Irish colonists, and “at a later date they were so largely reinforced by settlers from Ireland that the Celtic part of the population at this day is not far short of equality in numbers with the Saxon portion”—­(Hatton and Harvey, History of Newfoundland, page 32).  Pedley attributes the large proportion of Irishmen and the influence of the Catholics in Newfoundland to Lord Falkland’s company, and Prowse, in his History (pp. 200-201), refers to “the large number of Irishmen” in that colony who fled from Waterford and Cork “during the troubled times” which preceded the Williamite war (1688).  Many of these in after years are known to have settled in New England.

But it was to Maryland and Pennsylvania that the greatest flow of Irish immigration directed its course.  In the celebrated “Account of the Voyage to Maryland,” written in the year 1634 by Mutius Vitellestis, the general of the Jesuit Order, it is related that when the Arke and the Dove arrived in the West Indies in that year, they found “the island of Montserrat inhabited by a colony of Irishmen who had been banished from Virginia on account of their professing the Catholic faith.”  It is known also that there were many families in Ireland of substance and good social standing who, at their own expense, took venture in the enterprise of Lord Baltimore and afterwards in that of William Penn, and who applied for and received grants of land, which, as the deeds on record show, were afterwards divided into farms bought and settled by O’Briens, McCarthys, O’Connors, and many others of the ancient Gaelic race, the descendants of those heroic men whose passion for liberty, while causing their ruin, inspired and impelled their sons to follow westward “the star of empire.”

After the first English colonies in Maryland were founded, we find in all the proclamations concerning these settlements by the proprietary government, that they were limited to “persons of British or Irish descent.”  The religious liberty established in Maryland was the magnet which attracted Irish Catholics to that Province, and so they came in large numbers in search of peace and comfort and freedom from the turmoil produced by religious animosities in their native land.  The major part of this Irish immigration seems to have come in through the ports of Philadelphia and Charleston and a portion through Chesapeake Bay, whence they passed on to Pennsylvania and the southern colonies.

The “Certificates of Land Grants” in Maryland show that it was customary for those Irish colonists to name their lands after places in their native country, and I find that there is hardly a town or city in the old Gaelic strongholds in Ireland that is not represented in the nomenclature of the early Maryland grants.  One entire section of the Province, named the “County of New Ireland” by proclamation of Lord Baltimore in the year 1684, was occupied wholly by Irish families.  This section is now embraced in Cecil and Harford Counties.