Union and Confederate Irishmen in the American Civil War

Although some Irish Catholics had lived in America since the colonial period, there was no significant immigration to the United States until the Potato Famine in Ireland (1845-1853). According to the 1860 census, well over one and a half million Americans claimed to have been born in Ireland. The majority of these lived in the North. Irish Catholics faced both religious and ethnic prejudice from the then largely Anglo-Saxon population. Coming upon a group of Irish women chanting “the keen”, a traditional Gaelic lament, after a number of their men had been killed, George Templeton Strong wrote, “It was an uncanny sound to hear; quite new to me….Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.” Some 150,000 Irish soldiers served in the Union army, and 25,000 in the Confederate army.

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Santa Claus, Indiana: The Friendliest Town in America

In 1856, the town fathers of a newly founded small town in southwest Indiana petitioned the United States Postal Service to open a post office at “Santa Fe”, Indiana. The Post Office refused, since there was already another town by that name in Indiana. The town decided to change its’ name to Santa Claus, thus becoming the only town in the world with a post office bearing the name “Santa Claus”. The town's unique name went largely unnoticed until the late 1920s, when local postmaster James Martin began promoting the Santa Claus postmark. The growing volume of holiday mail became so substantial that it caught the attention of Robert Ripley in 1929, who featured the town's post office in his nationally-syndicated “Believe It or Not” cartoon.


Today, the town hosts a Santa Claus convention where “professional Santas” from around the globe gather annually to discuss, participate, improve, and learn from each other, on topics that promote the ideals of Santa Claus.


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