Thomas G. Connor, son of another Charles Connor, who was born at Philadelphia in 1786, is buried in Mount Vernon Cemetery, Philadelphia. His wife’s name was Martha Fitzgerald.
Morgan Connor, or O’Connor, was one of the early settlers in Pennsylvania. In the Pennsylvania Archives, Vol. X, he is referred to as “among the first to enter the service of his country as lieutenant in Captain George Nagle’s company, in Colonel Thompson’s regiment.” After the campaign of 1775–’76 he was ordered south as a brigade major for Gen. John Armstrong. He served with credit down to the winter of 1779, and on his return in that year he became lieutenant-colonel of Hartley’s regiment and subsequently colonel of the Eleventh Regiment. He was lost at sea in 1780, on a voyage to the West Indies. According to Volume I, No. 47, Register of Wills Office, Philadelphia, letters of administration on O’Connor’s estate were granted to Dennis McCarthy, on September 8, 1780, when McCarthy, Bryan O’Hara and Patrick Byrne gave a bond in the sum of £3,000.
In a pamphlet issued by Benjamin Franklin in 1744, entitled, Plain Talk, or Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania, appears a letter written in that year by Governor Morris of New Jersey, to Governor Clinton of New York, in which he said: “There are here a Popish chapel and numbers of Irish and Germans that are Papists, and I am told that should the French land 1,500 or 2,000 men, they would in that province soon get ten or twelve thousands together, which would in that case be not a little dangerous to these and neighboring colonies.”
Edward McGuire, who belonged to the staff of General McGuire in Austria, came to Philadelphia in 1751, with wines, in which he had invested his patrimony. He was the son of Constantine McGuire and Julia MacEllengot of the County of Kerry. He established himself in business in Philadelphia, but subsequently went to Alexandria, Va., thence to Winchester in 1753, where he built a hotel and gave the ground for and built the Catholic Church at Winchester in 1790. He died in 1806. His descendants were lawyers, doctors and ministers, some of whom married into the best old Virginia families.
Acrelius, in his History of New Sweden (as Pennsylvania was sometimes called prior to the English settlement), writing of 1758, said: “Forty years back our people scarcely knew what a school was. In the later times there have come over from Ireland some Presbyterians and some Roman Catholics, who commenced with school keeping, but as soon as they saw better openings they gave that up.”
Among the early Philadelphia schoolmasters, the following advertised in the Mercury: Charles Phipps, “from Dublin,” in 1729, and James Conway, on July 17, 1729. George Brownwell also advertised his school in the same year. The schoolroom later became a dancing academy, and was opened by “Theobald Hacket, dancing master, lately come from England and Ireland.” Alexander Butler advertised his school on November 12, 1741. On June 21, 1790, John Reilly opened a school at Columbia, and in the following year his scholars were taken by Francis Dunlevy, who taught the higher branches. This was continued until 1793, when Reilly gave the entire school to Dunlevy and opened another school at Mill Creek. It is stated in the Magazine of Western History for February, 1888, that this was the first school in the American settlements of the Ohio.
Many of these Irish schoolmasters are mentioned in Wickersham’s History of Education in Pennsylvania.
An Irish schoolmaster taught school at Chester in 1741. Rev. Mr. Backhouse of that borough, wrote the London Society for Propagation of the Gospel, that the Quakers had “set up another schoolmaster, one of their own sort truly, but a native Irish bigoted Papist, in opposition to one Charles Fortesque.” The name of this Irish schoolmaster is not mentioned.
John Conly taught “an advanced school” at Byberry, Philadelphia County, before the Revolutionary War.
John Downey, who was among the first settlers of Harrisburg, according to Wickersham, taught school at Harrisburg for a number of years. He was also a justice of the peace, town clerk and member of the Assembly. In 1796, he presented Governor Mifflin a plan for a state system of education, “in which he discussed the whole subject of education, showing a wonderful sense of its importance in a government like ours and a clear conception of the nature of the system necessary to make it general.”