In Mountcharles, Co Donegal, there is a fairly inconspicuous old-fashioned water pump. Yet, it holds great significance for local people and is an important landmark in the ancient oral tradition of Irish storytelling. For it was from here that writer Seumas MacManus would, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, regale young and old alike with traditional stories and folklore that he had popularised in the United States in the earlier part of his life.
Born in Mountcharles in 1868 the son of a small farmer and local shopkeeper, MacManus was educated in nearby Enniskillen Co Fermanagh. Like most young men his age he was drawn into the burgeoning nationalist movement, becoming the first Donegal secretary of the Gaelic League as well as a founder member of the local 1798 commemoration committee. MacManus was well acquainted with many the revolutionary figures of the time and was soon appointed a board member of Scoil Éanna in Rathfarnham by his friend Patrick Pearse. Pearse often stayed with MacManus in Mountcharles on visits to Donegal.
However, it was to preserving local folklore that MacManus was to devote his life. He collected legends and folklore in local “rambling houses” and began contributing to the local newspaper, the now defunct Donegal Vindicator. He would go on to publish his first books, Shuilers from Heathy Hills (1893), The Leadin’ Road to Donegal (1895), ‘Twas in dhroll Donegal (1897), The Bend of the Road (1898), and The Humours of Donegal (1898). Despite his success in bringing Donegal folklore to a wider audience in his own country, it was in the United States that MacManus was to have his greatest impact and most lasting legacy.
In 1898, MacManus was sent by the editor of Le Petit Journal in Paris to interview the leaders of Irish organisations in America. MacManus brought his collection of stories with him and went on to publish many of the folk tales he had collected in some of the leading US magazines of the time such as Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Monthly, the Century Magazine and the Catholic World. These stories resonated with Irish America and helped popularise Irish folk tales among the diaspora. From the late 1890s MacManus contributed frequently to American periodicals and published his works with American publishing houses to great success. Titles such as Through the Turf Smoke (1899), In Chimney Corners (1899), The Bewitched Fiddle (1900) and Donegal Fairy Stories (1900) were well received in the United States. But MacManus was soon drawn back to Ireland.
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MacManus attended the first meeting of Sinn Féin in 1905 and helped establish the GAA in Donegal later that year. He married twice, first to the writer Ethna Carberry (Anna Bella Johnston) and the two resided for a time at Revlin House at the bank walk in Donegal Town. After Ethna’s death he returned sporadically to the United States and met his second wife, Catalina Violante Páez, granddaughter of the first president of Venezuela, in New York. The couple married in 1911 and had two daughters. MacManus made an annual pilgrimage to Mountcharles, where he told nightly renditions of his stories at the village water pump.
It was in New York, however, that his life came to a tragic end. At the age of 92 he fell from the seventh-floor window of the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing home on East 53rd street in Manhattan on October 21st, 1960. His remains were repatriated the following year and he was buried alongside his first wife Ethna in the village of Frosses, Co Donegal. MacManus’s writing popularised the Donegal oral storytelling tradition often by capturing the local sense of humour. The phrase “Many a man’s tongue broke his nose” from his work Heavy Hangs the Golden Grain (1950) is typical of the local wit. However, his greatest contribution was in preserving local folklore from Donegal for future generations. This was an accomplishment he summed up best himself in his work In Chimney Corners, Merry Tales of Irish Folk Lore, published in 1899.
“These tales were made not for reading, but for telling. They were made and told for the passing of long nights, for the shortening of weary journeys, for entertaining of traveller-guests, for brightening of cabin hearths. Be not content with reading them ... And grateful be to the shanachies who passed these tales to me, for you.”
A simple inscription on the water pump in Mountcharles reads “Seumus MacManus, Author and Seanchaí born near this spot 1868-1960.”