The Donnelly Masacre

      An unfortunate chapter in the town of Biddulph was the massacre of the Black Donnelly’s – black meaning Irish Catholics that traded and fraternized with Irish Protestants as well as the Catholics.  In John Caswell’s memoir he said Biddulph Township, of which Granton was the core, had the reputation of being “a township of tyranny and murder”.

     Our Caswells had already moved lock, stock and barrel from Biddulph, to Palmerston by the time of the massacre, but there was a Joseph Caswell still living outside Granton.  One map shows him with one parcel; a later map has his name on two parcels.  Not sure how or if he was related to our Caswells, although I suspect he is.  A couple of family sources have mentioned that 2 or 3 cousins came to Canada with Andrew and Mary Jane (some were Wallis’s).  Joseph may have been a cousin or a nephew.  

     Joseph “moved to a farm claimed by one of the Donnelly boys."  After a series of misfortunes-reaper burned, horses slashed to death, etc. which everyone attributed to the enmity of the Donnelley’s, he left the township "a ruined man”. The Donnelley’s were in turn “massacred by a lynch mob of their fellow parishioners in the early morning of February 4^th in 1880....Although no one was ever convicted, the vigilantes were well known and they were all Catholics and neighbours of the murdered family’’.