By Nancy Huddleston, Editor

Although members of the Kearney family have scattered to different parts of the state and country since John and Rose settled here over 150 years ago, when their descendants come together to visit, the stories come flooding back.

Everyone can recount how the Kearney family came to Minnesota from Canada sometime between 1853 and 1856. The proof can be found in three land patents with President James Buchanan’s name on them and dated in the spring of 1857. Some of that land was along the Minnesota River in present-day Savage, where the family would grow hay and transport it to St. Paul to sell.

There’s also the story about how the Kearney family had a hand in naming the town, which was known as Hamilton at the time Minnesota joined the Union in 1858. As the story goes, the Kearneys came to Canada from Ireland and grew up close to Hamilton, Ontario. As well, Hamilton was a common Irish surname and can be found as John’s middle name on his headstone and in some printed references to him.

The Grand Excursion of 1854 is likely what caught the attention of John Kearney to come here, according to Chris McHugh, a member of the Kearney clan who calls himself an “amateur historian.” The excursion was put together to publicize settlement opportunities in Minnesota that included a combination train/steam board ride to St. Paul,” McHugh said.

Through his research with other Kearney family members, McHugh says the Kearneys likely followed a route publicized about the Great Excursion from Canada, through Detroit and onto Minnesota. “The only certainty of the trip was that they stopped in Detroit to have their only surviving photos taken,” he said.

At the time, John Kearney was in his 50s and married to his second wife, Rose Ann McKeown Kearney. He’d had four children by his first wife (whose name is unknown): Edward, Rose Anne, James and John – all born in the 1830s. John and Rose had five more children: Peter, Sarah, George, Mary, Andrew and Thomas, all born in Canada before the move to Minnesota.

Rose died at the age of 49 in 1860 and was buried in St. Paul and John died three years later at the age of 67. After the estate was settled in 1877, the Kearney farm along the Minnesota River was one of several eventually sold to M.W. Savage to build his famed “Taj Mahal” stables to house his beloved pacer, Dan Patch.

Through the years the Kearney family roots reached far and wide. The family is now in its eighth generation and family names in the area that trace their ancestry to John and Rose Kearney include: Byrne, Boyland, McCoy, Sheridan, Fusco, Beren, Widmer, Kennedy, Cuddigan, Phillips and Ramirez.

Many firsts came with being one of the first settlers in the area. John’s son, John Jr. and his wife Kate gave birth in 1854 to the first child of settlers. The first meeting of the township of Burnsville was held in the Kearney home, as was the election of 1860 when Abraham Lincoln became president.

Tragedy also shadowed the family history, as son Edward died in the area’s first murder that centered on a land dispute near the river.

Family tree branches

Family research shows that son Peter Kearney established the Kearney family that continues to work and live in Savage to this day. Daughter Sarah married Thomas Byrne, the family Burnsville is named after, while daughter Mary married Civil War soldier Andrew Welch and moved to DeGraff. Daughter Rose Anne married Patrick Boylan and stayed in the area and son George served in the Civil War and died. Son James married Jenette and they moved to Oklahoma and son Thomas moved to Oregon.

Son Andrew, McHugh’s great-great grandfather, walked to Stillwater at the age of 18 in 1868, became a blacksmith and established a branch of the family that still lives there.

In fact, the two branches of the Kearney family didn’t have much contact with each other until the 1970s when McHugh was working on a senior project in high school to research family genealogy.

Tom Kearney remembers his dad Gene got a call from McHugh asking for information. Before that, Gene had told the children that they had relatives all over, but they really only had contact with other members of Peter’s family, most of whom lived south of the river. “We knew Andrew had moved to Stillwater, but we’d had no contact with them,” he said.

After he graduated high school, McHugh continued to spend time researching the family history as a hobby, but then set it aside after college.

“Then Gretchen called,” McHugh said of cousin Gretchen Desautels of California. She researched and wrote a book, “Our Kearney History,” which got McHugh going again.

The two branches of the Kearney family continued to correspond and that increased about nine years ago when Terry Kearney (Gene’s oldest son) began calling around seeking family photos to scan into a data base.

Terry’s mother, Mary Pat, had a stroke and had been the family’s historian in terms of family photos and information. Terry estimates his mother had over 30 photo albums and he wanted to continue that legacy by working with her to continue documenting the family history.

“She had the knowledge and I had the skill of scanning photos, so we began putting them together as something we could do together,” he said.

Terry would travel back home on vacation with a photo scanner in hand. He and Mary Pat would visit family members in their homes and while everyone visited, Terry scanned photos. Afterward, he and his mother would get together to verify names and dates. And as the photo collection grew, he also started posted them online and invited other Kearneys to help identify family members. (Web site is http://familyfoto.no-ip.org.)

“I really wasn’t interested in the family history until I started on this project with my mom,” Terry said. “But doing it gives you an appreciation of the people who have come before you.”

Kearney store

When the name “Kearney” is mentioned around town, most people recall it fondly due to the grocery store on what is now 124th Street in downtown Savage.

Eugene and Mary Pat Kearney opened the store in an old Camp Savage building in 1945 or 1946 and the store faced what is now Ottawa Avenue. The Kearneys had four children: Terry, Mary Kay, Peggy and Tom.

Peggy Kearney Ramirez said the store and the family home were actually two Camp Savage buildings joined at the center. When Terry and Mary Kay were children and shortly after Peggy was born, the Kearneys moved into a newly-built story-and-a-half home at the opposite end of the block from the grocery store.

The land where the store sat is known on old plat maps as Block 55 and was one of the original ones purchased by John Kearney. In fact, its and the only land he bought that continues to be owned by his descendants, according to Tom Kearney.

Shortly after the family moved to the new house, the grocery store was remodeled and expanded. But then tragedy struck when the store burned down around 1961. While the new store was being built, the family ran the business out of some extra room on the back of Allen’s Garage. Shortly after the new grocery store was rebuilt, a variety store was added. Over the years, business development continued between the grocery store and the variety store. At one time, the family home was moved to make way for more business development on the block. It still sits next to the Credit River along Palmer Avenue.

Over the years, the shopping center housed not only the grocery and variety stores, but also the post office, a drug store and a hardware store. To this day, the strip mall is still full and is home to a karate school, travel agency, Lavonne Music, Fendler Patterson construction and a Laundromat, among others.

When she thinks back to the early days of the store, Mary Pat always smiles and laughs. She ran the variety store, but when things got busy at the grocery store, Gene would get on the intercom that served both stores and say “Mary, come to the register, please.”

Fond memories

Peggy and Terry also have fond memories of working in the family business.

As the oldest, Terry worked in the grocery store the longest and admits he likely didn’t appreciate it at the time.

“Now I see the value,” Terry said, “It gave me the opportunity to see people on a regular basis and to help them,” he said. “I knew the community well. People knew me and that helped me develop.”

Peggy worked in the variety store with her mom. “People would come in and say ‘it must be so easy to work for your parents,’” she said. “But let me tell you, they’d tell you to do jobs that no one else would do, so it wasn’t so easy!”

And if running a family business wasn’t enough to keep the Kearney family busy, Gene was one of the charter members of the Savage Fire Department and a founding member of the board of directors for Savage State Bank with some other local businessmen.

Peggy said the bank came about because everyone had to go to Shakopee each day to take care of the daily receipts. “For a small family-run business, that was a big deal, so some of them got together and started the bank,” she said.

As well, both Gene and Mary Pat were very involved in local politics. Mary Pat served as a state and national delegate on manyoccasions for the Democratic Party. Gene was the city clerk for years.

Peggy recalls that her dad made getting the old city ordinances in order a personal mission to make them “more professional and enforceable.” He could often be seen carrying large bound volumes of old town village meetings around with small sheets of paper sticking out in many places.

“My job was to help my dad get these typed up,” Peggy explained, saying she had only taken “personal typing” in school and wasn’t the best of typists.

Mary Pat’s involvement in politics and notoriety in the family’s variety store business earned her some recognition by some of Minnesota’s most famous politicians, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. In fact, when Mondale was elected vice president, she was invited to the inauguration in Washington, D.C., which she said was “very exciting.”

Peggy points out while she was growing up, Savage as only one square mile and the Kearney stores were places where people gathered. “So it was natural for everyone to know my parents or come to them when they needed something,” she said. “That was the way it was back then.”

After he retired and sold the grocery store business due to health reasons, Gene became the postmaster for the Savage Post Office, which at the time also handled mail for Burnsville.

“Savage was a city then, and Burnsville was still considered a farming community, so all the mail came here,” explained Peggy. “But as Burnsville grew and all the homes in River Hills started being built, Dad had to oversee that process, which was very time consuming.”

Gene passed away in 1970, but Mary Pat kept running the variety store until she retired. She did all the buying for a store that carried household goods, men’s, women’s and children’s clothing, fabric, gifts, cards and a variety of other items.

One of Peggy’s strongest memories of her parents’ business skills is that they were both very smart and good with numbers. “Mom would know what she had in stock in the store and if a salesman would come around and try and get her to buy more, she’d politely, yet assertively, would say ‘no,’” she said.

“Dad could rattle off information about numbers that would cause us kids to roll our eyes,” she continued. “If we went somewhere and it cost $20, he could tell you how much that was per person and even tell you how much that was per hour, per person.”

As Terry looks back, he not only finds value in growing up in a family business, but also the closeness to other family members. “My dad and my uncles gave me a unique perspective of life and taught me skills that I continue to use today,” he said.

Tom said as the youngest he didn’t work in the store much, but everyone did their part, from sorting pop bottles to bagging potatoes.

“When we all get together we share are stories, and after 150 years, they are still all the same, no matter where you are from,” Tom said.

 Nancy Huddleston can be reached at editor@savagepacer.com.