Virginia (Ireland)

Virginia ( Irish Achadh an Iúir , "field at the fork of the river") is a city in County Cavan in Ireland . It was founded in the early 17th century and named after Queen Elizabeth I of England .

Main road

Virginia is located near Lough Ramor and is approximately 80 km from Dublin . It can be reached on the N3 about halfway between Navan and Cavan . It was once a strategic base and resting point for carriage operations between Enniskillen and Dublin. More recently, Virginia is connected to the capital by an hourly bus service from Bus Éireann to Cavan. It is also considered a commuter city due to its close proximity to the trading cities in the east and west. It mainly includes the agricultural and milk processing industries at the local Glanbial factory (formerly Virginia Milk Products ), which produces skimmed milk powder and cream for the world famous brand of Baileys Original Irish Cream Liqueur. Another local manufacturer is the paint manufacturer Fleetwood .

The Lough Ramor is one of the largest lakes in County Cavan, the km km extends about 7 in length and at its narrowest point. 1 It leads to the Blackwater and Boyne River systems. It is a popular lake with anglers as it is home to a wide variety of fish such as pike , bream , roach , hybrids, trout and eel . Some record catches have been recorded in recent times, most of them from visiting British anglers.

history

Virginia started out as an Ulster Plantation project. An English adventurer known as John Ridgeway was granted the crown patent in August 1612 for the construction of a new town on the highway between the already existing towns of Kells and Cavan. The conditions were to bring English settlers into the area and then build a real city. Ridgeway's difficulty was in attracting enough English merchants and settler families, as many viewed the area as hostile territory outside the protection of Leinster Pale . The problems also lay in building some wooden houses and a flour mill near the then existing O'Reilly Castle. Ridgeway then gave his patent to another Englishman, Captain Hugh Culme, who already owned land around Lough Oughter in County Cavan and could access timber. Culme convinced the Plantation Commission to relocate to Virginia, to its current location near the Blackwater tributary. He then built a number of houses for the settlers, but failed to meet the timeframe of the commission, which stipulated that the city should be further developed, so he eventually gave up his job, presumably for the same reasons as his predecessor. During November 1622, the settlement, Virginia, came under the ownership of Lucas Plunkett, Earl of Fingall , who owned extensive estates near County Meath . Plunkett was a Catholic Anglo-Irish lord, believed to be of Norman descent from the 12th century, who set out to complete the project.

Complaints from the residents of Virginia about the lack of development progress reached the commission around 1638, so that the second Earl of Fingall , Christopher Plunkett, was ordered to submit a substantial bail to the commission court and build the church in Virginia or the decline of his lands in the Counter County Cavan. The Anglican Bishop of Kilmore , then William Bedell , intended to lay out the city in accordance with the commission's agreement. However, events that led to the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and shrouded the Irish Confederation Wars caused extensive destruction and depopulation in Virginia. In the summer of 1642, government forces completely destroyed the castle and burned the stocks of hay, corn and peat in order to punish the outlawed Earl of Fingall for supporting a rebellious siege of the garrison at Drogheda . The landlord had lived in exile since the Williamite Wars, which took place between 1688 and 1691. Virginia was finally sold by the absent Plunketts in around 1750 to pay the assembly debt. This sale cleared the way for a new land lord, Thomas Taylor, Lord Headfort, to continue building the town. It is recorded that Taylor's grandfather, also a Thomas Taylor, was a cartographer who assisted Sir William Petty with the Down Survey during the 17th century.

The Taylors (later Taylour) had built a sizable mansion (now Headfort School ) outside of Kells, County Meath, and their attention turned to the unproductive estates around Virginia, to be converted into profitable farms through land drainage and afforestation in the lower-lying areas to transform. The consequences of this brought employment and quickly led to the formation of local markets and fairs in Virginia, where produce was traded on the streets. Virginia's population grew and doubled to 467 between the 1821 and 1841 censuses, as did the rapid build-up of the city on Main Street. The subsequent Lords Headfort, later Earl of Bective and Marquess of Headfort , designed their own private estate and a hunting lodge (now the Park Hotel), overlooking Lough Ramor.

The famine between 1845 and 1849, caused by successive failures in potato harvests, brought extreme misery to the poorest classes, so that many died from diseases such as typhus and cholera , which were widespread. At that time, epidemics were spreading across Europe , as a result of poor sewage and garbage disposal and poor living conditions. A famine affecting many parts of the county was averted in Virginia in 1845 thanks to the efforts of the local Famine Relief Committee to provide special allotments of Indian meals to compensate for hard work. This included women with children who cut stones for the construction of the roads and the building of the local Catholic Church to be built on the landlord's donated land. In the following years, Virginia flourished with the introduction of a butter market in 1856, followed by the opening of a railway line between Kells and Oldcastle in March 1863. The livestock could then be used for export , but this meant that products such as coal and beer were sold by the larger towns in rural areas, which led to the closure of the local malt brewery and some bakeries in town.

Until relatively close to the end of the century, emigration was a feature of the rural Irish, and Virginia was no exception. Perhaps the most famous emigrant from Virginia was Philip H. Sheridan , whose parents were from nearby Killinkere, who left Ireland around 1830 and settled in America. Sheridan achieved success through his military career, especially during the American Civil War . President Lincoln opened, "This Sheridan is a little Irishman, but a great fighter", especially as the commanding general of the US Army , which earned him many honors. Another famous man who had ties to Virginia is Dean Jonathan Swift , who wrote his well-known novel Gulliver's Travels while residing near Quilca, the home of his friend the clergyman Thomas Sheridan, who ran a classical school and later became principal of Cavan's Royal School. Playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan is also descended from this family, while another distinguished 19th-century Virginia resident was Thomas Fitzpatrick , a noted London doctor. Admiral Sir Josias Rowley had connections through his brother Rev. John Rowley, who was an Anglican minister in Virginia during this period and who built the First Fruits Church . Admiral Rowley also helped rebuild the church financially, which destroyed the roof after a great fire on Christmas night in 1830.

Today, Virginia continues to modernize as a growing commune with one foot in its clinging rural origins. The railway line closed in 1958 while the population was falling to its lowest level, although road links began to improve continuously. A sustained increase in prosperity and population in the city is evident from the many newly built houses and commercial shops. The last census, taken in 2006, showed that there was a 34.5% increase from the previous 2002 census to 3,188 residents in the Virginia constituency.

The Portal Tomb of Ballaghanea located east of Lough Ramor in Virginia.

Web links

[1] Community website for Virginia and its surrounding communities
[2] Public Records Office for Northern Ireland.
[3] Great Irish Famine and the work of the Central Relief Committee.
[4] Blue & Gray Magazine references to General Philip Sheridan's campaign's in American Civil War (Shenandoah - Winchester & Ceder Creek)
[5] Virginia's first ever Pumpkin Festival 26-28th Oct. 2007
[6] Virginia Group of Parishes website
[7] Irish Genealogy and Family History website

53.833333 -7.083333Coordinates: 53 ° 50 ′ N , 7 ° 5 ′ W

Virginia (Ireland)

history

See also

Web links