Scituate, Massachusetts, is home to around 18,000 people, half of whom claim Irish ancestry. This makes it the "most Irish" town in the US. The reason behind that goes back to an Irish immigrant who recognized a natural resource in the ocean that folks from other places did not.
Around 1847, Daniel Ward was sailing off the coast of Boston when he spotted gold—at least in seaweed form. An immigrant from Ireland, Ward had been working as a fisherman when he saw red algae beneath the ocean surface that he recognized as carrageen, or Irish moss. Back home in Ireland, the Irish harvested this seaweed for uses like making pudding and clarifying beer. Ward immediately saw an opportunity to tap into this unknown resource in his new country, and soon abandoned fishing to settle on the beaches of a small coastal town called Scituate, midway between Boston and Plymouth.
Prior to Ward’s arrival, Scituate was unpopulated by the Irish. This proved to be an advantage, since the locals—mostly farmers and fishermen—had no interest in Irish moss and thus welcomed Ward and his friend, Miles O’Brian, and their entrepreneurial endeavor. As Ward began building the industry, Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine from 1845 to 1849 caught word about the opportunity overseas and came to Scituate to take part in this growing business. “By 1870 there were close to 100 Irish families... [and] by the early 1900s other Irish families that maybe weren’t harvesting the moss, but had relatives that were, knew about the town and moved here,” says Dave Ball, president of the Scituate Historical Society. “You can trace the roots of the whole influx back to Irish mossing.”
So what is it about Irish moss that makes it so valuable? It already had several industrial uses, and more were developed as the Scituate moss industry grew. Read about Irish moss and the Irish town it built at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: The Scituate Historical Society)