Resent this note, don't think it went through to the list successfully: Per "The Irish In America," Coffee & Golway, the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania got their name from a secret society active in Ireland just before the Famine. One story is that Molly Maguire was an old woman threatened with eviction from her cottage. In PA, a powerful trade union movement, the Workingmen's Benevolent Assoc. (WBA), became the largest union in the nation. In a series of strikes in the 1860s and early 1870s, the unions won important victories, not the least of which was recognition by the employers and the linking of wages to the price of coal. But in the 1870s it met its opponent in the person of Franklin B. Gowen. President of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Co., Gowen was determined to destroy all obstacles in his way, including small-scale entrepreneurs, trade unionists and the Molly Maguires. Half the leaders of the union were Irish-born. The Mollys, composed of Irishmen and favoring tactics of violence acted as a shadow organization. To gather! information against the Mollys, Gowen hired America's foremost private detective, Allan Pinkerton. At the end of 1874, Gowen declared war on the trade union, inaugurating the famous "Long Strike," which would culminate in the union's defeat and collapse in June 1875. Between mid-June and early September, the Mollys assassinated a policeman, a justice of the peace, a miner, two mine foremen, and a mine superintendent. Two year later, the Molly Maguires were brought to trial. More than fifty men, women and children were indicted. The star prosecutor at the great showcase trials in Pottsville (PA) was none other than Franklin B. Gowen. Twenty Molly Maguires were hanged in all, ten of them on a single day, June 21, 1877, know to the people of the anthracite region as "Black Thursday." A Pinkerton's National Detective Agency List of Fugitive Mollie Maguires (1879) named those connected with the agency as Clarence A Seward, Attn., 29 Nassau St. NY, Allan Pinkerton (principal) and F. Warner, Chicago, R. J. Linden, Phila., and Robert A. Pinkerton, NY. The list of fugitives and their descriptions went out: William Love; Thomas Hurley; Michael Doyle; James ("Friday") O'Donnell, James McAllister, John ("Humpty" Flynn); Jerry Kane, Frank Keenan, William Gavin, John Reagan, Thomas O'Neill, and Patrick B. ("Pug Nose Pat" Gallagher, along with their descriptions. Note - I believe Allan Pinkerton had emigrated to the USA from Scotland. I posted a note about him awhile back at Rootsweb Message Boards, also posted a note with the descriptions of the fugitive Mollies listed above, if anyone is interested. Jean