This past Father’s Day had another layer of significance in the Gallagher house. For June 21 marked the 149th anniversary of the 1877 hanging of my second great-grandfather on my mother’s side, John “Yellow Jack” Donahue, at Carbon County prison, along with nine other Irishmen on a day known as “Black Thursday” and the “Day of the Rope.” The ten men were coal miners and members of the small Irish secret society the Molly Maguires.

England ruled Ireland at this time; 97 percent of the land in Ireland was owned by absentee English aristocrats whose agents the Mollies fought – with fists and firearms – for economic survival. When the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s caused mass emigration, the Mollies found continued reason for existence fighting discrimination by the English coal mine operators. You might be familiar with the 1969 Sean Connery film “The Molly Maguires.”

Coal mining was the most dangerous occupation in America. The 1850s-1870s was a time well before effective labor unions, meaningful government oversight, mandatory safety regulations, and so forth. Life was brutal for all miners, who largely lived in company owned Patch towns and forced to shop at company stores, but especially for the Irish, who were denied higher paying jobs if they were hired at all.

Mining was “nothing but a drumbeat of death,” said one miner at the time. For instance, 100+ miners died at Avondale in 1869 because of a massive fire blocking the one exit/entrance the owners provided.

The coal mine owners simply waited out the 1875 January-June “Long Strike” of a fledgling union without negotiating and then cut wages when the paupered and starved miners crawled back to work.

When the Mollies fought back against owner unconcern for worker welfare, they were called “foreigners,” “hell-hounds,” and “a scourge worse than the Asiatic cholera” who may need to be “eliminated.”

“A Mollie” justified the ensuing violence that broke out: “I am as much against shooting as ye are. But the Union is Broke up and we Have got nothing to defend ourselves But our Revolvers and if we don’t use them we shall have to work For 50 cents a day , , , But I have told ye the Mind of the children of Mistress Mollie Maguire, all we want is a fare Days wages for a fare Days work, and that’s what we cant get now by a Long shot.”

Yellow Jack was an elder statesman in the Mollie hierarchy, helping to organize perhaps dozens of murders. The Mollies justified the morality of their violence by sending intended victims “coffin notices,” warning them to leave the area or die. During the period 1862-1875, there were 142 unsolved homicides in Schuylkill County alone.

And Yellow Jack was himself a tough customer. He was described by the sensationalist press as a “fiend in human form,” “without fear of God or Devil,” “the terror of the coal regions,” the man who made the anthracite districts howl.” Yellow Jack did murder.

Yellow Jack, father of nine, whose oldest son, then with seven children of his own, was overcome with “brain damp” and fell 300ft to his death, died penniless. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Old St. Jerome’s Cemetery, Tamaqua.

Socialist Eugene V. Debs called “the men who perished upon the scaffold [on the Day of the Rope] . . . the first martyrs to the class struggle in the United States.”

Knowledge of Yellow Jack, first in my mother’s line in America, was long suppressed. I didn’t learn about him till I was past 80. Times have changed. Masses have lately been said in the prison (now the Old Jail Museum) on the Day of the Rope. Now we make a point to remember him.