300 Cashel Street | The Irish in America

Mom and I began sorting through the research we had compiled on the 300 Cashel Street house in Clontarf, Minnesota. It has been fun looking through the folders and making sense of the floor plans Mom drew up nearly twenty years ago!

It is challenging to write about a house that no longer stands. It would be wonderful to walk around the house to see how it fits into the environment. But that’s OK…at least we have some photos of the place before it was dismantled.

300 Cashel Street, north side (Private Family Collection)

We realized we didn’t know when the house was built, and then we realized we only had property deeds for 1906-1934.

I called Carla Roberts, the department head of the Swift County Land Records Office, and asked if they could tell from their records when a house was built. Carla said to me that information is not usually included in the records held by their office since they are concerned with the transfer of land titles and deeds. She suggested we visit the Assesor’s Office (just across the hall from her at the Swift County Courthouse in Benson, Minnesota). We may see a change in taxes assessed, indicating new construction took place.

Too bad there were no building permit requirements. Mom and I wonder if there might be any building information in the Clontarf Township Records. I believe those are located at Swift County Historical Museum. We, of course, made tons of photocopies.

We are planning a trip to Clontarf in July, so we will visit the Land Records Office and the Assessor’s to see if we can find records before 1906 and ascertain when the house was built. We can’t remember if we looked at any earlier deeds and didn’t make copies of them. This is why it is essential to always keep good notes with your research!

We also need more details on what happened after 1934. In 1934, a foreclosure involved the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government program established to offer homeowners in default options for refinancing to avoid foreclosure. Obviously, the program was not successful in the case of the Regan family. We are looking into HOLC for further information. HOLC was a New Deal program during the Great Depression – check out this great site for tons on the New Deal.

Up next…a former resident of 300 Cashel Street has a landmark anniversary of their birth on Wednesday, so check back for a special tribute.

I posted this photo last Sunday for Mother’s Day because it features two special moms in my family (my great-grandma and grandma). I am sharing it again today because of what is behind them: the house.

McMahon Family, 1914 Clontarf, MN (Private Family Collection)

This photo hung on the wall above my grandma’s kitchen table for years. Grandma would often glance at the picture and smile while we chatted, played cards, or had something to eat. The photo sparked Grandma’s memory, and a family story or tidbit from her past, relatable to the current activity or conversation, would follow. Regardless of what the memory was, Grandma would always have this to say in conclusion: “You know, your grandpa’s family moved into that house several years after this photo was taken, and that is where he grew up.” Grandma loved making that connection.

Recently my mom and I came across a folder in our Clontarf archive labeled 300 Cashel Street, the address of the house in the photo. The folder includes notes, hand-drawn house plans, photographs, and copies of property deeds. Nearly twenty years ago, we began looking into our Clontarf, Minnesota roots with the ultimate goal of writing a book. We love to research and have done tons of it throughout those years but have not yet written the book. There are many explanations (excuses?) for this, but the scale of the project is somewhat overwhelming.

So, we decided to start small. We will use the house on Cashel Street to tell part of the story. We are not sure what this project will look like, but we are motivated to take the excellent research we have done out of the archive and shine a light on it. What can this little house on Cashel Street tell us about early twentieth-century life in a Minnesota railroad community? Stay tuned to find out!