Long time musicians in the area have finally gotten together to bring Pub Rock to the MidWest. Taking Celtic music and more to the world of a pint and a good time Connacht Town is the place to be.
The Birth of Westport as we know it today.
During the mid-1800’s, the towns of Westport and Independence thrived as primary points of departure for travelers on Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, as well as centers of commerce for fur trappers and Native Americans. The invention of the steamboat made it possible to ship people and goods up the Missouri River to these towns, where once they had only been reached by arduous overland travel. A convenient natural stone wharf on which to unload a steamer was soon discovered near where the Kaw River flows into the Missouri. However, the difficulty with this “shortcut†was that the journey from the river’s edge to Westport was straight up a rocky incline several hundred feet high.
A small settlement known as Westport Landing sprouted up around the wharf, but in order for its growth to continue, something had to be done about the roads leading inland. Father Bernard Donnelly, one of the area’s first Catholic priests, was experienced in both civil engineering and the stone cutting trade. Born in the town of Kilnacreva in County Cavan, located in the north of Ireland, Father Donnelly had acquired an education and worked at various capacities in the British shipyards of Liverpool before being called to the priesthood.
Donnelly soon saw that his knowledge of quarrying and brick-making would be as useful to his parish as his theological training. To attract the manpower necessary for the task of cutting roads of a reasonable grade into the bluffs at the river’s edge, he advertised for laborers in newspapers and magazines popular among Irish immigrants in the eastern United States. In addition, Donnelly assisted some 300 workers from the northwest Irish province of Connacht in settling an area of boarding houses near 6th and Broadway, which became known as “Connacht-town.†These individuals made their living doing the backbreaking work of digging with picks, drills and other tools through the thick stone of the bluffs.
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