This is John Bachelor, conversation with Professor Tyler Anbinder, his book,

Plantiful Country, The Great Potato Famine in the Making of Irish New York.

This one episode tells you many, many families, the lynches who came to New York, very poor, ambition

to start a farm in Illinois. They'd heard that it was heaven. However, they run into a fact, they don't have enough money at the time.

So the part of the story I like best is, they worked 10 years and is Professor Anbinder the tale of the lynches in Minnesota.

More of this tonight.

Well he does both he goes back to he goes back to new york gets his wife and his brother and they come and they work in St Paul and then eventually when the weather gets better in the spring go back and start working start building the farm and right so that the lynches are a great story because as you mentioned they get to America and their plan had been immediately to go to

Illinois and start a farm but they realized they didn't have enough money to do that so they worked for 10 years in New York, Peter works in a sugar refinery as a

laborer and a porter. And then after a decade they say, all right, we have enough money, we'll go west. But as you know, they decide, you know,

we can hardly buy anything in Illinois now, but out here in Minnesota, we can get government

land for, you know, barely a dollar an acre. and so they go out there even though it's it's

there's hardly any people living there at that point and it's very the

quote-unquote farms are mostly forest.

And yet they decide rather than spend $50 an acre,

they'll spend a dollar an acre and they'll cut down the trees

and they'll somehow eke out a living there.

And they create whole communities of Irish farmers in the Minnesota

wilderness and the Irish even there kind of stick together and help each other to become successful.