Galway’s role in the US exhibition on cost of war

Lifestyle – A manuscript from 1775, detailing the Headford lands of the St George family, travels to Philadelphia next month on loan from Galway County Council’s archive collection. Archivist Patria McWalter and members of the Headford Lace Project tell JUDY MURPHY about this family’s legacy.

An 18th Century manuscript, bought by Galway County Council in 1963 for £6, which is normally housed in the Council archives at Island House behind Galway Cathedral, has been carefully packed up this week, under the watchful eye of Council Archivist, Patria McWalter.

It’s heading to America, where it will join artefacts from Ireland, Europe, Australia and the US for a major historic exhibition, opening in September, entitled Cost of a Revolution: The Life and Death of an Irish Soldier.

The manuscript going on loan is the 1775 Survey of the St George Headford Estate. It gives a written account of some 4,000 acres of land in Headford that was owned and leased by the St George family to local tenants.

The manuscript includes a rent-roll and description of the farms as well as watercolour maps of each holding, with different colours illustrating the type of land – arable or bog.

The 244-year-old book is being lent to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, where it will form part of a temporary exhibition on the life and death of Anglo-Irish landlord Richard St George Mansergh St George (1757-1798).

The curators of the Philadelphia exhibition have gathered material from all over the world on this member of Ireland’s ruling Anglo-Irish class, who owned land in Cork, Tipperary and Kilkenny as well as in Galway, as Patria explains.

In 1776, Mansergh St George joined the British Army and went to America to fight against the American revolutionaries who were seeking freedom from English rule.

In 1777, in the Battle of Germanstown, during a campaign to capture Philadelphia, Mansergh St George was shot in the head and badly wounded. He survived, but needed an operation on his skull – in the days before anaesthetics.  He subsequently wore a black silk scarf to cover the wound.

He returned to Ireland and then travelled to Italy in the 1780s as part of his recovery. In Italy he met artist Xavier della Gatta and told him about the Battle of Germantown and the Battle of Paoli, which he’d also fought in.

Della Gatta painted both and his dramatic painting of the Battle of Germantown featured Mansergh St George being carried off the battlefield. These portraits are now owned by the Museum in Philadelphia and will feature in the exhibition.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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