Author Description

On June 21, 1877, ten Irish-Americans were executed in the mining areas of Pennsylvania. All were accused of being members of a terror-ist group called the Molly Maguires, and all were convicted of planning and carrying out the murder of a number of mining officials. Ten more Irish-Americans were executed in Pennsylvania in the next 18 months on the same charges. One of the men executed on June 21, 1877, was Alexander Campbell, grand-uncle of the author. The Molly Maguire executions generated a great deal of contro-versy in Pennsylvania from the 1870s to the present, with Irish-Americans claiming the Mollies were framed by the mine owners, while some other ethnic groups believe that they were guilty as charged and deserved the punishment they received. The author first heard about the execution of his grand-uncle back in the late 1940s in Dungloe, County Donegal, Ireland, and in the early 1970s, while living in New Jersey, began a fifteen year investiga-tion into the entire Molly Maguire controversy in order to determine if Alexander Campbell was guilty or innocent. A Molly Maguire Story is an account of that investigation.