BIO: Kate Murphy was just one of thousands of visitors to attend the 1897 Irish Fair at the Grand Central Palace in Manhattan. For several weeks people from all over the metropolitan region had come to see the handsome displays that the Irish societies had assembled in an attempt to present in capsule form something of Ireland's rich cultural heritage. One exhibit in particular, though, seemed to attract most of the attention. Irish soil, directly imported from the old country, had been laid out in sections, one for each of Ireland's 32 counties, to allow fairgoers to symbolically "set foot" in Ireland. In an age when relatively few Irish immigrants ever journeyed home again to see the old country, stepping on even a small piece of Ireland took on an almost mystical significance for many, particularly the elderly Irish immigrants who anxiously sought out the counties of their birth. Eighty-year-old Kate Murphy, overcome by the emotion of the experience of stepping once again upon the ground of her native County Fermanagh, knelt down in prayer, oblivious to the crowds and the newspaper reports around her. The flash of photographers' equipment surprised and startled this "simple-hearted creature" to such an extent that the light stunned her into awestruck silence as if it had been some sort of sign from heaven. Only reluctantly did she leave the exhibit, clinging all the time to the fence surrounding it, and looking back as if bidding a long farewell. A lingering homesickness was something that many immigrants would carry with them all their lives, but it was rarely so publicly and poignantly expressed as in the case of Kate Murphy. The Irish societies' exhibits at the Irish Fair were calculated to take a nostalgic look back at the Ireland the immigrants had left behind, and like their memories, it was a curious mixture of real and fanciful notions. But immigration in the 19th century was cruel in its finality, and faced with little chance of ever returning to Ireland, the Irish in America created the organizations that would try to create, in a small way, a surrogate Ireland in America. -- Excerpt, John T. Ridge, "The Irish in America," M. Coffey & T. Golway