Donnelly clan’s shillelagh to be auctioned off in July
A piece of history from one of Southwestern Ontario’s darkest chapters is going up for sale to the highest bidder. A 19th-century club that belonged to Robert Donnelly, a member of the infamous family whose five members were massacred by vigilantes near Lucan in 1880, is being auctioned off by Gardner Galleries this summer. Robert Donnelly gave the twofoot (60 centimetre) wooden stick — known as a shillelagh and commonly used as a weapon — to Catherine Currie Corbett, whose husband drove stagecoach for the Irish-rooted clan, according to the London-based auction house. Londoner Jim Grover, the greatgrandson of Currie Corbett, received the shillelagh decades ago and has decided to sell the family treasure, company president Grant Gardner said this week. Grover provided auctioneers with a photo of James Corbett, along with a family obituary and other newspaper clippings, Gardner said. “With something like this, provenance is everything,” he said. The Donnellys emigrated from Ireland to Ontario in the 1840s and settled on contested land in Biddulph Township, where they operated a stagecoach service that ran between London and Exeter. But the family was loathed in the community — earning them the moniker the Black Donnellys — following a string of feuds with neighbours who accused them of everything from arson and assault to murder.
The small-town turmoil reached a bloody boiling point on Feb. 3, 1880, when an armed mob surrounded patriarch James Donnelly’s Roman Line home. The weapon-wielding group of men charged into the house and killed James, his wife Johannah, son Tom and niece Bridget before setting the home ablaze.
Then the booze-fuelled attackers went to son Will Donnelly’s nearby house, where they fatally shot his brother, John, before the bloodshed ended.
Despite the mounting evidence against the killers, including a witness account from a neighbourhood boy who was hiding under a bed in the Donnelly house during the first attack, nobody was convicted of the slayings at two proceeding trials.
Robert Donnelly, one of seven sons, was the only surviving family member to remain in the town after the attack.
Online bidding for the Donnelly-owned stick begins on July 6 at noon and ends on July 16.