Jimmy McKeon 1864 - An untold Irish Famine and US Civil War Story

Late last year, Tim Feeney dropped me a message on Instagram after watching my video about Willie McBride. He’d noticed a grave marked McKeon right next to Willie’s. That sparked something in him, and he decided to write a song about his own family history, specifically his great-great-grandfather, Jimmy McKeon. It’s a brilliant story. We’re all familiar with the big historical beats - the Famine, the American Civil War - but you rarely get a look at it through one person’s eyes. This is the story of a man who survived both, starting as a tiny lad.

Let’s head back to where it all began.

Jimmy’s story starts with his folks fleeing Ireland for America. His mother and father, Ann and Matthew, were from the Drogheda and Tallanstown way. They got married in Dublin in 1845, just as the Famine was starting to tear the place apart. They had to run for their lives.

In his song, Tim has a line: "He pawned a fiddle." It’s a small thing, but it tells you everything you need to know. People back then sold every last bit of what they owned just to scrape together the fare for a boat. Often, families didn't have enough for everyone at once, so one would head over first to work and send money back home for the rest.

However they managed to pull the money together, they eventually ended up packed onto a coffin ship headed for New York, desperate for a bit of a fair crack at a decent life.

But things went sideways the moment they stepped off the boat. They ended up living in the Five Points, which was a rough enough spot at the best of times. Then, in 1849, tragedy hit and Matthew died. Jimmy was only a baby, maybe a year old. Looking back at the records, it’s fair to reckon his dad was caught up in the big cholera outbreak that wiped out thousands in the city that year. It was a brutal start for a young family, and truth be told, things didn't get any easier from there.

Jimmy’s start in life was tough as nails. With his father gone, his mother Ann was left to raise him and his sisters on her own in the middle of the slums. They were squeezed into a tiny tenement over on Laurens Street. New York was absolutely bursting at the seams back then. To pack more people in, landlords were taking old family houses and carving them into narrow, cramped apartments. You can imagine the state of them. They were pitch black and falling apart, with no fresh air or plumbing to speak of. It was a bleak spot for a boy to grow up. Jimmy had nothing to his name, no money and no leg up in life. He had to rely on his own hard work just to get by.

It’s actually interesting looking through the old records now, because nobody could even agree on when the poor lad was born. You’d see 1847 in one place, then 1849 or 1851 in another. He spent years later in life just trying to prove his own age for his pension, but we’ll get to that later. Living in those conditions pushed him toward what happened next. When you’re stuck in the mud of the New York slums and your options are thin on the ground, the military starts looking like a grand way out. So, he joined the Navy in 1864 while he was still just a teenager. When you sit back and think about it, that’s a heavy lot for a young lad to carry. His family’s life was torn apart in Ireland before they were shipped over on a coffin ship. He lost his father as a baby and had to dodge disease in the slums his whole childhood. After surviving all of that, his only real way forward was to head off to war.

To give you a bit of context on what Jimmy walked into - and for anyone who doesn't know much about the American Civil War - the country was basically tearing itself in two. You had the North, the Union, fighting to hold the states together and put an end to slavery, while the South, the Confederacy, wanted to break away and keep things exactly as they were.

The Union had a strategy called the "Anaconda Plan," designed to wrap around the Confederates and choke off their supplies. That is exactly where Jimmy’s ship, the USS Chicopee, came into play. It was a handy wooden gunboat with paddle wheels on both sides, meaning it could go forward or backward without even having to turn around. Because it didn't sit deep in the water, it was perfect for sneaking into the narrow rivers and shallow spots around North Carolina to keep the blockade tight.

The Confederates had a real beast on their hands: the CSS Albemarle. It was a massive ironclad covered in thick metal plating. They actually built the thing in a cornfield, using whatever scrap they could get their hands on - even old frying pans and farm plows. The sight of it was enough to strike fear into anyone, mostly because the Union cannonballs would just bounce right off its sides. It had already sent one ship to the bottom and was essentially ruling the river.

Normal guns were useless against it. The Union had already sent in a sister boat of the Chicopee, the USS Sassacus, to try and take it down, but that didn't work. So, they sent a lad named Lieutenant William Cushing on what was essentially a suicide mission. He took a tiny boat out in the pitch black, snuck past the defenses, and blew the iron monster sky-high with a torpedo.

After all that madness with the Confederate ship, you have to remember why a lad like Jimmy was there in the first place. He joined the Navy in 1864 just to get away from the hunger and the grime of those New York tenements. He told them he was fifteen. From what I’ve gathered, younger lads could enlist to help out on the front lines by carrying gear, weapons, and gunpowder - they were often called "powder monkeys." Jimmy, though, enlisted as a full Seaman, just like it’s carved on his headstone. Looking at the dates Tim found, Jimmy might have even been younger than he claimed. It wasn't unusual for the time, but pinning down his real age is a bit of a headache. About a fifth of the whole Union Navy was made up of Irish fellas just like him, all trying to find a way to make a life in a new country. And that’s only the Navy.

During his three years at sea, he saw it all. Being the lookout who spotted the Albemarle in the dead of night was a massive deal, especially since that mission was nearly a suicide job for everyone involved. Jimmy was also credited with catching two enemy spies. Between that and rowing out into the freezing Roanoke River to save Lieutenant Cushing after the blast, he ended up with a pile of medals for being a brave skin. He finished his service and got an honorable discharge in December 1866. He’d done more by the time he was out of his teens than most men do in a lifetime. After the war, you’d think the government would make things easy for a man who’d given so much. Instead, Jimmy ended up in a massive scrap with the Bureau of Pensions that dragged on for years. Since he was just a young lad from a poor immigrant family when he signed up, there was no birth certificate or proper paperwork anywhere in the city records.

He likely lied about his age just to get in, though nobody knows for sure. When he tried to get his pension increased between 1909 and 1911, the bureaucrats just wouldn't believe his age. He had to fight them tooth and nail, making the fair point that if the Navy was happy to take his word that he was fifteen while he was dodging cannonballs, they should be happy to take it as gospel now. It’s heartbreaking when you look at the life he lived. That war was the first time he risked everything for a future in America, and he would end up doing it all over again.

Once he got his discharge papers in 1866, Jimmy refused to go back to those miserable slums in the city. He headed north up the Hudson River instead. It was a fresh start, but he was really swapping the rough seas for a completely different kind of hardship. That move kicked off a fifty-year chapter of his life where he was either working himself to the bone or fighting the authorities for what he was fairly owed. Back then, Peekskill was the main hub for making cast-iron stoves. Jimmy spent forty years working as an ironmoulder and a foreman at the Southard Robertson Company there. It was a massive industry, but the day-to-day work was absolute torture.

To give you an idea of how big this industry was, locals say that during the Second World War, an American soldier stumbled across a Peekskill stove way over in the Black Forest in Germany. Even closer to home, there’s a Peekskill stove sitting in the rebuilt cabin of Henry David Thoreau - the very place he lived when he wrote his book, Walden.

Tim showed me an old photo from 1902 of the foundry crew, and you can spot Jimmy right there in the middle of it. His face is black with dust and he’s staring straight into the lens. It’s a powerful image. You can see the hard life he led written all over him. Even with the work being such a killer, those years in Peekskill were the first time Jimmy got a bit of solid ground under his feet. He finally found the kind of stability his own parents never had back home during the Famine. He married Mary Ann McLoughlin in 1880 at the local church, and they made a proper home for themselves on John Street.

They didn't do things by halves, either. They ended up with a house full of at least ten children. If you look through the old local papers, you can see he was right in the middle of everything in the town. He was always out at community events, like the time he won a turkey at a Thanksgiving shoot with the local fire company, or when he competed in rifle contests for Washington's Birthday. After everything he had been through, it's grand to think of him finally having a bit of a life for himself and a big family to come home to at the end of the day.

There is some brilliant folklore about Peekskill that is too good to skip over. Abraham Lincoln himself stopped by during the Civil War to give a speech. But, if you're looking for something a bit different, there’s the story of crayons. Crayola actually has its roots right there in Peekskill. They started out as the Peekskill Chemical Works, long before kids were drawing on walls.

They later changed their name to Binney & Smith. Back then, they were famous for making the red pigment that gave American barns their classic color and the carbon black that turned car tires from white to black. The first Crayola crayon finally hit the shelves in 1903, and it was actually Edwin Binney’s wife who came up with the famous name.

If that doesn't do it for you, there is also a great connection to L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz. He attended the Peekskill Military Academy between 1868 and 1870. Local historians dug up an old brick road leading from the river straight up to the academy. People reckon it might be the inspiration for the Yellow Brick Road. There is no concrete proof, but it is still a great bit of local history.

Jimmy eventually passed away at his home on John Street in April 1922. His health was fairly spent by then, which is no shock after the hard life he led. He left behind Mary and nine of their children, and you can see the proof of his hard work almost the minute he was gone. Only a few days after Jimmy died, his son Matthew wrote to the pension office to sort out his father's final payment. The best part is that he wrote the letter on his own business paper. He had his own shop, "M.J. McKeon, Groceries & Vegetables," right on Main Street.

Even though he spent years fighting those pencil-pushers in the government to get his pension, Jimmy was incredibly proud of his time in the Navy. You know how some fellas come back from a war and never say a word? Jimmy was the complete opposite. He must have told his stories with real heart, because when he passed away, his obituary was full of his heroics - like being the young lookout who spotted the Albemarle and bring part of the crew that helped save Lieutenant Cushing from the freezing river. His kids clearly knew how much it meant to him, too. They put up a massive stone cross at his grave in Assumption Cemetery and made sure to carve "SEAMAN U.S.S. CHICOPEE" right into the stone so nobody would ever forget.

The story doesn't end there in the graveyard, though. His great-great-grandson, Tim Feeney, is the man who wrote the song "Jimmy McKeon 1864" about this whole history. Tim did a massive amount of research, covering everything from the Famine and the slums to the naval battles and those roasting foundries. I never could have put this piece together without his help.

For the folk singer Timothy Feeney, this whole story kicked off right here on Inside Irish Music. Tim was born in Cold Spring, New York... not a stone's throw from where the legend Pete Seeger lived. That gave him a lasting love for Irish history and the music of the Hudson Valley. And as I said while he was watching the channel, he spotted his own family name sitting right there next to Willie McBride in that famous Green Fields of France. It struck a chord with him immediately.

By the time Tim was twelve, the McKeons in his family had passed on. His grandmother, who had married into the name, was the last one left to hold the stories. Still, Tim knew his great-great-grandfather, Jimmy McKeon, had left behind a hell of a life story.

Writing the song Jimmy McKeon 1864 was Tim’s way of holding onto a bit of family history that felt like it was slipping through his fingers. It’s a musical tribute to the folks who made the journey to the Hudson Valley... the same place where Tim is raising the sixth generation today.

When you take a step back and look at how close this all came to never happening, it’s enough to make your head spin. It’s practically a miracle that this family exists at all. If the cholera that took his dad in 1849 had hit a few months earlier, the story would have been over. There would be no Jimmy, no family legacy, and the whole line would have disappeared into the mud of the New York slums. They’d just be another forgotten name from the Famine ships. Jimmy’s life was like something out of a nightmare, and he was constantly dancing on the edge of a blade. Think about it. He survived diseases that were wiping out thousands as a fatherless baby, then jumped into the bloodiest war in American history as a teenager just to get a fighting chance. Even after cheating death in the war, he put himself through forty years of breathing in soot and roasting in those 100-degree foundries. Every single day was a gamble with his health.

It’s a massive butterfly effect when you sit back and think about it. If the wind had blown a different way on that river, or if the foundry had broken him a year too soon, that grocery store on Main Street never happens. His son Matthew is never born, and the generations that follow just vanish from the timeline. Tim Feeney wouldn't be here today either.

The song "Jimmy McKeon 1864" would never have been written, and we wouldn't be here talking about any of this. Tim's song is out now, and a fair bit of heart went into putting it together. It captures this entire history brilliantly, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did. It’s a powerful reminder of the real people behind the history books.

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