In May 1891, as the collapse of the Napostá colony was becoming a scandal in the newspapers of the day, a Buenos Aires journal published a brief sentence that today carries enormous historical significance:
“the boys have been located in an orphanage in Calle Cochabamba under the care of a committee of Irish ladies.”
Behind that single line were children from the families who had arrived two years earlier aboard the Dresden. They had lived through the chaos of those first days at the port of Buenos Aires before being sent into the middle of nowhere, carrying little more than hope, to establish the agricultural colony that promised land, prosperity and a new life in Argentina.
Some of these children had lost their parents. Others had been separated from their families by poverty, disease or abandonment itself.
That orphanage in Calle Cochabamba would eventually become the origin of the Fahy School.
More than a century later, the names of some of those boys can still be found in the 1895 National Census, registered in Capilla del Señor alongside Sister Catalina de Cristo Dowling.
On the website of the Asociación de Señoras de San José one can read a brief institutional history concerning the arrival of Irish immigrants in Argentina and the creation of a charitable work intended to assist orphaned children. The text preserves a deeply valuable memory, although it confuses dates, figures and names.
The account states that the ship arrived on 8 February 1889 and refers to it as the “City of Dresden”. Passenger lists and contemporary documentation, however, place the arrival of the Dresden in Buenos Aires on 15 February 1889.
There are also numerical exaggerations and simplifications inevitable in a memory passed down through generations. Yet behind those inaccuracies lies an undeniable historical truth: the reception of the immigrants was chaotic; the Napostá colonisation project ended in disaster; many families were left destitute; households fragmented and dispersed; children were orphaned or abandoned; and it was the Irish and Anglo-Argentine community that organised a concrete network of relief to assist them.
In May 1891, the Liverpool Mercury published extracts from a report by the British Vice-Consul Charles Ansell concerning the Napostá colony. The picture was devastating: failed harvests, insufficient tools, reduced rations, impossible debts and absurd restrictions that prevented the colonists from seeking work elsewhere even when there was nothing left to do in the colony itself.
The report referred to 76 families — 397 people — trapped in a system that had effectively collapsed. Their debts vastly exceeded the value of the land, and the colonists complained that they had been treated unjustly.
At the same time, Argentina itself was entering a severe economic crisis between mid-1889 and 1891, accompanied by political upheaval and revolution, including a change of government, which only worsened the situation already described.
Another article in The Irish Times summarised the problem bluntly:
“The Argentine Government agents induced the poor people to leave home under false promises.”
The agricultural dream promised to hundreds of Irish and English immigrants had turned into hunger, disease and the disintegration of families.
Newspapers of the period also referred to deaths caused by deprivation and illness. Dysentery appears repeatedly in testimonies connected both with Napostá and with the difficult months following disembarkation.
Faced with the collapse of Napostá, a relief network once again began to take shape, driven by the British Consulate, members of the Irish community and various religious and charitable institutions in Buenos Aires.
The reports of 1891 show that this assistance was neither improvised nor marginal. There were public meetings, collections, press campaigns and coordination with the Argentine government.
In one of the most important articles connected with this entire story, The Standard described the transfer of surviving families to new colonies in Santa Fe and Entre Ríos, before adding the detail that would become the foundation stone of the Fahy School:
“the Irish nuns hospitably received some of the little girls gratis, and the boys have been located in an orphanage in Calle Cochabamba under the care of a committee of Irish ladies.”
The article also allows us to identify several of the women involved in organising and financing the institution: Maria M. de Mulhall, Mrs Thomas Duggan, Mrs Hanly, Mrs O’Farrell, Mrs Nelson and Miss Ryan, among others.
The relief network was not exclusively Irish. Members of the English community and Argentine figures connected to the immigration system and charitable institutions also took part.
Contemporary documentation strongly suggests that the Fahy School was born first and foremost as an emergency response to the crisis affecting the immigrants of the Dresden.
On 24 May 1891, The Standard published an article entitled The Boys’ Orphanage, in which the name “Fahy School for Irish Boys” formally appears at Cochabamba 146, Buenos Aires.
The publication even reproduced a letter sent by Maria Mulhall to Juan Alsina, Commissioner General of Immigration, thanking him for an official donation of 4,000 pesos moneda nacional to sustain the orphanage — an amount roughly equivalent today to between USD 60,000 and USD 70,000 when adjusted through long-term historical US inflation.
Regardless of modern equivalents, the donation represented an enormous sum for the time and was sufficient to finance the orphanage for many months.
The article also detailed financial contributions, donors’ names, the opening of a bank account and instructions for requesting places for the boys.
All of this demonstrates that the Fahy did not initially emerge as a traditional school, but rather as an institution created to shelter children affected by a very concrete crisis directly connected with the story of the Dresden and the collapse of the Napostá colony.
Some years later, the establishment would be transferred to Capilla del Señor.
Sister Catalina and the Fahy at Exaltación de la Cruz
Later historical reconstructions often refer to “Mother Catherine Dowlan” as the woman responsible for the school at Capilla del Señor.
Documentation from the Congregación de las Hermanas Pobres Bonaerenses de San José identifies the superior correctly as Sister Catalina de Cristo Dowling, who assumed leadership of the institution in April 1893.
The establishment was conceived as a school for Irish orphans, an educational institution and a refuge for children affected by the migration crisis.
In the Second National Census of 1895, carried out in Exaltación de la Cruz, Sister Catalina de Cristo Dowling appears once again alongside a long list of Irish and English boys living at the institution.
The census list includes dozens of children:
- Mauricio Hickey
- Miguel José Lamb
- Orourk Lamb
- José O’Sullivan
- Timoteo Mac Namarra
- Juan Ward
- Santiago Ward
- Miguel Murphy
- Juan Farrel
- José Farrel
- Eugenio Carney
- Ricardo Kiernan
- James Nally
- Francisco Caffrey
When these names are cross-referenced with the passenger list of the Dresden, remarkable coincidences begin to emerge.
Mauricio Hickey corresponds almost perfectly with Maurice Hickey, a four-year-old boy who travelled aboard the Dresden with Michael and Kate Hickey in 1889.
Timoteo Mac Namarra appears likely to correspond to Timothy McNamara, son of Michael and Bridget McNamara.
The cases of Miguel José Lamb and “Orouk” are even more striking: the Dresden manifest includes a Lamb family travelling with children named Joseph Lamb and Orourk Lamb. The rarity of the name “Orourk” makes this connection extraordinarily compelling.
Possible correspondences also emerge for the Ward brothers, several O’Sullivans and various Murphy and Farrell boys.
Not every case can be documented conclusively. Some surnames appear distorted, hispanicised or badly transcribed. Yet the overall pattern is difficult to ignore: many of the boys at the Fahy appear to have been the children of families who arrived aboard the Dresden.
Mauricio Hickey: A Life After the Dresden
Decades after the 1895 census, a priest named Mauricio Hickey appears carrying out pastoral work in various parts of Buenos Aires Province.
The 1915 Guía Eclesiástica de la República Argentina already lists him as assistant priest in Lomas de Zamora.
Later he appears as parish priest in Salto, promoting educational works, community projects and the creation of a Municipal School and Band in 1929.
He also left a lasting mark in Temperley, where he promoted parish and educational institutions connected with Nuestra Señora de la Piedad and the future Tomás Espora Commercial School.
Chronologically, everything aligns remarkably well with the boy Maurice Hickey from the Dresden and the Mauricio Hickey registered at the Fahy School in Capilla del Señor in 1895.
No definitive document has yet emerged proving that they were the same individual.
Yet the biographical, chronological and onomastic convergence is too strong to dismiss.
A possibly orphaned immigrant child may have gone on to become a priest, educator and builder of community.
And yet his parents do not appear in any known Argentine records. One clue may place them in the United States several years later, connected to the registration of another child. Were they the same people? Did they leave Mauricio in the care of the Fahy before re-emigrating? Perhaps time and further research will tell.
The story of the Fahy School forces us to look at the episode of the Dresden from a different perspective.
Not merely as a failed migration scheme.
But as a story of childhood, displacement and survival.
Behind every surname in the census stood a child who had lived through one of the most traumatic episodes in the history of Irish migration to Argentina.
Many lost their parents.
Others became trapped between languages, institutions and unfamiliar worlds.
And yet some managed to rebuild their lives.
The Fahy was not merely a school.
For many of those children, it was probably the boundary between abandonment and a second chance.
