In 1951, St. Joseph Academy in Mt. Washington became McNicholas High School, named in
honor of Archbishop John Timothy McNicholas. Since that time, the school has been either
McNick or McNicholas to students, parents and alumni.

Archbishop John T. McNicholas was born in 1877 in Treenlaur, Kiltimagh, a small village in
County Mayo in the West of Ireland. He was the youngest of seven sons and one daughter of
Patrick J. and Mary (nee Mullaney) McNicholas.

At the age of four, John T. McNicholas came to the United States with his parents and settled in
Chester, Pennsylvania. In 1894, he entered the Dominican Order at St. Rose Priory near
Springfield, Kentucky. He continued his studies at the Minerve University in Rome, and there, at
the age of 24, he was ordained a priest. In July, 1925, McNicholas was appointed the Archbishop
of Cincinnati where he remained until his death in 1950.

As an ambassador for the Catholic Church in America, Archbishop McNicholas championed
education, racial justice, labor relations and mission work.

In 1998, the Sisters of St. Joseph sold McNicholas High School to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
To better reflect our Catholic heritage, we will begin a gradual process of using "Archbishop
McNicholas High School" in formal school documents.
-
Volume 12 No. 1 - October 1998 Fall Edition
Publication for McNicholas Alumni and Friends
http://www.iac.net/~mcnick/amhs-fall-98.html#anchor214617

From 1816-1818, Congress authorized two Quartermaster Generals, one for the each of
the military Divisions that the United States was then divided.  Colonel Mullany served as
Quartermaster General of the Northern Division.  This was the only time in the history of
the Quartermaster Corps that such an arrangement has existed.

James R. Mullany was born in Ireland in 1780, but no information is available concerning
his family, early life, education, or training. However, the letters he wrote while
Quartermaster General show quite clearly that he was well-educated and a man of
culture. Apparently he emigrated to New York as a young man, though the date of his
arrival is not recorded. It is assumed to be about 1810 since he is listed for the first time
in the New York City directory of that year. Inasmuch as he was residing in the Bowery,
then the most fashionable district of the city, it may be inferred that he was at least
moderately well-to-do.

When war threatened with England, Mullany offered his services to his adopted country,
and emerged from obscurity as a Major in the 13th Infantry Regiment on March 13,
1812. He probably had some military training in Europe, and possibly may have served in
the British army. He transferred on August 26 to the 23rd Infantry Regiment, which he is
believed to have recruited near Canandaigna, New York, and was promoted to Lieutenant
Colonel on March 3, 1813. On November 30 of that year he was promoted to Colonel and
transferred to the 32nd Infantry Regiment. After participating in the many battles and
campaigns of the War of 1812 in northern New York and Canada, he was discharged on
June 15, 1815, when Congress took action to reduce the size of the Army at the end of the
war.

In the spring of the following year Mullany was recalled to service and appointed
Quartermaster General of the Northern Division of the Army. He was then thirty-six
years old. Reporting for duty on May 8, Colonel Mullany assumed the administration of
his office in a difficult period of retrenchment and readjustment following the War of 1812.
His immediate task was to convert the Quartermaster's Department from a war to a
peacetime establishment and to reduce the expenditures of every branch of the office.

Transportation of troops and supplies, the quartering of troops, the opening of roads, and
the construction and repair of bridges and barracks were the major functions of the
Quartermaster General of the Northern Division.  But new problems growing out of the
War of 1812 also demanded his attention. The most pressing of these was the settlement
of claims against the Government for supplies and services furnished to the Army.

Colonel Mullany worked energetically to settle claims in the area around Plattsburg, New
York, and Burlington, Vermont, during the summer of 1816. He hoped to have the
problem of settlement in the New York area so well in hand by October that claims could
be settled at the New York City office "with greater facility & much less expense than by
traveling in Search of Claimants." This goal was apparently achieved, for on November 5
the War Department directed him to make New York City his headquarters for settling
claims.

Mullany was also responsible for taking charge of all public property belonging to the
Quartermaster's Department in the Northern Division. Great quantities of stores had
been deposited throughout the New York area and required removal. This disposal of
surplus stocks, like the settlement of claims, was an aftermath of the War of 1812.

In the long run, frontier supply was of more importance than either of these immediate
problems. Peace had brought the necessity of extending the military frontier in order to
control the Indians, promote the fur trade, and exclude foreign traders and emissaries.
For this purpose the Government decided to build a chain of forts, and Major General
Brown, commanding in the Northern Division, was directed to establish posts from
Mackinac, via Green Bay, to, Prairie du Chien and the upper waters of the Mississippi
River, while still another line of posts was to be erected from Chicago along the Illinois
River to St. Louis. He was to cooperate in this program with General Jackson,
commander in the Southern Division. It was the function of the Quartermaster's
Department to transport the needed troops and stores, but the immense distances
between posts and the transportation difficulties involved made Quartermaster supply
complicated and arduous.

When the Quartermaster Department was reorganized in 1818 with one Quartermaster
General, Mullany's position ceased to exist.  Colonel Mullany and his political allies
actively campaigned to get him appointed to the new post. He was unsuccessful in this
attempt and again faded into obscurity.

After his discharge from the Army, Colonel Mullany continued to live in or near New
York City until his death there on August 15, 1846. When the former Quartermaster
General died, his death was recorded tersely in a three-line obituary which gave no
biographical information nor made any mention of his military service. It stated merely
that he died at the age of sixty-six, after a lingering illness and was taken to Greenwood
Cemetery in Brooklyn for interment. Records at Greenwood show that the body was
transferred a year later to "some unknown place."

U.S Army Quartermaster Center and School
Fort Lee, Virginia
http://www.lee.army.mil/quartermaster/history/qmgenerals/COL_James_Mullany.html

"The lucky ship"
Seven Battle Stars for Action in WW II

(Irony- First Captain-Comdr. Baron J. Mullaney
           To the crew: "Boys, I'm going to have to learn to get along with you".
        To the officers: "And, gentlemen, you will have to learn to get along with me!")

HISTORY OF THE USS MULLANY DD528
author: John McCloud

               Taken From the Far - East Cruise Book of 1963-1964

           The USS Mullany is a 2100-ton destroyer of the Fletcher Class, Built at the
 Bethlehem Steel Company Shipyard at San Francisco, California.  She came to life as a
 man-of-war at commissioning ceremonies of 23 August 1943.  She is the second ship to
 be named after Rear Admiral James Madison Mullany, a fighting Irishman who
 distinguished himself in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War.

           Her wartime assignments covered the Pacific from the Aleutians to Australia and
 back up island-hopping chain of events in the typical destroyer roles of escort, fire
 support, and anti-submarine patrol.

           During the summer and fall of 1943, she operated with the Ninth Fleet in the
 Aleutians; during early and mid-1944, with the Seventh Fleet off New Britain, New
 Guinea, Los Negros, and Manus; during the fall of 1944 at Leyte Gulf operation; and
 back to San Francisco for repairs and alterations.

           During the spring of 1945, MULLANY was on picket line at Iwo Jima and
 Okinawa, when her luck ran out.   On 6 April, which could be called D Day for DD's, the
 MULLANY, along with ten other destroyers in the area, was hit.  A Kamaikaze in
 flames crashed into the port side of the after deck house.  Exploding depth charges
 began ripping away the superstructure while the gun crews knocked down two other
 Kamaikazes.  Fires in the magazines threatened a disasterous ammunition explosion
 and the MULLANY was ordered abandoned.   Assistance from sister ships playing
 water hoses on the fires brought the fires under control and that night the ship's salvage
 party returned aboard.  The salvage crew lighted fires under 2 boilers, got the starboard
 engine running, and steered her by hand to Kerama Rette Anchorage of Okinawa.

           MULLANY, then limped on one shaft back to the homeyard for repairs, and was
 at Pearl Harbor ready to go again when the long awaited cease-fire came.  MULLANY
 was then retired to the Atlantic Reserve Fleet in Charleston, South Carolina.

           Increased naval activity and rotation policy put her back in commission on 8
 March 1951, and she joined Destroyer Squadron 18 for three employments to the
 Mediterranean.  Transiting the Panama Canal on 6 December 1954, this group became
 Destroyer Squadron 21, and a member of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.  Since that date
 MULLANY has participated in seven employments to the Western Pacific.  During
 these WESTPAC employments MULLANY has undertaken some difficult assignments,
 such as escorting Nationalist Chinese convoys under fire from Quemoy, visiting ports
 all over the southern Pacific and Orient to show the flag, and participating in stormy
 patrols in the China Sea and Formosa Straits.

           In April of 1963 MULLANY celebrated the 20th Anniversary of service in San
 Francisco, her birthplace, with a brief ceremony which included officials and shipyard
 workers who helped build and commission MULLANY 20 years previous.

author:  John McCloud

sources:
1) U.S.S. Mullaney DD528
http://www.chemplus.com/mccloud/ussmullany.htm
author-John McCloud

2) USS MULLANY (DD-528)
http://colint.com/enehls/mullany.htm
author:  Erick C. Nehls Jr.

by Joanne Forman

In the 19th century, doing the laundry did not mean tossing the perma-prest into the washer, then the dryer.

It meant, first of all, saving up the ashes from the woodstove and fireplaces and the fat from the meat - which you probably slaughtered yourself - and boiling it up to make soap. It meant cooking up your own starch. It meant drubbing with bran, lemon juice or other remedies to get out stubborn
spots. It meant hauling and heating water (over a fire of wood you had hauled and chopped).

You then scrubbed the clothes on a washboard, rinsed them in clean water you'd hauled and heated, hung them up, took them down, starched them and ironed them with castirons heated on the stove (more hauling and chopping of wood).

And you did this, if you were a 19th century wife, amidst all the other domestic labor, and very likely you were pregnant.

One day in 1827, Hannah Montague of Troy, New York, looked at one of her husband's rumpled white shirts with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Orlando Montague was a prosperous shoe manufacturer, and it was unthinkable that he present himself in anything less than the most snowy linen. Whether she actually did the work herself or had a "hired girl," Mrs. Montague was definitely underwhelmed by having to wash, starch and iron the entire shirt, when only the collars and cuffs really needed it.

Then, in a flash of genius, Hannah Montague invented the detachable collar and cuffs, which lasted clear into the 20th century. Troy, very much an industrial city, became the center of manufacturing the new-fangled but instantly popular things. It was also in Troy that the new-fangled commercial
laundry became very well established, employing mostly women. They could make as much as $18 a week - if they worked 14 hours a day, six days a week. At that, it was perhaps preferable to working 14 hours a day, seven days a week in the home, with no income at all except what they could wheedle from husbands or parents.

Then as now, women worked outside the home not because they were bored or needed pin money but because they had to support themselves and their families. "Fincher's Trade Reviews" might thunder that "we shall spare no effort to check the most unnatural invasion of our firesides, by
which the order of nature is reversed, and women, the loveliest of God's creation, reduced to the menial condition of savage life." Millions of women were so "reduced."

The potato saw to it that America and Troy had plenty of cheap labor. Beginning in 1848, a series of failures of the potato crop in Ireland sent half the population fleeing starvation For girls and women, even the arduous work of the Troy laundries was a step up from being a "hired girl" -- or a
prostitute.

Irish-born Kate Mullaney supported herself, her mother and her two younger sisters by working in the Troy laundries. Along with Esther Keegan and Sarah McQuillan, she demonstrated that women could be at least as militant as men in their struggle for justice.

Mullaney and her working sisters organized the Collarworkers Union in 1865, and they were able to win some pay raises. But the history of the union from 1869 on was not a happy one. In 1869, a strike was answered by a lockout, and Mullaney noted that the bosses "used every means in their power to break the union." (Sound familiar?) Some of the women organized a laundry cooperative,
which struggled along for about a year, but they could not compete with the bosses.

The entire labor movement was decimated in the 1870s and, as is the case with so many women workers and leaders of the period, Kate Mullaney disappears from written records. It was not until 1880 and again in 1886 that the women were able to mount strikes, with only very small gains.

Though central to the laundry industry in its region, Troy, of course, was not the only place it existed. As early as 1866, Mississippi reeled at the "Petition of the Colored Washerwomen," who had the nerve to want $1.50 a day for their backbreaking labor. Of this first known collective action of black working women in American history -- women only a very few years out of chattel slavery -- the Jackson Clarion grumped, "We believe it originated with one or two norther adventurers." Thus was furthered the mythology that the darkies would be happy if only the damn yankees wouldn't stir them up.

Further reading: "Women and the American Labor Movement" by Phillip Foner: "Working Women of Collar City", by Carole Turbin.
-----------------------------------------
Article 2
Catholic woman was labor pioneer

By MAUREEN McGUINNESS
Staff Writer

Working 12- to 14-hour days in oppressive heat, for $2 to $3 a week, Kate Mullaney, an Irish
immigrant, thought working conditions in 19th-century Troy could improve.

So the parishioner of St. Peter's Church in Troy organized the first long-lasting, all-female labor
union when she was 19. Known as the Collar Laundry Union, it was able to secure a 25 percent
wage increase and better working conditions.

For her efforts, Miss Mullaney's Troy home was recently made a National Historic Landmark and
earned a visit from first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

For working women

Miss Mullaney founded the union in February 1864 to protest low wages and the introduction of
the starching machine. The machine was scalding hot to handle and cut the prices for starching in
half, which jeopardized the income of the starchers. The union, originally made up of 200 women,
eventually grew to 500 members.

According to "Working Women of the Collar City: Gender, Class and Community in Troy, New
York, from 1864-1886," by Carole Turbin (University of Illinois Press), "Catholicism played a
complex and significant role in the consciousness and labor activism of Irish working class women
and men."

Dr. Turbin states that the clergy did not approve of labor organizations during the labor struggles of
the 1860s through 1880s. However the Catholic view of unionism did not deter Irish working class
women from labor activism. Rather, they viewed their activities in the union as separate from their
religious beliefs.

Religion's role

One of the reasons the collar laundresses of Troy were able to unionize was because of their ethnic
heritage in which Catholicism played a role.

According to Dr. Turbin, collar workers lived in a few working class neighborhoods. Jobs were
secured through ethnic networks. While the women who sewed the collars were predominately
Protestant, the collar laundresses were Irish Catholics.

These Catholic immigrants had experienced class antagonism in their homeland, states Dr. Turbin,
and still held those beliefs when they came to America. The women identified more with the
working class males of their culture than with working women of other ethnic backgrounds. This
gave them insight into the potential of union activity since the Irish men were successfully involved in
the labor movement.

Working together

According to the application to make the Mullaney house a National Historic Site, the Collar
Laundry Union succeeded where individual women could not.

"Before the Civil War, a week's wages could only buy a pair of shoes," the application states.
"When they asked for higher wages, they were not listened to. With the union, when they struck for
a 25 percent increase, the laundry owners gave the laundresses what they wanted in less than a
week after they left their shops."

Work in the collar laundries was complicated. Rather than simply throwing the collars in a washing
machine and then a dryer, like today, the newly manufactured collars went through an 11-step
washing process. The collars had to be washed, bleached, washed again, boiled, rubbed and
rinsed, blued, rolled, starched, dried and ironed.

Recognition

The success of the Collar Laundry Union led to Miss Mullaney's appointment as the assistant
secretary of the National Labor Union. NLU president William H. Sylvis said of her at the National
Labor Union Congress in 1868: "We now have a recognized officer from the female side of the
house -- one of the smartest and most energetic women in America; and from the great work which
she has already done, I think it not unlikely that we may in the future have delegates representing
300,000 working women."

The Collar Laundry Union held three successful strikes in 1864, 1868 and 1869. A fourth in 1869
was unsuccessful. According to the National Historic Site application, that strike for higher wages
was unsuccessful because the collar manufacturers united with the laundry owners to kill the union.

The collar makers refused to send collars and cuffs to any laundry that employed union ironers. In
exchange, the manufacturers helped the laundry owners find and train a non-union workforce. The
strike ended when the laundresses, with the exception of the union leaders, went back to work
without the wage increase.

The union leaders then started a cooperative collar and cuff factory, which lasted until 1870 or
possibly 1872.

Who was she?

Miss Mullaney worked to support her family, which consisted of her widowed mother, an older
sister, and possibly two younger sisters and a brother.

Census data state that there were three younger children living in the house that were siblings of
Miss Mullaney. However, these children are not mentioned in her will and are not part of the family
burial plot. It is possible they were cousins or boarders that were mistaken for family members by
census takers.

Miss Mullaney eventually married John Fogarty. She died in 1906 and is buried in St. Peter's
Cemetery.

"The Evangelist Online"
http://www.global2000.net/evangelist/
    Official Publication of
the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, New York