Day: March 17, 2022

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Lost in translation in Galway, New York | IrishCentral.com

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Lost in translation in Galway, New York | IrishCentral.com

The town of Galway is located in Saratoga County in upstate New York and was established in 1792. The town contains a small village also named Galway, similar to how the county Galway’s largest city shares its name. The history of the town’s name travels slightly farther over the Atlantic, however, to our neighbors in Galloway, Scotland. The New York town was originally christened New Galloway after its Scottish counterpart and it is thought that this name was used as early as 1785.

Unfortunately, due to a misspelling when the town was incorporated (or a misinterpretation as can so often happen with place names), Galloway was to become Galway. Despite the name being Hibernicized with this loss of letters, the pronunciation stays true to the original, making it still sound dissimilar to the Irish version.

Upside-Down Traffic Signal – Syracuse, New York – Atlas Obscura

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Upside-Down Traffic Signal – Syracuse, New York – Atlas Obscura

Old rivalries often followed immigrants coming to America but one of the strangest examples of this may be Syracuse’s Upside-Down Traffic Signal, which was so regularly vandalized as a statement about Irish-British relations that it was permanently reversed.

Irish immigrants made up the majority of the labor team that helped install the Erie Canal across Upstate NY. When the job was finished, and the workers sought a more permanent way of life, Syracuse became a natural choice because of its central location and access to the canal itself. Because so many of those families hailed from the County Tipperary in Ireland, their new settlement in Syracuse became commonly known as Tipperary Hill, which was later made official.