Irish American Heritage at the William Floyd Estate

For over nearly a century, the Floyd family relied on women of Irish descent such as Kate Kane, Ellen Craven, Mary Conboy, and Mary Connolly, to clean their homes, cook their meals, care for their young children, provide companionship, and even assist with the care of pets and livestock.

Ellen Craven (c.1862-1937) stands out among these women for her long and dedicated service to the Floyd family. Ellen came to Floyds as a chambermaid in 1891, when she was about 28 or 29 years old. Over the next 46 years, Ellen lived with and served the family as a caretaker of children, lady's maid, waitress, laundress, seamstress, cook, and chaperone. When she passed in August 1937, her wake was held in the main hall of the Old Mastic home and she was buried in the Floyd family cemetery.

Ellen was remembered fondly by one of her charges, Rosalie Delafield Floyd, as Ellen "of the comely, ruddy countenance, infectious smile, Malaprop tongue, and heart of gold." Rosalie’s sister Cornelia Floyd Nichols remembered “In spite of the hard work demanded of a chambermaid at Mastic there was no long procession of damsels turning up their noses at the position. Our rosy-cheeked Ellen accomplished it with goodwill and laughter for eight years before the blessing of a new wing with bathroom came to lighten her labor. Then she could heartily exclaim with Henley, “Oh! The music of running water!”

Ellen was part of a shift in the labor force in the mid to late 19^th century from Black to immigrant labor resulting from a confluence of the Black migration and Irish immigration. Over the course of the mid to late 19^th century, newly manumitted Blacks migrated from the South to the North and from rural to urban centers. Black women took on positions of domestic service, but typically in live-out situations as day laborers and contract workers. The mid to late 19^th century also saw an influx of Irish immigrants who came to the United States to escape the devastation of the potato famine in Ireland, 1845-1852, known as An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger). Between 1846 and 1854, nearly 800,000 Irish immigrants entered the Port of New York .New Immigrants often faced discrimination for their heritage, their religion, and their immigrant status. More than any other immigrant group, Irish women came to the United States single and independent of any family. They found work where they could, often as live-in domestic servants in wealthy white households. And, by 1900, 60.5% of wage-earning Irish-born women were employed as servants.

Like other landed gentry on Long Island, the Floyd family began hiring Irish immigrant women as domestics at this time. Our earliest documentation comes through a letter dated February 24, 1848 by Sarah Kirkland Floyd, wife of John Gelston Floyd, Sr., in which she remarks upon her satisfaction with her “Irish woman.” More Irish women were hired as domestics in 1848 and 1856, and in 1854 family lore tells of two Irish immigrant women kept on as domestics following the wreck of the “Franklin” which was carrying both passengers and a cargo of silk and other dry goods.

Ellen Craven comes into the story a bit later as the child of immigrants. Born in New York to immigrant parents, Ellen saw her options largely limited to domestic service or mill work. As a live-in domestic servant in the Floyd household at Old Mastic, she likely occupied the rooms above the kitchen, in spaces shared with other single female domestics. Their days would have been dictated by the family, awake before the family and on call even after the family went to their beds. If the terms of their employment followed common practice, they would have had little personal time with just one afternoon or evening off a week and one day (usually Sunday) off every two weeks. It was a rigorous schedule that often resulted in the eventual movement of women from domestic service to waitressing, fruit-picking, cannery work, and labor in shoe, textile, and clothing factories and later to retail sales. That Ellen and others remained with the Floyd family for so many years is a testament to the family’s efforts to cultivate a “relationship of mutual respect and affection” with their domestic servants.

Our research on this topic is really just beginning. We are excited to bring the story of Ellen Craven and, hopefully soon, others to light. These women supported the Floyd family and enabled them to live a life of privilege. We remember them for their resiliency and compassion as inspirations for generations to come.

Family recollections to illustrate experience of domestics:

[In Robinson’s barn] “Maggie, our well-loved nurse [probably Mary Connolly or Mary Conboy], fresh from Ireland, perched on a little T-shaped stool, milking away as if she had just stepped our of a Caldecott picture book.” (Cornelia Floyd Nichols, Letters to my great-great-granddaughter, unpublished manuscript, pg. 12)

“The water supply of the house consisted of a pump some twenty feet from the kitchen door, (supplemented by a water barrel at the roof’s edge) and another, very laborious to work, upstairs in a dark closet of the wing known as the Fo’castle. The Saturday night bath was no joke. How many mile good women must have trudged carrying hot water for the round tin tubs from the kitchen up and down steps, through doorways and passages to the Parlor Bedroom, the Garden Room, the Den, the Green Room, the Blue Room and the Big Bedroom. My own absolutions took place nearer to the pump in one of a pair of tiny rooms opening off of Mother’s.” (Cornelia Floyd Nichols, Letters to my great-great-granddaughter, unpublished manuscript, pg. 12)

[Recalling her youth at Old Mastic, 1880s-90s] “The Sabbath dragged along. ‘In it thou shalt do no manner of work, thou nor thy son nor thy daughter, they manservant nor thy maidservant, ***nor the stranger that is within thy gates.’ They did not stick very closely to the part about man and maidservants when you consider the enormous dinner with an icecream freezer turned by hand, and the excellent summer of vegetable salad, hand-whipped mayonnaise, hot muffins and cocoa; but there were never any complaints from the kitchen so there must have been something wrong with the commandment.” (Cornelia Floyd Nichols, Letters to my great-great-granddaughter, unpublished manuscript, pg. 34)