WOLFE TONE HAD COFFEE DATE IN WESTCOURT HOTEL
IT’S not too hard to find history in the Cord Cemetery - there’s over 1,000 gravestones and burials dating to 1180 - but finding out Wolfe Tone had a coffee in the Westcourt Hotel was a surprise!
The recent open day afforded the public the chance to look around an incredible piece of the town’s history, and pick up a few good stories along the way.
One of those stories surrounds James Hamill, a Catholic merchant who is buried in the centre of the graveyard.
He was a member of the Catholic Committee in town and was arrested accordingly, in 1792.
A young barrister called Wolfe Tone came to defend him, his role in the case apparently sparking Tone’s rebellious streak.
But in his writings, Tone says he came to Drogheda and had fine coffee in Siddell’s coffee house, which local historian Sean Collins, revealed was later to be the White Horse Hotel and now the Westcourt.
It can be dated that a hotel has stood where the Westcourt is for hundreds of years.
The archway of St Laurence’s Friary stands in a corner of the graveyard and interestingly contains the graves of two Dominicans, Fr Burke and Fr Peter Magennis, the latter passing away in 1818.
Jack McEvoy, a right hand man of Michael Collins, is also buried here and military men like Captain Edward Toker and James McGough from Fair St, a fleet engineer in the Royal Navy.
There’s great snippets of family history, how Captain Laurence Morgan died in Liverpool in 1898. the death of Capt Laurence Branigan from Boyne View in 1894 or how Captain John Cooney of the US Army was shot and killed in California in 1854.
It is hoped to make the graveyard a lot safer in the years to come with new footpaths to be laid.