American wood used for West Cork mining huts to make journey home after hundreds of years
The original wood from kit houses brought over from America to house miners in Allihies has been recycled into a model of the one of the original houses. Picture: David Dudley
It brings recycling to a new ‘historic’ level — parts of ‘kit houses’ which were brought over from the US to accommodate miners in West Cork nearly 150 years ago will soon be back in their rightful place.
Meanwhile, more of the wood is being repurposed as a special gift to a city in the US which has vital mining and heritage links with the same West Cork village.
Such kit homes were very rare in Ireland, and when mining finished in the village of Allihies in the late 1800s, the wood from them was auctioned off and was recycled to build houses.
It is said that the Woods family purchased the timber and went on to build what was to become the first timber bungalow in the West Cork region, in Skibbereen.
A number of years later, the Roycroft family bought the same building and lived there for many years.
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Three years ago, members of that family made contact with the Allihies Copper Mine Museum to see if it would like to have some of the original timber back in Allihies in order to use it for something on the museum site, as they were about to dismantle the structure in Skibbereen.
Museum chairman Tadhg O’Sullivan said they jumped at the chance.
“We decided on a model of the original huts using the original timber,” he said.
"We asked the Allihies Men’s Shed to take on the project, and they have now completed the model, which will be unveiled on Saturday, April 5."
The model comes with a QR code which will allow visitors to key it into their mobile homes and read all about the history of the huts.
In the meantime, other wood is being fashioned into a ‘friendship table’ by the local Men’s Shed.
Chairman David Dudley said it will be presented to City Hall in Butte, Montana, next month by a delegation from Allihies which is travelling to the US town to further cement twinning arrangements between the two areas.
Mr O’Sullivan said the kit houses were brought into Allihies for ‘The Mountain Mine’ miners throughout the 1860s to the early 1880s.
“They were needed to house the workers during the boom years for copper mining here, especially in the 1860s,” he said.
The mines finally closed down almost two decades later. At their peak, they employed more than 1,500 people.
Many of them emigrated from Allihies to Butte in order to mine copper and silver there. As a result, a huge number of Butte citizens are descended from the Irish miners.
