced Migration Typology,” Annales de Démographie Historique, no. 2 (January 1, 2002): 29.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Researcher, Dover, NH, USA

    Cory Wells

  2. Department of History, University of Texas, Arlington, TX, USA

    Charles Travis

  3. Trinity Center for Environmental Humanities, Trinity College, The University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Charles Travis

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, University of Texas, Arlington, TX, USA

    Charles Travis

  2. Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Francis Ludlow

  3. Department of Regional Science, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Ferenc Gyuris

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Wells, C., Travis, C. (2020). “A Brother Orangeman the World Over”: Migration and the Geography of the Orange Order in the United States. In: Travis, C., Ludlow, F., Gyuris, F. (eds) Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis. Historical Geography and Geosciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37569-0_8

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