There was no airport at Carrickfinn and no comfy coaches when three American journalists made the long trek from Dublin to Dungloe just over a century ago.
They had come to interview the legendary Paddy ‘the Cope’ Gallagher (main pic), between 1919 and 1922.
Mr Gallagher famously established an agricultural cooperative in Dungloe in 1906 for locals to pool their resources and buy food and agricultural products more affordably
Employing over 100 people in the region today, the 119-year-old business has locations in Dungloe, Annagry, Falcarragh, and Kincasslagh.
A December 1916 article in the New York Tribune was one of the first mentions of Gallagher in a US newspaper, according to a recent story by Mark Holan on The Irish Story website.
Three years later, Ruth Russell appears to have been the first American journalist to visit Gallagher in Dungloe.
Savel Zimand visited Gallagher in August 1921 and described the west Donegal town as a “one-street village with little cabins surrounded by high hills and little silvern lakes with innumerable islands and the high sea.”
The following year, in the summer of 1922, Redfern Mason of the San Francisco Examiner made his way to Dungloe to interview the pioneering ‘Cope’.
Alighting from the train at Fintown, he tossed his “portmanteau and typewriter” into a “side cart” stuffed with mail, newspapers, animal feed, and other cargo.
“It was a heavy load and we tottered and lumbered through thirteen miles of the wildest country in Donegal,” Mason, then 55, wrote of his ride to Dungloe.
You can read the full article on the American journalists’ visit at www.theirishhistory.com
Mark Holan writes about Irish history and contemporary issues at markholan.org
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