Her Hometown
Two stones in Ireland, linking a family across two towns, five generations and one ocean
Rathangan, County Kildare, Ireland
In October 1853, three sisters left their home in County Kildare, Ireland, bound for the port of Liverpool and the ship that would carry them to America. Elzabeth Garrity was 10, Catherine was 12. Ann, their shepherd on the journey, was just 14. They were traveling alone, but they were on a familiar path – joining the exodus of two million people that drained Ireland of about a quarter of its population in the hungry decade after 1845, when the potato crop that fed the nation failed, and the Great Famine began.
Their father, Christy Garrity, had made the journey alone two years earlier, leaving behind his job hauling cargo along the Grand Canal that ran through their hometown of Rathangan, aiming to earn enough money in America to bring his family over to join him. He traveled by sail, on a packet ship that lost a mast in a storm near Newfoundland and had to turn back to Liverpool. His second ship got him to New York, where he worked the docks initially until he was hired by the owner of a large farm near Freehold. Potatoes were the dominant crop in the rich, loamy local soil, and many Irish immigrants – my own family among them – found work in fields untouched by the blight that had ravaged the fields they left behind.
Christy’s family soon followed him to Freehold. His three sons traveled with his wife, Catherine; his three daughters traveled alone. Who came first isn’t clear, but the daughters traveled more swiftly than he had, on a paddle steamer, the SS Arctic. (Had they waited much longer, they might not have made it: Eleven months after delivering the Garrity sisters to New York, the Arctic collided with another ship in the fog off Newfoundland; of the 400 people on board, only 85 survived.)
In 1855 Christy Garrity bought a house at 89 Mulberry Street that backed up to the Freehold Institute for Boys, a boarding school for the sons of the families that presided over the town and owned the land where the Irish immigrants worked. By 1858, Ann was married and lived next door at 87. The street was rechristened as Randolph Street, after one of the Institute’s founders, and the Catholic parish of St. Rose of Lima grew up on the corner next to Ann’s house – church, school, convent, rectory.
Something grew in front of Ann’s house, too – a tall, thick, stately, spreading, Tolkienesque copper beech tree that, as her descendants told the story across the generations, she had brought with her to America from Ireland. The story is fuzzy about how it got here in the company of a 14-year-old girl: a tiny sapling? a cutting? a hard prickly seed pod? But to the family that followed her in that house, long after she was gone, it was always Ann’s tree from Ireland, a small piece of the old world that grew tall in the new.
The house at 87 Randolph stayed in her family for more than a century, long enough to become home to her great-great-grandson Bruce Springsteen for the first six years of his life. The beech tree loomed so large in Bruce’s life that he used it as the narrative frame of his Broadway show – as the opening image, when he was a boy and it was “the grandest tree in town,” where, when he climbed “up near the top I had the wind in my face and I had all the dreaming room that you could want’; and as the closing image, when he returned as a man to find the tree itself gone (it outlived the house, which was torn down in the early 1960s, but, dying, was cut down in 2008) but its soul still there, sparking an epiphany about time and family, loss and love.
In May 2023, when he was in Ireland on a concert tour, Bruce visited Ann’s Irish hometown, Rathangan, at the urging of his cousin Glenn Cashion, the eloquent chronicler of their family’s saga. He pulled a pint of Guinness at a pub where he sang “My Hometown” with the startled patrons; watched some young dancers at the community center that now occupies the church where Ann was baptized; walked along the canal where his great-great-great-grandfather once worked; and visited the cemetery where, because all the Garritys had left for America, the nearest ancestral gravestone was Ann’s grandmother Catherine Kelly.
That was the start of what became a formal twinning process between the two hometowns, Freehold and Rathangan. In March 2024 a delegation from Rathangan came to Freehold, marched in our St. Patrick’s Day parade and quickly endeared themselves to us. Two months later, a group of us from Freehold went to Rathangan, where, after visiting Catherine Kelly’s grave, Glenn and our mayor, Kevin Kane, planted a copper beech tree in a triangular green park that occupies a place in the middle of Ann Garrity’s hometown similar to the place that Elks Point does in the middle of Bruce’s.
Two nights after the tree was planted, we all joined 82,000 other people in Croke Park in Dublin for the last and largest of Bruce’s four concerts in Ireland that month, and one that marked a milestone for him: a total of one million tickets sold in Ireland, a nation of just 5 million people, over the course of his career. “Big night in Dublin,” Bruce told the crowd at Croke Park. “We’ve got the mayor of Freehold here tonight – my hometown. I’ve got relatives from Rathangan. They’re going to twin the two towns together.”
And then, just before he cued the first organ chords of “My Hometown,” he said, “For my homies.”
I knew that Bruce was big in Ireland, I knew he sold out more stadiums in Europe than he does in America, but I didn’t fully understand how deep the ties ran with his overseas fans until I heard 82,000 people in Dublin singing not just the chorus of “My Hometown,” but all the verses, too, as if he had written it about their hometowns.
Our Rathangan friends came back to Freehold in March for another St. Patrick’s Day parade this year, and we went back to Rathangan in June for the formal signing of the twinning charter between the two towns. (Note to concerned Freehold taxpayers: No public funds were expended on these trips; we all paid our own way.) Before the officials convened in the community center to sign the documents, we all gathered at the park where the beech tree was planted last year – at the top of town, as they call it. The two mayors – of Freehold, and of the municipal district the includes Rathangan – unveiled a granite monument at the base of the tree that told its story.
“Bruce Sprinsgteen’s great-great-grandmother Ann Garrity was born in Rathangan,” it began.
There’s no stone in the nearby churchyard to mark the Garritys of Rathangan, but now there’s a stone at the top of town to mark the Garritys of America, and we all stood there admiring it and the tree behind it – the descendants of those who left Ireland, beside the descendants of those who stayed, joined by the ties we each had to our own hometown, and now to each other’s, too.
loved this one