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Picnic under the plum trees, 1890

Written by Gary Wesman

St. Andrew Church hopes to have something for everyone at our parish picnic on the church grounds Sunday, Aug. 7. Three things we won’t have are swine, quince and an oompah band.

Starting in the 1880s or 1890s our parish picnics were hosted by a big Irish Catholic family. Ten had been living in a one-and-a-half story house catercorner from the church until, after a lifetime of toil, they became rich overnight. Just east of the church grounds they bought a whole city block that they had to themselves. On what used to be five acres of farmland they built the only house on the block, a seventeen-room Victorian manse lighted day and night with outdoor gas lamps.

The heads of the family were Patrick and Catharine Sullivan Casey, both immigrants. Patrick, born in 1827 or ’28, was from Peterborough, Ontario. Catharine, born in 1838, was from Killarney, Ireland. They had eight children who survived to adulthood. Through the late 19th Century and maybe into the 20th Century, the Caseys and descendants invited their fellow parishioners to the picnic in their grove.

“Near their house was an orchard of apple, pear, prune and quince trees, and it was in this orchard that the parishioners assembled every summer.”

Matthew McCarthy, a parishioner, wrote of that boyhood memory in his 1971 memoir.

“St. Andrew’s owned a portable wooden dance floor made up in sections. On this pavilion in the orchard the people, young and old, danced to the strains of the Koehler family band,” McCarthy wrote. “There were also bazaar booths gaily decorated with Chinese lanterns and oil lanterns. The folks would visit, spend their money on games and refreshments. . .”

The Caseys owned the block from Cascade to Raspberry streets between West Seventh and West Eighth streets. Patrick Casey bought it in April 1880 out of his one-fifth share of an inheritance that today would have the buying power of $13.9 million.
Since 1864 their family home had been 1040 West Sixth Street, the little house on half of a lot. On old city maps and in other documents the big, new property they bought was uninhabited acreage designated Block 47. Very soon it acquired a grander name: Patrick Casey Heights.
The elegant Victorian they built in 1880-81 went up on the west side of Cascade Street. Within a year or so it got an address: 712 Cascade Street. The house still stands, now an apartment building, and with the same address.

Today, of course, the homes stand shoulder to shoulder filling the block, built so close together that a one-car driveway is a tight fit. To us it’s an old westside inner-city neighborhood, surrounded to the horizons by others much like it. Circa 1880, in casual conversation Erie west of Liberty Street and south of West Sixth Street was what people called the countryside. In tax assessments for the first years of Casey ownership, Block 47 consisted of the house at 712 Cascade Street, a barn, outbuildings, a gas well, one carriage, one horse and one dog. That and a big Irish Catholic family were the whole domain.

Here I should introduce Karen A, Meyn of Grove City. Meyn wrote a history of the Casey family covering 1790 to 1894. The book, published in 2013, is documented and sourced to a pinpoint (and, not coincidentally, it’s almost as long as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Most of the Casey family information in this article is from her book.

Patrick Casey followed his two older brothers, James and John Casey, from Canada to Erie. The older brothers worked on canals, then railroads, then docks. They are listed as contractors, Patrick as a laborer.

While building a railroad the brothers, James especially, started buying scattered farmland in Harborcreek Township, then Greene Township. Caseys wound up owning 413 acres in Harborcreek alone.

Patrick farmed in Greene Township near St. Boniface Catholic Church. A tax assessment for 1860 itemized his livestock as two horses, four milk cows, five cattle and two swine. The farm yielded thirteen tons of hay, four hundred pounds of butter, one hundred pounds of Irish potatoes, sixty bushels of oats and thirty bushels of corn. Karen Meyn wrote that Patrick probably operated his brother’s sawmill in Harborcreek and worked on their railroad construction jobs as needed.

Patrick sold his farm, moved into the city and bought the house on West Sixth Street catercorner from the church in 1864. I sense that where his older brothers thrived, Patrick just scraped by somehow.

A newspaper article in Buffalo, N.Y., described Patrick as the poorest of his siblings with a large family to support. “Large family” was an understatement but he might have objected to being called poor. When Patrick came into his inheritance the only Casey children not in school were the couple’s youngest child, a three-year-old boy, and their eldest, a twenty-one-year-old son. Two teenage boys were already attending Notre Dame and in time their siblings went to college, too.

James and John Casey were contractors who built the first of the brawny coal and ore docks at the foot of Cascade Street in 1863-64. The docks connected a fleet of ships with new railroads called the Erie & Pittsburg (no “h”) or the Pittsburgh and Erie. By 1871 there were three docks, two of them for the iron ore arriving via Lake Superior on its way to the steel mills of Pittsburgh.

John Casey, a bachelor, died in 1879, age fifty-eight. He left an estate worth $492,000. By the most conservative comparison, using the Consumer Price Index, that would have the buying power today of $13.9 million. As a share of the U.S. economy, more like $1.1 billion.

The estate was divided equally between five siblings. Each of the brothers and sisters immediately gave equal gifts totaling $60,000 ($1.6 million today) toward the construction of St. Peter Cathedral. The cathedral was then in the fourth year of an eighteen-year building project. Patrick was fifty-two or fifty-three years old. From then on he gave his occupation as “gentleman.”

St. Andrew parish lore holds that the property hosting our picnics was a farm. The orchard was a fact and so was an impressive garden. Whether the rest was still being farmed is iffy. The seller was a widow. By 1885 thirteen lots were taxed as farmland valued at $5,200, or $137,000 in buying power today. No crops were listed and the Casey livestock was down to one horse.

In the 1880s Patrick had three more houses built on Casey Heights, all fronting West Eighth Street. They were for the Casey children if they chose to live on the homestead as adults. In 1887 he sold the houses to his wife for one dollar, probably so that Catharine would have the rental income if she outlived him, which she did by twenty-nine years.

The west bayfront was already a-bustle with connected neighborhoods. Now more of the blocks south of West Sixth Street were sprouting some houses. An 1890 atlas shows the next block south of Casey Heights (Cascade to Raspberry streets between West Eighth and West Ninth streets) with just three homes and two structures with X’s through them, which usually meant a barn. Meanwhile the two blocks north of Casey Heights were filling in with homes fronting Cascade Street.

Business directories of the time list no farms in the city. I take that to mean property owners might have grown some crops but farming was no longer their main occupation. What Erie had many of were nurseries, flower-growing businesses and dealers in seeds.

At the turn of the century there were at least ten registered wholesale-retail florists and greenhouse operators in the city. St. Andrew Church shared the block with one of them, Ernest Neuberger. Judging from the map Neuberger’s flower beds and greenhouses were the bigger part.

The 1901 city directory lists only one house on the north side of our block of West Seventh Street. That was 1136 West Seventh, home of William Roward Jr., coremaker. A couple of houses stood on the south side near Cranberry Street.

That was it for dwellings. Cranberry Street was the western city limits then. Beyond lay the estates of the superrich and the villages in the wilderness known as Millcreek Township.

Those parish picnics in Casey’s orchard served a larger purpose. The original church burned down in 1896. The picnics were fundraisers for the new church, completed in 1916. Mattew McCarthy, our parish memoirist, wrote that the bazaars, refreshment stands and games of chance raised $30,000, or somewhere near $750,000 today.

This year’s St. Andrew picnic will follow the 11 a.m. Mass on Sunday, Aug. 7. You can find picnic information on this site. We will meet on the church grounds, not under quince and plum trees but under the magnolia tree.

NOTES – By far the most important source of information about the Caseys is the book written by Karen Meyn of Grove City. It is the most well-researched family history l have seen and the most carefully sourced. It was copyrighted and published in 2013 by K.J. Meyn Books.

I found a few things in directories, atlases and old maps at Blasco Memorial Library. They were but kernels next to Meyn’s silos of research. The book’s full title is, Thomas Casey and Johanna McCarthy and Descendants 1790 to 1894, including their contributions to the progress of Erie, Pennsylvania. Ask in the library’s Heritage Room for the “Casey family history.” The librarian will know what you mean. It is 931 pages long.

The eyewitness to the picnics and much else at St. Andrew Church circa 1900 is the late Matthew McCarthy. He wrote his memoir in 1971 when he was eighty. It was printed in a commemorative brochure for the church’s centennial.

McCarthy’s is the only mention I’ve ever come across of “the Koehler family band.” At a guess, maybe the band was fielded by one or all three of the beer-brewing Koehler brothers. In the 1880s and ‘90s the Koehlers took over their late father’s brewery and separately opened a second brewery plus a bottling plant for beer, pear cider, ginger ale, mineral water and “Buffalo Mead.”

For money equivalents then and now I used the website MeasuringWorth.com, which compares dollars seven different ways depending on context—purchasing power, labor value, as a commodity, etc.