We’ve commented in the past about whether some of our county names should be changed to honor more contemporary heroes—and maybe reject some scalawags who we learn from history weren’t really worth honoring in the first place.
110 years ago a distinguished Missouri politician introduced a bill to change the name of one of our major counties.
We discovered his suggestion among our clippings. It’s part of a column from the Taney County Republican, January 30, 1913
The column began, “Until a few years after the war, the city of St. Louis was the seat of St. Louis County. When, by authority of an act of the legislature, the voters of the city and the county adopted the “scheme and charter,” St. Louis became a separate jurisdiction, a county within itself, under the name “The City of St. Louis” and the county became known as “the County of St. Louis.” The county seat was established at the city of Clayton and a courthouse was erecte don land donated by a citizen of that name. It has never since had any legal connection with the city of St. Louis, although comparatively few of the people of the Stat know yet that St. Louis is not in St. Louis County. Deeds and legal documents intended for county officials and courts and lawyers are often mailed to St. Louis and important legal documents affecting property and persons in the city of St. Louis are often mailed to Clayton. The confusion created by the use of name St. Louis for the county has been a source of annoyance for many years to both city and county.”
It continues:
It was doubted, of course. One reason Michael McGrath’s bill didn’t make it is because Michael McGrath didn’t make it either. By the time the newspaper published this article, McGrath had been dead for two days. But it was something of a remarkable gesture—-because Michael McGrath had been a Confederate soldier whose unit took part in important early battles in the Civil War.
His name means nothing to most of those who labor in the halls of the Capitol now. But in his time, Michael McGrath was a political power. And his influence is still felt in Missouri government today. In fact, he has a presence in thousands of homes, libraries, offices, and schools.
McGrath was born in 1844 in Ballymartle, County Cork, Ireland and was raised on a farm and educated in a parish school. He went to the National School in Kinsale, a small village in the southeast corner of Ireland where he studied to be a teacher and became one at age 16 (Kinsale is the home to a lot of famous people we Americans have never heard of except for William Penn, the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania. Nearby is Old Kinsale Head, a piece of land jutting into the Atlantic that has a lighthouse and the remains of an old castle. About elven miles out to sea from Kinsale Head, the wreckage of the torpedoed liner Lusitania. sunk in 1915, lies 300 feet down.)
A blight that infected the potato crops throughout Europe, causing “The Great Potato Famine,” led to thousands of deaths and thousands of emigrants fleeing Ireland and other European countries to the United States. McGrath arrived here in 1851. He hung out at the library in New York where his reading of copies of The St. Louis Republic convinced him to come to Missouri in July, 1856.
His good handwriting landed him a job with the St. Louis County Recorder. He became a deputy clerk in the criminal court in 1861, a position he lost when Radical Republicans in the legislature passed an Ouster Ordinance that declared all offices not held by citizens loyal to the Union to be vacant.
We don’t know how soon McGrath came under the influence of Father John O’Bannon who at that time was raising money for the construction of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist Church, but he soon became involved a local militia unit tied closely to O’Bannon’s Total Abstinence and Benevolence Society. The unit, known as the Washington Blues, was led by Captain Joseph Kelly, another Irish immigrant, who ran a grocery and became McGrath’s father-in-law. A drill by the Blues helped raise money for O’Bannon’s church that later served as the cathedral church of the St. Louis Archdiocese and remains an active congregation today. O’Bannon was a Confederate chaplain in the war.
Kelly’s Irish Brigade was sent to Missouri’s western border in late 1860 to repel Kansas invaders, part of the infamous Missouri-Kansas border war, and became one of the first units in the Missouri State Guard, a pro-confederate force organized by Governor Claiborne Jackson and former governor Sterling Price. McGrath was a private in what became a regiment of the Sixth Division of the Missouri State Guard.
Irish Immigrants were more likely to join the Union army but some historians think many of the immigrants in Missouri were felt they were disrespected by the anti-Irish German Unionists in St. Louis, and further identified with the Confederacy because it reminded them of Ireland’s long-standing struggle to become independent of England.
Whatever his personal motivation, Michael K. McGrath was a rebel who apparently spent the entire war fighting against the forces of the man for whom he later wanted to name a county.
Come back next time to see how this Confederate survived the war and became a distinguished political figure in Missouri.