Girardville: Molly Maguires and the Pardoned King

Girardville is named for Stephen Girard, the Philadelphia sea captain turned financier who purchased vast coal lands in Schuylkill County before his death in eighteen thirty-one. The town built on his estate became one of the most heavily Irish-Catholic communities in the anthracite region, and its population peaked at nearly five thousand in nineteen thirty.

In the eighteen sixties and seventies, Irish miners organized in secret against brutal conditions in the mines. The group became known as the Molly Maguires. John Black Jack Kehoe ran the Hibernian House saloon in Girardville. He was convicted of murder and hanged in eighteen seventy-eight.

A century later, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp issued Kehoe a posthumous pardon in nineteen seventy-nine, after a state review, praising the Mollies as martyrs to the cause of labor.