Boston docks Irish labourers: hiring on the waterfront

Boston docks Irish labourers were hired by the day, not by the season or the year. Men gathered each morning at Long Wharf, Lewis Wharf, and the South Boston piers to see which ships had come in overnight, because there was no fixed employer, no guaranteed shift, and no roster. A man worked when a vessel needed unloading and went home with nothing when it did not.

Arriving before the work even began

For many of the men who would end up carrying cargo on Boston’s wharves, the waterfront was also the first hard test of the crossing. Boston’s Irish-born population grew by more than 13,000 in 1847 alone, the worst year of the Famine, and on at least one April day that year more than 1,000 Irish immigrants landed at the port in a single day, according to Massachusetts Historical Society records of the period.

Ships arriving with sickness aboard were held at Deer Island, in the outer harbour, before anyone on them was allowed onto the mainland. Over 4,000 Irish immigrants were quarantined there in 1847, and roughly 850 of them died there rather than in the city, buried at what became known as Resthaven Cemetery. A man’s first sight of Boston’s waterfront could be the quarantine station rather than a wharf looking for hands, and only after clearing it did the question of finding a day’s work even arise.

Boston docks Irish labourers: how the hiring actually worked

By the late 1840s, Irish men made up the bulk of the casual labour force on Boston’s waterfront, in a city whose overall population grew from roughly 115,000 to more than 150,000 across that single year. The National Park Service, in its account of Irish immigration and the Kennedy family’s arrival in the city, notes that new arrivals were “mainly qualified for work as day-labourers, working on the piers and construction sites,” a description that fits the wharves as closely as it fits the building sites further inland.

There was no single hiring office. A man looking for work walked the waterfront, checked which berths had ships tied up, and asked whoever was directing the unloading whether hands were wanted that morning. Boys as young as twelve left school to do the same work their fathers did, carrying, stacking, and hauling cargo off vessels that might be gone again within a day or two.

This was casual labour Boston harbour ran on, not a payroll in the modern sense. Work went first to men the hirer already knew, so newcomers off a ship that week competed for the same handful of openings as men who had been working the wharves for years. A slow week for shipping meant a slow week for wages, with no employer obliged to carry a man through it, and no fund a man could draw on between one hire and the next.

Nothing in the surviving record points to a formal labourers’ organisation on Boston’s wharves in this particular decade. What existed instead was informal and personal: a foreman who knew certain men, a stretch of quay where the same faces turned up every morning, and a system that ran entirely on being seen, being known, and being there before the next man.

What a day’s wharf work paid

Wage ledgers kept for individual casual dock hands from this period are scarce, and no reliable figure survives specifically for Boston wharf labour in the 1840s and 1850s. What can be said with more confidence is the broader benchmark against which that work was measured: for roughly two centuries, from the colonial era into the early twentieth century, a dollar a day was the standard rough wage for unskilled labour across the United States, a figure recorded in comparative wage studies drawing on Massachusetts records stretching back to 1752.

That benchmark tells us what a full day’s work was worth in general terms, but it says nothing about how many days a wharf labourer actually got paid for in a given month. Work depended entirely on ships arriving, cargo needing hands, and a foreman having a place for one more man that morning. There was no sick pay, no weekly wage, and no cushion between one paid day and the next.

The 1850 federal census, in a sample examined by researchers at Boston College’s Global Boston project, found that 62 percent of Irish men surveyed were recorded simply as labourers, with carters making up the next largest group. The job title covered wharf work, construction, and street work more or less interchangeably, which is itself a sign of how little the work was formalised or specialised at this point.

That lack of formality cut both ways. A man with no fixed trade could turn his hand to whatever the day offered, moving between a wharf, a building site, and a street excavation as work came available, which meant a bad week on the docks was not necessarily a bad week overall. It also meant no single occupation record captures what a wharf labourer’s year actually looked like, since the same man might be entered in one register as a labourer, in a city directory as a carter, and in a parish record as something else again.

A trade ruled by ice and the shipping season

Waterfront day labour 1850s style depended on one thing above all: ships in the harbour. When the harbour froze, the work stopped with it.

In January 1857, a severe cold spell locked Boston Harbour in ice. Henry David Thoreau, visiting the city, recorded in his journal on January 26 that he saw “thousands on the ice,” with a “stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city,” and noted that the ice was said to reach fourteen miles out into the bay. The blockage did not clear until mid-February. For three weeks, ships that should have been docking, unloading, and reloading at Boston’s wharves were frozen out of the harbour or frozen in at their berths, and the men who depended on that cargo for a day’s pay had nothing to unload.

That same year brought a second, separate blow to Boston’s Irish workers when the financial panic of 1857 cut into shipping and construction work across the city, a period covered in more detail elsewhere on this site. Between a frozen harbour in January and a credit crisis by autumn, 1857 was a hard demonstration of how little control wharf labourers had over whether they worked at all.

Even in an ordinary year, the trade had a rhythm set by wind and weather rather than by any employer’s calendar. Packet ships crossing from Liverpool and Cork ran to a schedule that shipping firms adjusted for the season, and a harbour full of arriving vessels in the spring and autumn could turn into a harbour with very little traffic once winter set in.

The wharves where the work was done

Long Wharf, extending roughly a third of a mile out from the shore, was the centre of Boston’s shipping trade through the middle of the century and remained so until the Civil War changed the pattern of the port’s trade. The Custom House Block, a granite warehouse building raised there in 1848, stood as one marker of how much cargo the wharf was expected to handle in these years.

A short walk away, Lewis Wharf kept its own wharfage and dockage books between 1833 and 1883, ledgers of goods and berthing fees that survive today, even where records of the individual men who carried those goods do not. In South Boston, the Boston Wharf Company was building warehouses on newly made land for sugar and molasses, cargo that needed hauling from ship to store the moment it arrived, work that was heavy, sticky, and entirely dependent on which vessel had tied up that week.

Across the harbour in East Boston, shipyards belonging to builders such as Samuel Hall and Donald McKay were turning out vessels at a rapid pace, work that pulled in carpenters, riggers, and general labourers alongside the men loading and unloading at the piers. Irish crews had already done much of the underlying work that made East Boston buildable at all, draining the marshland the shipyards and wharves stood on before a single hull was laid down there. None of these sites paid a standing wage to a standing workforce. Each one drew on the same pool of men waiting to be pointed toward whichever berth needed hands that day.

Living close enough to hear the ships

Irish families settling in Boston in these years clustered in the North End and in East Boston, both neighbourhoods that sat directly against the waterfront. Global Boston’s research on East Boston notes that Irish labourers there were central to draining the marshland and building the wharves, roads, and housing that the neighbourhood was built on, work that put them within walking distance of the docks where a day’s hire might turn up.

Staying close to the water was practical rather than sentimental. A man who lived a short walk from the wharves could get to a berth before another man coming from further off, and a family living near the harbour could hear when ships were coming and going. Where those families settled, and how that shaped the neighbourhoods around Boston’s harbour, is worth its own closer look.

What historians cannot know

The scale of Irish arrival in Boston during these years is not settled to a single figure. Estimates for 1847 alone, drawn from different contemporary counts, run from roughly 7,000 to more than 37,000, depending on whether the number covers a single quarter, a full year of arrivals, or net growth in the city’s Irish-born population after departures and deaths are accounted for. No single ledger reconciles these figures, and none likely will.

Even less survives at the level of the individual wharf labourer. The wharfage and dockage books kept at Lewis Wharf recorded cargo and fees, not the names of the men who carried the cargo. No diary or account book written by a Boston dock labourer from this decade has surfaced in the archives consulted for this piece. What is known about hiring, pay, and the rhythm of the work comes largely from census occupation counts, harbour and weather records, and the physical wharves themselves, rather than from the words of the men who worked them.

Sources and further reading

• National Park Service, “President John F. Kennedy and the History of Irish Immigration in Boston,” nps.gov, 2024
• Global Boston, Boston College, “Irish in East Boston” and “Irish,” digital history project, globalboston.bc.edu
• New England Historical Society, “Frozen Mercury and 18-Foot Drifts: Surviving the Cold Storm of 1857,” citing Henry David Thoreau’s journal entry of January 26, 1857
• Boston Public Library, Research Guides, “Waterfront: Boston’s Maritime Industrial History,” guides.bpl.org, including Lewis Wharf wharfage and dockage books, 1833 to 1883
• Boston Irish, Peter F. Stevens, “These Thoughtless, Head-Strong, Imprudent People: The June 1847 Mass Arrival of Famine Irish,” bostonirish.com, 2024, citing the Boston Daily Evening Transcript

Read next about the mass arrivals of 1847 that filled these wharves with new hands, where Boston’s Irish families settled once they found work, and how the financial panic later that year hit the same men from another direction entirely.