A S TUTTERING FOUND A TION TRIBUTE JOHN MACKAY THE IRISH-AMERICAN BONANZA KING


John Mackay ranks as the richest Irishman ever in history, as the $1 billion he possessed at the time of his death in 1902 is the equivalent of $80 billion today. In a December 7, 2021 article in Irish Central, Niall O’Dowd wrote, “What are the odds that


the richest ever Irishman would be born in a Dublin one-room hovel with a pig, his parents, and a sister for company?” Well, what are the odds that the richest Irish person


ever and one of the richest persons in the world during his time was a person who stuttered?


Born in Dublin in 1831 into a working-class poor family, a young John Mackay immigrated to New York with his family in 1840, settling in the infamous Five Points slum in Manhattan. The better fortune the family sought in America was quickly dashed as Mackay’s father died, forcing the youngster to quit school at age eleven to go to work to support his mother and sister. He hawked newspapers such as the New York Herald in Manhattan, and later was an apprentice in a shipyard. Those years presented a struggle to maintain housing and food for his mother, his sister and himself.


Intrigued and enticed by the news of the 1848 California gold rush, he waited until his sister was old enough to work and then in 1851 the 19 year-old made his way across the country to California. He mined for seven years without any success at all, but did not let the often grueling physical labor discourage him. The article, “The Mining Millionaire Americans Couldn’t Help But Love” in the June 2018 issue of Smithsonian magazine put forth, “He didn’t have a nickel to his name when he arrived on what soon became known as the Comstock Lode in what was then the west Utah Territory (present day Nevada) so he did what he’d always done – he pushed up his sleeves and went to work. He started as a common hand in somebody else’s mine at $4 per day.”


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