When the O'Sullivan family moved to Grange House, eight miles west of

Cork City on the 5th. of April 1936, they were following in the

footsteps of a family that had done exactly the same thing on exactly

the same day one hundred years before.

     Nora O'Sullivan, one of four girls and two boys in the family, was

six at the time and had little appreciation of the co-incidence. She

was more concerned to explore with her brothers and sisters the

wonderful natural playground around the 26-bedroomed house and

extensive farmyard.

     Little did she know that, as they played 'Cowboys and Indians', they

were sharing the childhood pleasures of one of the great heroes of the

American Civil War. He had played in these very fields after his

family had moved there on the 5th. of April 1836, when he was eight.

    And she could certainly have had no inkling that in her later years,

her life story would be bound so closely to that of General Patrick

Ronayne Cleburne, who led Confederate forces to victory at Richmond,

Murfreesboro and Missionary Ridge, and who died at the Battle of

Franklin in 1864 at the age of 36.

     Nora O'Sullivan became Nora Lynch, the wife of a

fire engineer. They lived on the edge of Ballincollig, a burgeoning

satellite community of Cork, less than five miles from Grange House,

and no more than three miles from Bridepark Cottage, where Patrick

Cleburne was born. And by a strange twist of fate Nora became the acknowledged local contact and guide for the hundreds of

scholars, writers, Civil War enthusiasts and re-enactors who visit the

area,

    When I spoke to her in Ballincollig in 2001, I found that Nora Lynch wears her learning lightly. 'I came from a farming family where there was always something to be done around the place,' she says. 'We never had much time for studying history when we were growing up. But we knew there was history around us.

    'We could see the remains of the four towers that had guarded Grange

House when it was a fortified mansion.  We had all heard the gory

folktales of brutal murders on the steps leading down to the blessed

well in the copse above the house near the site of St. Cera's 6th.

century monastery.

    'Our dairyman was the son and grandson of dairymen who had worked at Grange House since the Cleburne's time. And our postman (mail man) Tim O'Connell only died a few years ago at an advanced age. They all had stories about the Cleburnes.

    As she lay in bed at night, Nora could listen to the sounds of the

shutters banging 'like drums along the Amazon'. And on the reverse

side of one of them, she found a poem, partly obliterated.

    The  poem had been written in 1843, the year General Cleburne's

father died at Grange. It went something like this (she has

reconstructed the parts that were difficult to decipher):

 

When I am old and tired of life

And my mind is filled with anguish and strife

Please sit me down in my favourite chair

To dwell on my youth, when life was fair

 

Now the autumn leaves have steadily grown old

And like my hair, they've lost their gold

So think awhile, when this you see

Some day you too will grow old like me.

 

P. R. Cleburne, 25th. December 1843

 

And so, exactly one hundred years later, a thirteen-year old added a

stanza to the work of a fifteen-year-old:

 

Here I am sitting in '43 – a damsel in distress, don't you see;

 

If I was here when you were young, our epitaphs would be written with

so much more fun

 

N. M. O'Sullivan, 25th. December 1943

 

All the young O'Sullivans were active and creative. 'We were a bit

wild, I suppose. Wherever there was singing or dancing or music, we

were there in the thick of it. If anyone wanted a skit (mocking verses

or song), we were the ones they came to.'

    But there was a gentler side to Nora. 'When other children would

spend their money on sweets (candy), I would buy a packet of seeds,

and sow them. Then I'd 'scald' (yell at) the Rhode Island Reds for

scratching in my little patch.

    'Or if I found a bird with a broken wing, I'd care for it. Of course

I'd ride bareback on horses too!.'

    After going across the fields to elementary school near the village

of Ovens (often taking a short-cut across the graveyard where

Patrick's father Dr. Joseph Cleburne is buried), Nora went to high

school in Cork, at St. Aloysius Sisters of Mercy.

    'I loved debating and I suppose if things had been different, I might

have gone on to study law,' she says. 'But my father died in 1949 when

I was 19 and we had to help our mother keep things going. There's

always something to be done on a farm, every type of animal to be

managed, things to be lifted and carried - and we'd tip  around

(hustle) to make a shilling (about 8 cents) wherever we could.'

     Then she decided it was time to do something for herself and so she

leased a premises in Cork City, where she set up a grocery and

provisions business. 'I sold everything there,' she says, '– from a

needle to an anchor! I learned a lot about human nature – people

confided in me in absolute secrecy about their problems.

   Meanwhile she had met a dashing young man named Jim Lynch at a social function. They were married three years later; today, having reared a son and a daughter. At the time of our interview they lived in a neat bungalow home opposite the former medical centre where Dr. Joseph Cleburne attended as 'dispensary doctor'. 

    For a number of years the Lynch family lived in Cork City, but even

after they moved to Ballincollig, Nora cycled the 16-mile round trip

to and from her store in Magazine Road every day.

    But the niggling feeling of history unexplored was always there and

in 1972 she began to investigate the pattern of land holdings around

her old family home, then occupied by her brother Patrick and his wife

and family.

    Her interest in law gave her an important advantage when it came to

unravelling the complicated trail of agreements and leases relating to

the area originally known as Cloghmacoillig (a Gaelic name that

translates literally as The Stone of the Wood).

    Her research began with the Coll and Barrett families in the 15th.

and 16th. centuries and then focused on the Sarsfields who held the

property at the beginning of the 17th. century.

    'In 1649 Colonel Robert Phair leased the Grange property from William Sarsfield. Robert was known as 'The Regicide' because of his part with Oliver Cromwell in the murder of King Charles 1 of England, but he was able to survive the Restoration and the Phairs lived on here until 1712. They put in 'motte and bailey' fortifications and you can still

see the remains of them in dry weather'.

    The lease of Grange House then passed to John Welsh of Wales, who had already more than 2000 acres of land in Cork and Kerry. The Welsh and Benn-Welsh families were to hold the head lease until 1900; they were ennobled as Lords Ormathwaite and were regarded as good landlords.

    Sub-leases of the property were given to the Hawkes family, who also became prominent in the area. 'They built Bridepark House in

Killumney, a few miles from Grange, in 1789,  and later Bridepark

Cottage where the Cleburne family came to live in 1825.

    Joseph Cleburne was by then a successful young surgeon doctor in his early thirties, and a graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons of

Ireland. In 1823 he had married Mary Ann Ronayne, daughter of a

business family from the Great Island area to the east of Cork City.

Their first child, William, had been born in 1824.

    The Cleburnes had connections with the Irish counties of Wexford and

North Tipperary, and immediate ancestors of Joseph Cleburne were

associated with the Annaghanarrig area near Lough Derg on the River

Shannon. 'I believe that there was also a connection with the Phair

family, who had extensive properties in Wexford, where another Joseph

Cleburne, a grand-uncle of Dr. Joseph, lived in the mid-1700s,' Nora

Lynch said.

    In addition to his private practice, Dr. Cleburne also served as

'dispensary' or public health doctor to the small village communities

in Ballincollig and Ovens, and was doctor to both the British Army's

regimental headquarters nearby and the Ballincollig Gunpowder Mills.

    His son Patrick was born in 1828. Shortly after the birth of their

fourth child, Joseph, in 1829, his wife died. By 1836 he had married

again, to Isabel Stuart, and made the move to Grange House, now with

the beginnings of a second family (a boy aged 5 and a girl aged 3).

Their new home was an impressive building, sub-leased with its

surrounding farm of 219 acres for a period of 100 years from John

Hawkes as principal lessee of the Sarsfields.

    'The house was built in the 1780s,' Nora Lynch told me. 'It was extended at various stages and an entire third storey added. This was supposed to have happened after the other additions, but when we came to renovate it in the 1940s, we found that the top storey seemed to be older than the other additions.

    'The standard room size was 25 feet square and the front hall was 20

feet by 40 feet, with an elegant staircase sweeping up to the first

floor.'

    'There were the usual farm out-buildings, servants quarters, a coach

house and some exotic landscaping features  – I remember a French

Chesnut and a Gingko tree.'

    Within seven years of moving to Grange House, Joseph Cleburne had

died, leaving a widow and eight children: William, 19; Annie, 17;

Patrick, 15; Joseph 14; Isabella, 12; Edward, 10; Robert, 6 and

Christopher, 2.

    Already a series of potato blight attacks in the 1820s and 1830s had

begun to set a pattern of impoverishment and hunger that grew to

tragic proportions in the 1840s, the period of the Great Famine

    'By this time Patrick Cleburne had received an education, probably

through private governesses and at Spedding College, a local school

set up by a Protestant minister for the education of his own seven

sons,' Nora says.

    But his step-mother and siblings were still dependent on the rents of

sub-tenants on the farm and on an income from produce, including the

country butter that they made in their dairy.

    Having failed his college exams, in 1845 Patrick joined the British

Army, hoping for an overseas posting. Instead he was assigned to

Mullingar, where the army was involved in carrying out evictions of

famine-stricken tenants on behalf of the more unfeeling landlords.

    Traumatised and directionless, Patrick lost contact with his family.

In 1849, after re-establishing contact with them, he took ship for the

United States with his brother Joseph on the barque Bridgetown,

arriving in New Orleans on Christmas Day of the same year.

    By 1850, many of the Cleburne sub-tenants had emigrated or become too poor to pay their rent. When an arrangement with a butter merchant

regarding payment for their own produce fell through, the Cleburne's

faced disaster. 'They owed nearly £800 and would be leaving themselves open to further debt if they broke the contract with the landlord for occupation of Grange House,' Nora said.

    But Lord Ormathwaite came to the rescue, allowing them to break the

terms of the lease without penalty, and arranging through Sir Thomas

Tobin for them to have access to a small cottage on the lands of the

Ballincollig Gunpowder Mills. Here the remaining Cleburnes were to

live for five years until they too made the journey to America.

    Patrick had by now become a respected citizen in Helena, Arkansas.

Some of his family and step-family joined him there. William went on

to become a railroad engineer and respected botanist, first in Omaha,

and then in later years living with Isabella, who was a music teacher

in Newport, Kentucky, where Robert established himself as well. Joseph

also worked on the railroad in Omaha for a time. Annie became

milliner in Cincinnati. Only the youngest, Christopher, was to follow

the example of his general brother: he died on the field of battle in

1864.

    And nothing further is heard of a young Irishwoman who had also been a major figure in Patrick Cleburne's life - Susan Tarleton, described in some references as his fiancee.

    When Nora Lynch's father took over the former Cleburne home at

Grange House, it was largely as it had been in the Cleburne's time,

though some portions at the rear had been damaged by fire. 'Over the

years, he tried to make the house more manageable, knocking the

damaged portions and making the rooms more compact,' Nora said.

    Her brother Patrick and his wife Mary made it into an

elegant home in a pleasant country area that is within easy reach of

Cork city, and therefore regarded as a very desireable place to live.

Other family members, including two of Nora's sisters and a niece who

is a lawyer, built homes nearby.

    'From the beginning, Grange House was always open to anyone with an interest in Cleburne,' said Nora. 'My brother and his wife were always

the soul of hospitality to everyone who came, whether out of

curiosity, enthusiasm or academic interest.'

    Two years after her first contact with the new owner of the general's

birthplace, a group of the Cleburne Brigade came with full period

armaments, to perform a 21-gun salute at Bridepark Cottage. It was the

beginning of something that was effectively to take over Nora's life.

    'All the weaponry had to be listed in detail and submitted to the

local police with the passports of all of those participating', she

remembered.

For some years after that, she was kept busy as groups of Civil War enthusiasts sought the origins of their hero, who was only 36 when he fell at Franklin.

In 2001, the area was host to a special gathering of the Georgia

Cleburne Society led by Mauriel Phillips Joslyn, a dedicated Cleburne

scholar and devotee. Their visit was marked by a special community

celebration and parade.

    It was an occasion that gladdened Nora Lynch's heart – covered by

Irish national television, it showed the Cleburne connection in the

best possible light. And it gave her added enthusiasm for the cause

she had taken up.

     So her brother's family continued to welcome occasional

'invasions' at Grange House, which had also become the centre of a number of enterprises including an extensive potato production and sales operation and part of a family coach-hire business.

     She continued to talk at schools, colleges and community meetings

about the Cleburnes and the area where they lived and worked to promote a fitting memorial to Patrick Ronanyne Cleburne in his native place – and in bronze, too.

    'I feel that learning about the Cleburnes has helped me and others to

think differently about the times they lived in, and given us a new

slant on the way people like the landlords and the farmers and the

professional classes of the time contributed to local life,' Nora

told me.

    She has met many of the scholars who have come to the area to study

Cleburne's background ('I got on well with them all except one or two

who thought the Irish were illiterate, and who spent too much of their

time looking for mud cabins').

    'I do what I do for the pure love of it,' she said. 'But I know that

we have hardly begun to tell the story of this area and its

connections in every period of history.'

But at least the telling has begun. And it is fair to say that

without Nora Lynch of Grange House and Ballincollig, that might never

have happened.

 

 

The small private Cleburne museum at Bridepark Cottage is accessible

only by special arrangement, and enquiries must be made locally. 

 

For more on Patrick Celburne's life and participation in the Civil War, see a separate entry to be made in the Biographies section